The Rust Belt of Courage
Charles Monroe-Kane reflects on what he learned about his hometown and the people who stayed there when he decided to leave.
By Charles Monroe-Kane
I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees.
I never married, but Ohio don’t remember me.
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe.
I never thought about love when I thought about home.
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe.
The floors are falling out from everybody I know.
—“Buzzblood, Ohio,” by the National
Recently, I went back to my hometown in northeastern Ohio to interview my friends and family for my national show on public radio, To the Best of Our Knowledge. In the 36-minute documentary, I barely scratched the surface of what I found there — and not just in the specific stories I heard, but in Center of the World’s role as a microcosm of what is ailing America, and even what might heal those ills.
Nearly every person I interviewed in Center of the World is staring down a crisis. Their business is on the brink, their home is boarded up, they don’t have a job, or they’re hooked on heroin.
The week after I was in Ohio, 23 people overdosed in my home county in a 48-hour period. Among them was my second cousin.
On the drive back to where I live in Madison, I was forced to ask a blunt question: is Center of the World past the point of no return?
I didn’t want to do another piece romanticizing the poverty of the Rust Belt, exposing the scourge of opioids, or explaining yet again how all those counties went for Trump. I didn’t want to do an ethnographic survey of another declining Ohio town.
I wanted to do something much more concrete and personal: to find out if the floor is falling out from under everybody I love.
And if that is really happening, then what comes next?
It’s my love that forces me to ask these questions. It’s my roots that gives me permission to ask.
From my perspective, my childhood home is a place of destitution, the embodiment of the phrase “left behind.” At my 25th high school reunion a group of us were talking, and the people who still lived there asked those who left if it is moral to raise your children in such a place. My wife was shocked. No one asks that question where she’s from.
Part of me thinks, those dumbasses should have worked harder and left.
Fuck that place.
And yet… I’m fiercely proud of my Rust Belt roots. That chip on my shoulder got me through a private college with rich kids and gave me the moxie to survive hard times. When LeBron James and the Cavaliers won the NBA championship, I cried like a baby. Because I believe what the shoe commercials say: he is one of us. He won for us.
From a distance, I have long feared that the truth back home is just boring and sad: that the long-ago disappearance of steel mills and tire factories in the Mahoning Valley left behind a trail of alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, apathy… hopelessness. Just like all the books and magazine articles say again and again and again. I fear that my people elected Trump for no good reason other than to wave that middle finger at D.C.
But man, I’ll be honest. I love their defiance. Their independence. It’s quintessentially American. It’s kinetic. If you could tap that energy? You’d have something amazing. Or, as we may be learning right now, something very destructive.
This story we put on the air — and hopefully, we’ll hear more like it — only a hometown boy or girl can tell.
Center of the World is only one town in Ohio. How many other places in America need personal, homegrown stories told about them? Who returns to vacant parts of Back of the Yards in Chicago, or abandoned log mills in Tacoma? Where are the stories from the parts of New Orleans that never recovered? We face a real question of how to reckon with parts of our country that have been left behind. If you have the microphone, the camera, the pad and paper — go home. Use your skills to publish the stories that help Americans understand their unseen fellow Americans.
