Pistolville (3): Pistolville Comes Home
The best way to keep heroin away from Mount Dora is to acknowledge Pistolville as deeply our own (third part of a three-part series)
Pain and Community
Very little trace of historic Pistolville can be found in Mount Dora as it grew into the Festival City. Still, as the city builds out with shiny new development and the promise of a bustling Innovation District, poverty still haunts this town. A lot. Many of the city’s poor are in East Town, but they’re also in areas tucked around it, off the main roads, down at the end of dead-end cul-de-sacs and in trailer parks or in dilapidated rental houses.
At night, the shadow of Pistolville’s darker legacy still does business in the economic fissures of our city, getting high and raising the sort of hell that by the light of day sounds like justified rage at Trump rally. Such wrong sides of the tracks can be found anywhere pain cries out for relief. We sit between much more troubled neighbors to the north (Leesburg) and east (Sorrento) and Apopka where development booms right next to rising crime. (Apopka has seen a nasty streak of gun violence this year.)
But Pistolville could come back in subtler ways. In a 2013 survey to determine the economic health of consumers, the Federal Reserve Board asked how they would pay for a $400 emergency. 47 percent said they would have to borrow the money or sell something — they did not have that much in savings. This has been corroborated by several other studies, leading to the conclusion that somewhere just above the poverty line, much of the country is financially fragile — living paycheck to paycheck.
Edward Wolff, economist with New York University, has discovered that median household net worth of Americans has fell 38% from 2003 to 2013, from $87,992 to $54,400. Either recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 has not happened for many American households, or ground that has been slipping since the 1980s is continuing to erode.
Living so tenuously spells trouble for the golden years; in a recent study from the Insured Retirement Institute, only 22 percent of American workers are confident they have saved up enough for retirement. Almost 40 percent of aging baby boomers will rely on Social Security income alone, and four in ten have nothing saved at all. And many are looking at a far, far longer retirement, living well into their 90s.
The American economy is fragile and many white-collar professions are now also being outsourced or eliminated. Automation and digital disruption are creating a much smaller workforce. Wages remain flat while many costs — health care, prescription drugs, housing, education, transportation — are rising at alarming rates. Many now expect to work far into retirement. Help doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon — Washington is locked in a partisan deep freeze — leaving many Americans distracted and skittish and angry.
If it’s true that economic pain is in abundance these days, it’s also tragically true that avoidance of feeling that pain has become a national obsession. Once all of those prescription pain pills rained down like manna from heaven, it isn’t be hard to understand why heroin — cheap, pure — is now so predominant, not only in traditional ghettos but across the vast suburban and rural white main.
Where to trace America’s aversion to pain? When did we give people permission to avoid it? Did it start when wars were fought overseas and out of sight? Or when easy credit became so available? Or was it when government aid like disability became too available and without scrutiny due to a shrinking of the federal workforce?
Sam Quinones, whose book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (2015) is in large part the inspiration for this piece, locates the trigger for our deadly opiate obsession in something more comprehensive and fundamental: the destruction of community life. He writes,
It occurred to me, as I researched Dreamland, that talking about heroin — opiates in general — was really a way of talking about America.
Where we stand as a country has a lot to do with the nature of drugs containing the morphine molecule.
By the time I began the research for this book in 2012, we had, I believe, spent decades destroying community in America, mocking and clawing at the girdings of government that provide the public assets and infrastructure that we took for granted and that make communal public life possible. Meanwhile, we exalted the private sector. We beat Communism and thus came to believe the free market was some infallible God. Accepting this economic dogma, we allowed, we encouraged even, jobs to go overseas. We lavishly rewarded our priests of finance for pushing those jobs offshore. We demanded perfection from government and forgave the private sector its trespass. (351)
In Florida, you have only to look around at the massive tracts of single-family home development to understand where a major loss of community has happened. Suburbia is one slice of paradise repeated in row after row of homes and replicated in toto hundreds more times over the ghost of the old citrus industry. Central Florida cities like Orlando are megasuburbs building out toward each others’ fringes with the urgency of kudzu.
