The Struggling and the Lucky

‍ American class is measured less by what we have than by how close we remain to losing it.

There is something about the air and water in Ashtabula, Ohio, that seems gritty.

You can smell and feel what Americans call the Rust Belt when you wash up at the Flying J in Austinburg, where State Route 45 passes over I-90. It rolls in through the windows as you drive down US-20 past Walmart, the dominant center of consumer life for miles in any direction. It settles on surfaces throughout the region, a fine dust that is less about neglect than the overwhelming presence of greater concerns.

Reading Beth Macy's Paper Girl, her account of growing up and away from Urbana, Ohio, brought Ashtabula immediately to mind. I have spent more than 20 years visiting chosen family there, including a couple of years living there myself. I recognized the landscape and the people who remained after money and opportunity found somewhere else to go.

But I also thought about Toledo.

Toledo felt like it balanced on a narrow ridge between the Ohio of rust and dust and the urbanity of hot rubber, weed smoke, and noise. Drive its streets and you might think a plywood plague had infested the city. As industries faltered and economics shifted, wounds opened in businesses and households alike. Plywood was the texture of the scabs that grew over them.

In places like these, people seemed to come in two flavors: the struggling and the lucky.

That is not to say the lucky did not work hard. You had to cling to a lucky break with everything you had to make the luck stick. Stay lucky long enough and perhaps you could stop estimating the grocery bill with every item placed in the cart. But you probably still feared the house repair, or the doctor's appointment.

Very few people had truly made it. Some had merely become less vulnerable.

I struggled through college and the years after it alongside dozens of people doing the same. My lucky break was a job as a public-safety dispatcher. It took a master's degree in a related field, a reference from someone already inside, multiple tests and interviews, and one of a few positions expanded because stress was driving people out of the work.

I worked hard for that opportunity. Luck still decided whether the work would finally move me somewhere.

In 2017, $14 an hour elevated me into the Toledo middle class. After a few years, I bought a house. I still chose the cheaper food, but I shopped at cleaner stores and stopped keeping a running tally of the cart. The driveway and garage remained beyond my means to repair. A neighbor's history occasionally brought police with rifles onto my front lawn.

But I had made it, at least by the local definition. I had moved one level above the absolute struggle of keeping food on the plate and the roof paid for.

Every day, I dispatched calls for neighbors who had not been as lucky, knowing I was never so far from joining them again. I sent fire engines to blighted streets where crews tried to keep an abandoned house fire from spreading to the next abandoned house. Then I would visit Ashtabula, where there was less plywood but more dust, fewer medics and more funerals.

Disrepair and despair were always within sight if you knew how to look. The form changed with the landscape. Urban poverty was concentrated into blocks people with money could avoid. Rural poverty was dispersed across miles that made every service harder to reach and every decline easier to ignore. Whether the smell was mold or rust, it was poverty pretending to be something, anything else.

We treat these places as separate American failures. We tell rural people that cities consumed their future. We tell city residents that rural decline was chosen by backward people unwilling to change. We tell the precarious middle that everyone beneath them is reaching into their pockets.

These walls are politically useful. They keep people living under different forms of abandonment from recognizing the same arrangement. Wealth can move. Employers can leave. Hospitals can close. Property owners can extract rent from somewhere else. The people who remain are made to absorb the consequences, then judged for what those consequences did to their communities.

The answer is not to pretend that every hardship is identical. It is to stop mistaking different environments of insecurity for different kinds of people.

A nation cannot remain whole while allowing markets to decide which communities deserve clean water, functioning schools, medical care, safe housing, and a future. Stewardship begins with refusing to call any American community disposable. It means building a country where people do not have to abandon their roots to find opportunity, and where making it means more than earning the right to fear a slightly better class of disaster.