Paper Girl Quotes

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. —Flannery O’Connor[2]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“The ability to earn a bachelor’s degree is one of the single most important factors protecting Americans against deaths from addiction, poverty, and hopelessness, what the economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Higher education is a stronger link to a longer life than even household income, according to Deaton and Case.[1] A college diploma, in fact, is correlated to an extension of the average American’s lifespan by eight and a half years.[2]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“When they pulled the ladder of upward mobility away from low-wage families, they took away the thing that soothes misery and distress; they took away their hope. What the free-market boosters failed to account for is that, without the potential for advancement and the general sense that fairness and justice will prevail, our social compact is screwed. The more divided our education levels, the more divided our nation.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“interviewing me for my first newspaper job asked me to describe myself in a single word, then acted startled when I said it. Naive enough to say the quiet part out loud, I didn’t get the job.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“it’s not the poorest people who support Trump. It’s the richest people in the poorest places,” Mason told me.[15] Trump not only cut their taxes but also made it okay for them to hate political correctness of all sorts, including people of different gender and racial identities.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“nonsense, and rock-solid, her footfall so pronounced that the floor vibrated when she moved from her kitchen sink to the stove. If you were a teenager with a hangover, she was not above vacuuming the carpet in front of your bedroom door, over and over, until you hauled your ass out of bed and commenced being a productive human being.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“For the first time in history, the individual is the basic unit of society,” the journalist Bill Bishop, the author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, from 2008, told me. “People don’t want community; they want a platform.”[14]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“Average tuition has more than tripled since I went to college, and the neediest students now have only roughly a third of their costs covered by Pell Grants,[20] thanks to paltry budget allotments advanced by Congress and state legislatures headed by both parties. Had I been born just a decade later, I would not have been able to go to college.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“But most politicians and pundits still fail to acknowledge that the majority of American people fared worse under free trade, even as the nation’s combined income rose.[18] In 2016, exit polls confirmed that anger over free trade was the prime reason Donald Trump flipped Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan from blue to red.[19]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“For blue-collar workers left to fend for themselves, many of them now working service jobs for half their previous pay and no benefits, the shift to unfettered free trade was like opening a velvet box and finding a turd inside. The Democratic strategist David Axelrod had a better (or at least more polite) metaphor: “I’m so proud of my association with Barack Obama, but the Democratic Party was the party that brought and heralded free trade. We lied to people and said all boats would be lifted somehow. Well, it was a tide that lifted a lot of yachts. A lot of the smaller boats got shipwrecked. A lot of people’s lives were changed for the worse.”[14]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“NAFTA took nearly a million jobs away, and the trade agreements that followed it were responsible for the loss of a staggering four million more jobs, most of them in manufacturing. The Great Recession slashed another two million jobs and twenty-five thousand businesses.[11] The average laid-off factory worker suffered a 19.2 percent fall in their standard of living, with Chinese imports reducing roughly a third of all Americans’ incomes, delivering a disproportionate blow to rural areas and small towns.[12] The international conglomerate Honeywell Aerospace would end up owning Grimes Manufacturing. “I don’t even know where it’s based,” said Rich Ebert, the county’s director of economic development.[13] (Honeywell’s corporate headquarters are in Charlotte, North Carolina.) There is no Old Man Honeywell who has at least some of Urbana’s interests at heart. Cheaper furniture and blue jeans notwithstanding, displaced American workers are still waiting on Clinton’s win-win to land. In the transition to a “twenty-first-century economy,” hollowed-out communities and even whole regions were largely treated as collateral damage.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“the late 1990s, average tuition in the United States had more than doubled from when I went to school, while the value of the top Pell award dropped 25 percent. When President Bill Clinton touted his Hope Scholarship and related tuition tax credits as a doubling of federal funding for financial aid, it was a sleight of hand, catering solely to middle-class students who were already going to college. That same decade, Clinton oversaw the country’s catastrophic entry into NAFTA in 1994 and paved the way for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001. He predicted that offshoring would eventually prove to be a “win-win” for American workers. Our country still suffers the fallout of those disastrous decisions, which were cheered by business schools and Nobel Prize–winning economists, including several who have since recanted their pro-offshoring views.[”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“While rural people still rally around their flagship universities’ sports teams—my siblings and former classmates all proudly wear Ohio State University apparel—the level of contempt rural people have for universities has soared. The University of Wisconsin political scientist Kathy Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, offered that she, too, had wildly underestimated the “reservoir of hate” that rural people felt.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“America’s student-loan debt machine is now larger than Americans’ combined credit-card debt.[11] Think about how many college graduates have amassed five- and six-figure student-loan debts, and yet a third still earn less than half the nation’s median wage.[12] While economists argue that a four-year degree is still the best long-term path forward,[13] only half of Americans participate in any form of higher ed at all. When they pulled the ladder of upward mobility away from low-wage families, they took away the thing that soothes misery and distress; they took away their hope. What the free-market boosters failed to account for is that, without the potential for advancement and the general sense that fairness and justice will prevail, our social compact is screwed. The more divided our education levels, the more divided our nation.