The 55+ megasuburb The Villages is perhaps the Eden of affordable Florida paradises, where 97 percent of the population is white (and where as long as you are white, it doesn’t matter if you bought your house for $77,000 or $2 million). There you can find no pain — it’s like a geriatric Disney World. Alex French writes in “Club Meds,”
The grass is always a deep Pakistan green. The sunrises and sunsets are so intensely pink and orange and red they look computer-enhanced. The water in the public pools is always the perfect temperature. Residents can play golf on one of 40 courses every day for free. Happy hour begins at 11 a.m. Musical entertainment can be found in three town squares 365 nights a year. It’s landlocked but somehow still feels coastal. There’s no (visible) poverty or suffering. Free, consensual, noncommittal sex with a new partner every night is an option. There’s zero litter or dog shit on the sidewalks and hardly any crime and the laws governing the outside world don’t seem to apply here. You can be the you you’ve always dreamed of.
Can the Villages be called a community if it has no diversity, no visible decay, not even a cemetery?
As local media instruments like the Mount Dora Topic lost their business model to aggressive corporate newspapers, communities like ours have lost their central, combining voice. Few newspapers have ever been truly representative of their communities — the East Towns rarely had a voice, and the Pistolvilles have never fared much better — but without any local media, communities like Mount Dora became strangers to itself, a motley of locals and winter visitors and businesses and schools going about their separate business, policed from ne’er-do-wells you usually only read about in the crime report or the online mug shots.
Community in Florida isn’t helped by the fact that houses here are enforced oases in a swamp of heat and increasingly oppressive conditions, complete with air conditioning, lighting, plumbing, the Internet and entertainment systems which make going outside for anything a rare and moot occasion. Online life is even more isolating, a digital representation of life which is paradoxically unliving and eternal. People are almost frightened to be outside now.
Quinones continues,
… Heroin is, I believe, the final expression of values we have fostered for thirty-five years. It turns every addict into narcissistic, self-absorbed, solitary hyper-consumers. A life that finds opiates turns away from family and community and devotes itself entirely to self-gratification by buying and consuming one product — the drug that makes being alone not just all right, but preferable.
I believe more strongly than ever that the antidote to heroin is community. If you want to keep kids off heroin, make sure people in your neighborhood do things together, in public, often. Form your own Dreamland ((a large public pool in Portsmouth, Ohio, which was popular with families in the community for years)) and break down those barriers that keep people isolated. Don’t have play dates; just go out and play. Bring people out of their private rooms, whatever forms those rooms take. We might consider living more simply. Pursuit of stuff doesn’t equal happiness, as any heroin addict will tell you. People in some places I’ve been may emerge from this plague more compassionate, more grounded, willing to give children experience rather than things, and show them that pain is a part of life and often endurable. The antidote to heroin may well be making your kids ride bikes outside, with their friends, and let them skin their knees. (353)
To me it’s notable that you can read that paragraph replacing heroin with suburbia and the result is about the same. And pain, as it turns out, may be the antidote to both.
Blue is the New White (Collar)
Countering the belief that work is scarce in Lake County, there are many who say that isn’t the case at all. Beyond the minimum-wage service sector, there’s a broad variety of skilled positions in short supply of trained applicants. As the economy keeps changing, some of these jobs are solidly blue-collar, others what might once have been called white-collar — or somewhere in-between.
The training, however, is all.
Lake Tech is Lake County’s public post-secondary technical college located in Eustis. As with the other 47 post-secondary technical colleges located around the state, it’s connected to the local school district but receives funding from state higher education. Lake Tech is also a charter school — the second of its kind among state technical colleges — something which executive director Dr. Dianne Culpepper says helps to eliminate layers of bureaucracy.
The school offers some 2,800 students more than 30 career-technical certificate programs each year. The most popular are in health science (nursing, EMT technician, pharmacy tech, home health aide, medical assistant), manufacturing (welding and computer numeric control technician), automobile service and law enforcement (firefighter, police officer, corrections officer). Other tracks include construction, a/v technology, business management, hospitality, human services and information technology.
