Cheers, RK. Stay safe.
Since apparently what happened is that, when all of the many "first world" countries transitioned from manufacturing economies to service economies, they didn't actually bring those former manufacturing workers into the service economy. They just let them suffer and be miserable for several decades and didn't expect much of it.
Part of the continued amazing bullshit about all this is that people continue to believe this. In spite of decades of democrat attempts to bring relief and better options to those workers, even in the face of them repeatedly spurning said attempts and an incessant republican campaign to sabotage them. You literally have a party that has been trying for as long as I've been alive to make sure these folks have a better life and better options, but apparently none of that ever happened. There was no education initiatives, no attempts at improving housing conditions and transport so they could move to an area with better possibilities or at least make it easier for something to come to them, no cornerstone of the platform dedicated to trying to make sure these folks were healthier and happier than the vagrancies of their birth and location left them. No attempts to improve the infrastructure what hopes those folks had hinged on pretty strongly. None of the thousand and one other things the left wing of our government has been doing and trying to do for years upon years. None of that happened. It's been party policy and constantly attempted implementation on pretty much all goddamn levels for longer than most of us have been alive, but somehow these suffering workers have been ignored.
I mean, hell, I understand why some people continue to say that. What they
didn't do was bring the exact same jobs back in even greater numbers, mostly due to that whole "completely fucking impossible" thing. But somehow people keep coming to the conclusion they didn't try anything else. That some huge chunk of the dem related headlines that weren't the latest line of vacuous bullshit for all my life
haven't been about democrat initiatives to help and help uplift the downtrodden and down on their luck, to bring life to areas rotting out as the country's economy irreversibly changed or at least help what life was there move. I've literally spent chunks of my life either volunteering or helping folks doing the work of getting this shit implemented on a local level, but apparently I was suffering under a massive bloody hallucination for years of my life. Apparently the literal weeks upon weeks of raw hours my mother spent writing grants, implementing and managing what the funding from them allowed for, trying to bring what succor to this hellhole of a state she can didn't happen. Apparently all the people she's worked with, and the ones they've worked with, who have been constantly undercut by republican politics and policies, and for whom D support was about the only chance they had to keep doing what they were doing, never existed. The people both myself and all those people have talked to from one end of the country to the other doing the same sodding thing? Fever dreams.
Somehow. Kinda' wish I had known a couple decades ago so I didn't waste time and effort trying be a decent human being.