WORK SITE / WORK CITES  Volume II: Fire, Wrack & Ruin, A Telling

You are the salt of the earth: a very good and honest person or group of people. - Merriam Webster Dictionary

You are the salt of the earth: but if the salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It’s no longer good for anything but to be cast out and trampled underfoot.   –Matthew 5:13, The New Testament

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men”.     –Karl Marx, Manifesto

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.   –Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Timeline: 1982 – 2012 

Each day on my way, I passed the wreckage of industrial sites near my home. The hulking shells of buildings, the wrecks and relics of the abandonments, the ashes and rubble from arson, the residue of soot on collapsed walls, the absence of workers. The impact of the shambles spread far beyond them. Nearby, our modest houses in neighborhoods once convenient and desirable, now stood in corners of ruination, abandonment, toxic brownfields and acres of wasteland. Left behind, trapped with nowhere and no way to go, we sat in our living rooms watching the news and praying for speculators to save us.

The sites I photographed are long gone. This erasure of place leaves my photographs as artifacts and relics. These industrial structures and their specificity — of vernacular forms of purpose, the architecture and engineering, materials of form or function, ornamentation or lack thereof; the context of these sites, their proximity to the river, a rail line, neighborhood or industrial zone — all have since been altered. During the years I photographed them, these abandonments were no-go zones on the back edges of the cities and in neighborhoods that were so remote and unknown to outsiders that there was little vandalism or graffiti to be found on the walls. They have now either disappeared or have been developed beyond recognition through the neoliberal cycle of deindustrialization, arson, demolition, brownfield remediation, adaptive reuse, historic preservation and gentrification. They hold no room for those who have lost their worth. We are taunted by the gleaming restorations accomplished by new neighbors who look past us on the streets we were powerless to save. We have been cast out, typecast, castrated, cast about, a cast of characters to be parodied, pitied and scorned.    

We were left behind to suffer destruction from forces beyond our control. No longer employed using our hands, our backs or our skills in industrial or skilled trades, our new job is now to get over it, to move on. The grief, anxiety and pain caused by the epic forces of neoliberalism and globalism that couldn’t be anticipated or prepared for are fixtures in the lives of working people. A flood or tornado would have been easier — there would have been some outside help for recovery given. But there’s no charity and mercy forthcoming for us. Working folk are left to cope and recover on their own — resiliency is expected of us, but despite our grit and pride, many simply can’t. In Rust Belt regions there are few resources left. Our houses hold little value or are underwater with no way out but foreclosure. Foreclosed houses become zombie buildings abandoned by the banks, and renters become squatters. The remaining day jobs pay minimum wage, no benefits, and night shifts have no child care. Couples pass each other in the morning, or grandmothers step in and sleep on the couch. One cannot leave without betraying one’s kindred as we are the only ones who will help us. Those who’ve left can’t return after turning their back. We question our identity, our relationships, our relevance and our value as the quality of our lives suffer. Free-market economics do not free those who are stranded. Our losses begot hopelessness and trauma, we became waste along with the abandonments living in sacrifice zones. Industrial disease, injuries and deaths of despair are routine, even banal here. Our destruction, our erasure and our invisibility are necessary for those who won’t take responsibility for what they caused. 

Are we evil, ignorant people? Did we bring on our own demise? Were our unions too strong? Did our demands go too far? No.Ours were diverse communities of hard-working people, the salt of the earth who showed up every day, earned our wages, sent our children to school, attended services, helped our neighbors, were drafted into a resented war and despite coming home shattered, tended to those less fortunate. So why were we left behind? Why have we been forgotten? Why have we been held responsible for what happened to us? Was it God who struck us down and laid us low? We’re considered stiff-necked by adherents of the Doctrine of Prosperity. If we too, would simply believe, we will be reborn into health and wealth, we can name it and claim it. God helps those who help themselves so we must be lazy ignorant sinners not worthy of His blessings. 

Secular scholars, experts and politicians either ignore us or exhort us to stop whining, call us names behind our backs and use slurs in print they think we won’t read. They tell us to send our children away to college to better themselves, to leave home and all they know, taking on debt they can’t repay when they hit the class-ceiling in their striving. Middle-aged men lose their pensions and find their houses, their sole asset, becoming a liability during the abandonment and middle-class flight from their city. These man-made disaster zones are rationalized by those that caused them simply as creative destruction, "the process of industrial mutation that continually revolutionizes the economic structure from within.” (1)  In time, better things will come from this, but not soon enough, and not for us.

In this purgatory, desperation and uncertainty torment the stranded. Some took heart in the cloying words of a reality-show huckster and his henchmen — false prophets cynically calling themselves the true champions of the common man. They made false promises to reopen steel mills, coal mines and manufacturing plants while whipping up the politics of resentment and pledging revenge on the “woke left” on their behalf, claiming they’ve forgotten them. In deluded betrayal to themselves and their kin, some fell into the cult, and many voted in anger, tainting us all by association. 

Yet I know for a fact there are many righteous people who remain in our land. Indeed, far more people from the outside – the middle class, privileged and elite Whites who have actual power and fear losing their status joined the cult in larger numbers. Their religious-right neighbors in a fit of hypocrisy proclaimed a new Cyrus divinely sent to enable their extremist agenda. As insurance, the hucksters targeted, recruited and groomed the traumatized working-class as the pawns needed to tip the electoral scales in Rust Belt states, estranging them from the party they were once allied with.