Courses are cheap — $2.88 per hour for Florida residents. Costs for the various certificates depend on the amount of required hours of coursework. For EMT’s, $720 plus books and fees; corrections officers, $1,200; pharmacy techs and welders, more than $3,000. Students can get various grants and scholarships as well as financial aid.
That compares to about $10,000 for a 2-year degree at Valencia and $20,000 for a 4-year degree at UCF.
All programs are business-centric and have an advisor from the business community to ensure the program is delivering the up-to-date skills that businesses need. And where the accrediting body for Lake Tech requires that graduates of their programs have a 70% placement average, Culpepper says their placement rate is actually around 90 percent.
Lake Tech graduates earn much better than what service economy jobs pay. A HVAC tech starts between $21-$27,000 a year, EMT’s $30-$40,000 and welders $35,000 all the way up to $80,000 in some parts of the state.
Along with strong ties to the business community, Lake Tech also maintains a close relationship with secondary schools. A post secondary specialist visits schools regularly, and students are offered to shadow Lake Tech classes to get a feel for what they’re like. About 60 high school students currently have dual enrollment.
Some Lake Tech programs require a high school diploma while others do not. The school provides GED certification and offers academic remediation as well.
Culpepper says there’s been a sea change in attitudes about the work people are getting out of technical colleges. It used to be that white collar jobs were seen as better than blue collar work. But white collar industries are being even more affected by automation and digital disruption. A town may not need an editor, but it will always need a plumber.
“Lake Tech is a good place to start out of high school, but its also a good place to come back to,” she says. “Sometimes people who got jobs with their college find they don’t want to continue in that line of work, or are underemployed. Some people want to start over. A lot of career positions require ongoing training.”
Culpepper estimates there are currently some 300 manufacturing concerns spread about Lake County, and there would be more if there were more qualified talent available. “It’s hard to attract new business if you don’t have trained workforce.” The school plans to build a separate, 2,400-foot facility next year for an advanced manufacturing program, training hi-tech skills for the workplace of the future.
Mount Dora’s Innovation District, the 1,300-acre commercial development planned around the Wekiva Parkway extension plans to start filling out with employers starting in 2021. If Lake Tech continues to do a good job of networking with area businesses, these new light industry, healthcare and high-tech players may find in Lake Tech just the talent pool they’re looking for.
And for the community which grows up around the Innovation District — as Mount Dora builds out to twice its size and population — surely there will be an ample supply of HVAC technicians and EMTs and automobile repairmen and home health aids to keep things bustling.
And if the District takes decades to materialize, the true opportunities in this area until then may best be found by the likes of Lake Tech.
Lake County’s economy may be transforming for the better, and Pistolville could form the new labor pool it needs.
Waking Locally from a National Nightmare
In Florida, there is always a dodge for for pain: There’s booze (deaths of rural white women in the early 50s from cirrhosis of the liver have doubled since the end of the 20th century) … Porn offers limitless release through curvature … Opiod pain pills are still available (as well as benzodiazepines like Valium and Xanax) … There’s a Mardi Gras of meth in Leesburg … And there’s heroin, chugging up from Orlando. All of these things are symbolically linked to the stills of Pistolville, and are all whitening agents — smoke that signals the misery of things going bad.
That pain-free smoke (for there is no such thing as freedom from pain) fans out through our city in other ways, destroying community and forcing people deeper back into their homes. It looks like business as usual but smells something burning close and closer. We all think something should be done about it, but it’s hard to pay attention with so many shiny new things to adore.
Without paying attention to the deepening needs of our community, here is one likely scenario for Mount Dora. As the Wekiva Parkway completes and the Innovation District builds out, it does create new jobs: But few families care to more here to work because Lake County schools lag so far behind their peers in neighboring counties. Residential development on the city’s west side may push more of the poor away through gentrification.
Maybe the single family developments try to grow apace of the Innovation District for a while, but they’re don’t need an Innovation District for their own success. The Wekiva Parkway can also take workers to jobs into Orlando, and retirees have no special need for the sort of things such a commercial district contributes. Our neighbors in Apopka and Eustis are eying the new commercial pie, too, and as our current City Hall is crippled for staff, we don’t have the best shot at those opportunities.
