This is
a book for people who love America and want to hear that it will get better.
Obviously, I really liked it. A married couple (the authors) fly in a small
Cirrus plane around the country, visiting small towns that don’t get much coverage
in the media. Often, when these towns are in the press, it’s not good. Instead,
the Fallows look for what’s going right in these towns and cities, trying to
find the formula for American towns to achieve success.
Small
towns in America face a key disadvantage. By the nature of being small towns, they do not have a lot of
people. As we move away from a manufacturing economy, when the greatest
resource to be used came from the ground or was crafted in a factory, we are
entering a service economy, where the best resource is another human being,
ideally well-educated and with top-notch skills. That means that people want to
start businesses where the other people are. However, small towns, write the Fallows,
often have advantages in lower costs of living and a high quality of life.
Their best route to success is often to make living in their town really nice.
This was especially true in towns like Bend, Oregon and Burlington, Vermont,
which try to preserve the beautiful nature around them.
A major
theme of the book is something that I’ve thought about nonstop in Colombia. The
government is an extremely powerful force of social betterment through the
provision of public goods. In Colombia, it’s hit me especially with the lack of
consistent water, the common power outages, and the poor road condition. In the
book, they highlighted that the pillars of small towns are the schools, libraries,
and public spaces. They cite Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) projects that
have reinvigorated dying towns. In Riverside, California, locals mention that
the city’s ownership of its utilities- water, electricity, and sewage- gave it
the chance to control its own fiscal destiny. They discuss how libraries “offer
citizenship classes, English-language classes, and programs on car-seat safety,
self-defense, parenting…, and fighting forest fires.” This is cool stuff that
we should have more of.
I liked in particular one small
section where they talk about “the question” that people ask you in different
towns. In the Low Country of South Carolina, it’s “Which bend [of the river]?”
In other more socially conservative areas, it’s “Where do you go to church?” In
racially diverse cities like Philadelphia and Boston, it’s “What are you?” In
New Orleans, where everybody seems to know everybody else, it’s “Who’s your
mama?” I thought this was an interesting concept. The authors write that it’s
our way of sizing people up and finding out who they are in relation to us on
the social hierarchy. As you might expect, in New York and DC, the question is “What
do you do (for a living)?”
I wrote in my notes that “This book
is so obviously written by white people who read the news too much.” That is to
say that it has exactly the racial awareness you would expect from two middle-aged
white people who live in Washington, DC. They write, “Redlands has always had
it easy… with a better-educated, richer, and whiter population than the other
two cities…” I found that to be a pretty disgusting sentence in the way that it
so sterilely addresses racism. Instead of pointing out that the problem is
racists, it makes it seems that the place is better off just be nature of being
whiter, not that the racial homogeneity makes racism less impactful. The
authors are not outward racists, but people who’ve been trained their whole
lives to imagine that race doesn’t even exist, and if it does, only exists for “minorities.”
There’s another point in the book where they write, “The school administrators
told me that their students today ‘don’t see color,’ which speaks to the mature
integration of races within Dodge City.” In fact, claiming to “not see color”
is a sign of a white person’s (it’s almost always a white person) racial IMmaturity. In “Why Are All the Black
Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., Tatum
specifically addresses the idea of race-blindness, pointing out that it is just
fine to see that there are differences in peoples’ skin color, but that white people
are uncomfortable with this, and would rather just not discuss it. While this
is better than outward racism, it leaves lots of questions unanswered and just
pushes things under the surface rather than solving any racial tensions. In
addition, black teenagers often need to seek out the company of other black
teenagers due to their shared experience of racism that their non-black friends
won’t be able to understand. They also make heavy use of the word “millennial,”
which I found annoying.
At the end of the book, the Fallows
give us the recipe for success. It is made up of ten- and one-half rules that tend
to be followed in successful cities. They are (and I’m quoting):
1.
People work together on practical local
possibilities, rather than allowing bitter disagreements about national
politics to keep them apart.
2.
You can pick out the local patriots.
3.
The phrase “public-private partnership” refers
to something real.
4.
People know the civil story.
5.
They have downtowns.
6.
They are near a research university.
7.
They have, and care about, a community college.
8.
They have distinctive, innovative schools.
9.
They make themselves open.
10.
They have big plans.
For the details about these rules you’ll have to read the
book. There is a semi-rule they also give us though: successful towns and
cities have their own craft breweries. This is certainly correlation and not causation,
but as they write, “A town that has them also has a certain kind of entrepreneur,
and a critical mass of young (except for me) customers. It sounds like a joke,
but it explains a lot.”
To sum
up, this is a really interesting book and also a well-written story. While it
isn’t perfect, it has a really great perspective on the United States. The
authors definitely do justice to their subject matter. I found it extremely
easy to read and it made me want to travel the country.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- The Bay of Fundy in Maine has some of the strongest tidal forces on Earth, sucking in and pushing out more water than exists in all the world’s rivers combined.
- There are very few natural lakes in Texas, and most bodies of water are from dam-building projects since the 19th century.
- The Big Island of Hawaii is a relocation spot for the federal witness protection program.
- After WWII, Oregon’s economy was nearly 25% forestry while today it’s just 2%. That’s a decline you don’t hear nearly as much about as the coal country.
- Of 5,000 airports in the USA, only about 600 have control towers. When pilots fly into those that don’t, they use their radios to warn and coordinate with other pilots.
P.S.
This is a random thought, but they mention when visiting
Eastport, Maine that a Civil War veterans hall is a point of local pride. This
makes sense, as it honors the sacrifice of American veterans. However, is it so
inappropriate to honor the dead Confederate soldiers. They fought for a
terrible cause that tried to break up the country and keep slavery, the
greatest evil perpetrated in America and maybe anywhere, however, most of them
were not consciously doing so. They probably signed up because everyone else in
town did when Union soldiers appeared, since the Union invaded the Confederacy
first. I think Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and other leaders don’t
deserve anything, but states from the Confederacy should be able to recognize
their foot soldiers who died along with the slaves who were freed. It would be
a shame if only northerners could have remembrances of their Civil War dead.
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