Converting to bossist loyalty against worker solidarity, their betrayal sold out all of us and we've suffered collective punishment for their actions. Many from the Academic Left who once took up our cause, write essays and books asking what’s the matter with us. They ignore our districts in elections assuming we’ll turn out to vote like the old days, but when many saw no reason to, we’re considered irredeemable by the narrating class, assured by their blind spots and asserting in bigoted prose their one-sided blame. We have lost our strength, our savor, our usefulness and their support. We are trash living in sacrifice zones. We’ve been turned against each other, cleaved by design. They say we have a chip on our shoulder and I say we have a knife in our back.(2, 3)

So it goes. After the speculators came, I finally left home. I was orphaned through industrial disease. My siblings are either estranged or dead. My sons are grown but treading water, trapped in inherited precarity. I have no grandchildren. Despite my going, I walked out backwards facing the place I left. Like Marah in the poem The Turning of Lot’s Wife, (she) could not turn her back on even one doomed child of the city, but must turn her back instead upon the saved. (4) I couldn’t turn my back either. Leaving didn’t mean I was comfortable among the saved. I carried my photographs with me and live with them daily. They are relics and they are evidence. They are markers of loss that often makes them hard to look at. Showing them in this thriving place where I currently reside, people learn I’m from a dark and damaged land. When they look at me, do they see a pillar of salt?

But it must also be said that I took these photographs as a young working-class woman with an overpowering sense of awe and loss as I walked the grounds. The quietude of these sites was in stark contrast to their former intensity and I could be present where I couldn’t go before. Ruination offered me a way to see how these once vital industrial structures were built, revealing hidden systems and engineering as they were being dismantled, burned out or demolished. They were abandoned and left to decay until remediation or demolition returned value to the land through redevelopment or civic reclamation of zombie sites. I resented the owner’s ability to walk away and write off the workers who spent their lives in tedious, often dangerous jobs generating wealth, but never enough for Corporate. Better to shut down in bankruptcy than to give in to workers who asked for too much.

Despite my justifiable feelings of resentment and despair I know the answer isn’t bringing on further destruction through revenge or self-hate. The answer for me lies in telling true stories, in honesty and vulnerability so that outsiders will understand what we’ve lost. The pen is mightier than the gun and stories can go further than a bullet. That said, I’m certainly not here to justify or make excuses for the deluded, revanchist, bigoted people who joined a destructive cult out of hate, or for those who are hoping against hope it will save them. I've seen this story play out for decades and it's why we are where we are now. Yet I’m not delivering a eulogy or a parable either. I’m simply taking aim and telling truths from the othered side. The thing is, I really don’t know how far my words will fly or where they’ll land. Regardless — I see, I say, I show, and I tell.

This work is dedicated to my father, Paul D. Myers, Journeyman Machinist and mentor, who gave me my first camera, taught me the laws of physics and how to break them without breaking myself, who taught me how to use tools, how to listen to opera, how to read well and insisted I think for myself. He respected my autonomy, expected much and expected me to do it myself, but was always there to help when it was needed. He made a strong woman out of me, gave me the courage to walk alone upon those work sites, but also, sometimes together, where we claimed our ground if even in passing, while watching it all vanish away. He has been gone for over 27-years, he is still here.

POSTSCRIPT:

This essay was written in June, 2023 for the printed version of Work Sites/Work Cites Volume II, before the presidential election of 2024, and once again, many are asking what happened with the Working-Class, this time of all races and genders, and why. I share it here as one piece of a complex puzzle for those who care to learn of our struggles. Many of us in the working-class, which is indeed multi-racial and multi-ethnic, are not opposed to identity politics or what's been called "Woke" as we have worked hard on behalf of social justice causes through our churches, union halls, schools and communities. Our class status has made us natural allies for decades as we work together, serve in the military together, live in the same neighborhoods, attend the same schools and fall in love and have children together. The unacknowledged truth about class in this country is that it has not yet been properly addressed much less accurately seen by those in power and in government and has been wrongly severed from its multicultural, multi-ethnic reality. Some do this to divide us, others through misunderstanding of who we are. Many White working-class people feel not only left behind, but also feel alienated and exhausted by the erasure, dismissiveness, accusations of racism and condescending analysis imposed upon us by the narrating class that has been especially prominent since 2016. The frustrations and desperation that caused many people to vote the way they did is no excuse, but it did get the country's attention, despite the very real risks for self-harm and danger for neighbors, friends and loved ones. Sadly, rescue will not come under the new adminstration's watch. This tragedy will continue to play out for yet another term. And I am especially concerned for those who have become cynical or have lost hope and simply didn't show up. Many are the left behind and forgotten souls whose needs are the most immediate, are most often disregarded and were the biggest reason for the electoral results. If your vote is your voice, and your voice is your power, then many have felt unheard too many times to count.

Sources:

^{1. creative destruction: www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp  retrieved June 6, 2023}

^{2, 3. Misrepresenting The White Working-class, What the Narrating Class Gets Wrong; workingclassstudies.wordpress.com : Post of March 14, 2016, retrieved June 7, 2023}

^{4. From the poem “The Turning of Lot’s Wife,” Figures for the Ghost: Poems, Scott Cairns, University of Georgia Press, 1994}

^{5. This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1995  https://tupress.temple.edu/books/this-fine-place-so-far-from-home  retrieved June 12, 2023}