The major population growth in the city will occur on the east side in the new developments, and there is little incentive among them to play nice or second fiddle to the old half of the city on the west of US-441. As a result, east Mount Dora could easily build out to look like the Villages or Clermont. Retail commercial development — the Targets and Home Depots and Red Lobsters — will spread over east SR-46 and north Round Lake Road and US-441 like kudzu. There’s lots of work there, but most for minimum wages, which means that a lot of working people who need cheap housing will have to cut every other corner to afford living here.
And when the distance between comfort and misery gets far enough apart, Pistolville will return.
* * *
To my thinking, these are the issues Mount Dora should be thinking and talking and together on to do our best to make sure that sorry future doesn’t come to pass:
- How well are our schools meeting the needs of students? Are they providing a safe environment to learn in, offering healthy meals especially to those who cannot afford any and a structure to those whose family support is small? Are they preparing our kids for the workforce America is evolving toward?
- Are there employment opportunities for all in our community, and do jobs pay wages above the poverty level?
- When those run afoul of the law due to addiction problems, are there sufficient alternatives to jail? Are there adequate resources for long-term treatment for opiate addiction?
- Are kids being encouraged to participate in city recreation programs? Are green spaces being promoted as healthy outdoor alternatives to indoor isolation? What about that bike park near the high school that keeps getting kicked down the budget road?
- What sort of cross-441 community-building can be done to prevent the creep of isolation of New from Old Mount Dora?
- What are other ways the Mount Dora community can become more complete? Have our East Side neighbors been properly invited to our parades and lakeside bashes and festivals? In our poorer neighborhoods, are we being sensitive enough to the financial burdens of marginal residents who don’t have more in their monthly funds to pay for more costly services? As the city continues to build out, are marginal neighborhoods respected as roads are widened and re-routed? Are they also protected from gentrification?
- Are we being friendly neighbors to our surrounding sister cities, lending a hand where needed or lending support so that all residents who live around us, regardless of city boundaries, feel a part of the same larger community?
I suspect that if we as a city can make strides in this any of these directions, pride of place will grow from dreams of oaks and festivals into a real perception of what it means to live in vibrant, diverse, informed and growing community.
Contrary to what you frequently hear in negative campaign rhetoric, there are many places in America where just this is happening, as James Fallows discovered in his recent Atlantic Magazine piece.) Wouldn’t it be great if Mount Dora could add itself to that list?
In the end, probably our best prevention against the rising tide of heroin is a change of narrative. We’ve had too much rhetoric driving us apart. A tide of negativity in media and politics have corroded trust and faith and hope. Working together — council and city hall, districts One through Four, city and fellow cities, city and county — is a story worth telling and building on.
But I suspect we can’t get to that narrative until we have fully told the story of Pistolville. That’s were we are stuck as a country right now. David Brooks of the New York Times spoke just to this in his April 29, 2016 op-ed titled “If Not Trump, What?”
… We’ll probably need a new national story. Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged.
I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive. Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss, a story of those who triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common today.
Just this week, Dr. Thomas H. Lee, chief medical officer of the healthcare consulting firm Press Ganey, published a commentary in the Journal of the American Medicare Association stating that elimination of patients’ pain is both impossible and unnecesary. “Zero pain is not the goal,” he wrote. “The reduction of suffering is — and that is something more complex than analgesia alone.”
Lee cited several studies on post-surgical patients, noting that long-term use of opiods can actually make patients’ pain worse. Suffering, Lee went on to say, is more than physical pain, as it includes impairment, fear, uncertainty and confusion. Treatment of suffering goes far beyond alleviation of pain. “Quality does not mean the elimination of death,” he wrote. “And compassion for patients does not meant the elimination of pain.”
Pistolville’s narrative is certainly a painful one. I hope you stuck around for it, because our town’s tale is wrapped up in it for better and for worse. If we deny that story, we deeply hurt our own.
Maybe the best thing we can do for Pistolville — and ourselves — is to invite it home.
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
“Pistolville” is a three-part series:
1. Finding Pistolville
2. A World of Pain
3: Pistolville Comes Home
