The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Not long ago a friend asked me if I thought the rest of the country was pretty much the same, economically, as the South End. Obviously my buddy needs to get out more once this Covid business recedes enough to allow traveling again. What he was really asking was if most folks were fairly well off in America. Now, to be fair, my pal isn’t exactly in the 1%, he’s more likely down in the bottom quarter, no Social Security, no retirement, still working manual labor under the table at 74 and will be until he dies.

Traveling through the Deep South one year with my father and brother on one of our Trips with Dad, the Old Man mused how in his lifetime most of us boats had risen with the economic tide. He and my mom grew up poor in Northern Maine where nearly everyone was in that same boat, not much water underneath. And of course there was the Great Depression, then World War Two, what some historian yahoos call the Good War. Please leave your college degrees at the door when you leave, guyz….

We got a few leaky dinghies on the South End moored next to the yachts, but most folks don’t have a boat to pee in and some not even a pot to bail with. We’re 99% white bread with the few immigrants working on our lawns then leaving by dark. The South End has a few homeless people, but not many. It has a few millionaires, maybe too many. Rents here are high, real estate is hot, retirees are many and working couples few. I’m no sociologist (although I have a degree in sociology) but no way is the South End representative of the America spread over 3000 miles east of us. We’re white, we’re fairly well off, we’re insular and we’re divided about equally by politics.

I told my friend that parts of America are poor and getting poorer, rural but the farms are played out or bought by agri-corporations, urban with ever marginalized ghettos, suburban with the malls dead and abandoned. The South End is a backwash of a lost American Dream on an island with a rising sea level. If my buddy is any indication, ignorance is bliss. For the rest of us, it may just be a tactic.

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