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“When I left for college in 1982, the Pell Grant paid the entirety of my tuition, my room and board, and even my textbooks—an investment in my future that I have paid back through taxes many times over. When you consider that the government recoups the money spent on a typical Pell grantee, through taxes on their increased earnings, in just ten years,[10] the gutting of Pell’s purchasing power is extremely shortsighted. But the plundering of this federal program, birthed in the last gasp of America’s War on Poverty, is also rarely discussed.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“In my hometown, the number of children living in poverty has more than tripled since I left.[4] The number orphaned by the opioid crisis has tripled just since 2015.[5] After the jobs went away, heroin helped itself to my hometown, followed by fentanyl and meth. The result of that one-two punch has been a preponderance of trauma that is overtaxing every system meant to address it. “Backward mobility,” economists call this devastating trend, exacerbated by the Great Recession. As corporate profits soared, the median wage for workers, adjusted for inflation, stagnated, and the cost of housing, education, and health care far outpaced inflation. In the four decades between my graduation and Silas’s, inequality grew so dramatically in the United States that the richest 0.01 percent of Americans have accumulated the same amount of wealth as the poorest 50 percent.[6]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. —Flannery O’Connor[2] It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. —Frederick Douglass[3]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“I struggled to recognize my hometown.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“America’s slide into fascism was already playing out as the philosopher Richard Rorty envisioned it in 1998: “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“I used to dream about going to vet school, but I couldn’t handle people spending thousands of dollars to keep a cat alive when people can’t get that,” Church said. Her medical education at Ohio State was mostly paid for by a program that incentivizes students to become primary care providers.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“Deaths of despair are disproportionately concentrated in places where misinformation spreads rampantly—in high-poverty communities with low college education attainment, scarce access to local doctors, and scant local news. Small Ohio cities like the Springfields, Urbanas, and Marysvilles are places that tend to be the most overlooked by the Democratic Party and urban elites. “Emerging neurological research has shown clear links between despair and vulnerability to misinformation, right-wing radicalization, and violence,” noted a Brookings Institution study Chad shared with me.[”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“We talk about systemic racism, misogyny, and LGBTQ rights, but we don’t talk enough about how, for fifty years now, this strange evangelical-slash-Catholic movement has been trying to infiltrate the government and turn our country into a religious nation,” Mason said. “We’ve never faced it in any kind of organized way or even said out loud that it exists!”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“When Reagan aligned with Jerry Falwell and other evangelicals, Republicans believed they’d be able to contain the fervor of white Christian nationalists. “But they couldn’t keep the dog on the leash, and those folks eventually took over, which is how Trump executed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.” Because of gerrymandering, Ohio is practically a one-party state now, not unlike southern states during Jim Crow.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“Boundaries can save, yes, but also boundaries suck.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“I think what is often lost in the story about Trump supporters is that it’s not the poorest people who support Trump. It’s the richest people in the poorest places,” Mason told me.[15] Trump not only cut their taxes but also made it okay for them to hate political correctness of all sorts, including people of different gender and racial identities.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“The Trumpiest people I’ve ever met are in Long Island or in the suburbs of Phoenix,” Jacobs told me. “I don’t like punching down on people, but it’s hard not to punch down on the hellscape of North Myrtle Beach and all its hedonistic consumption, and goddamn they love Trump. They’ve got new houses, golf courses that are maintained by immigrants, and they’re doing just fine.”[”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“By the 1970s, it was no longer respectable to be overtly racist, but you could still cuss the government. “And for fifty years that’s what they’ve done,” Branch said. “There’s no longer a shared noble purpose behind ‘We the people.’ Instead, people convince themselves that their liberty depends on taking a gun into Starbucks.”[5]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“When the GI Bill was enacted to reward returning World War II veterans and to help America compete in the cold war, the notion of making public education free through the fourteenth grade was floated by the high-minded Truman Commission Report in 1947.[3] Had follow-up legislation and federal dollars been attached to the report during that optimistic postwar era, college access, including for Black people and women, might have become a game-changing aspect of the American social contract, along the lines of Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. But the legislation went nowhere, partly because southern schools would have had to embrace integration to be eligible for federal funds.[4]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“Local news once served as democracy’s immune system. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“In Carroll, Iowa, a fourth-generation newspaper publisher named Doug Burns joined forces with the Democratic California congressman Ro Khanna to ask Khanna’s Silicon Valley donors to help Iowa’s newspapers by putting $4 million toward a project to combat misinformation. The goal was for social media companies to atone for the damage they had done to democracy by backing a proposal to push accurate reporting and buoy struggling newspapers. When he was turned down, Burns told a Facebook executive, “When the revolution starts, and we have a civil war in this country, and someone’s dragging you and your family out of your Silicon Valley homes, before the knife goes into you, you’re going to think, maybe I could have stopped this.”[”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America