Reflection on Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade

               This is a great book that reminded me a lot of Our Towns and American Nations. In the book, Arnade sets out to explore and meet people from “back row America” which basically means people with little money and formal education who often live in their hometowns either because they don’t want to or cannot leave. He contrasts it with “front row America,” made up of people who are more globalistic, who leave their home towns, who are educated, and who are largely atheistic or agnostic. I think that these are some very important distinctions. I would say that they’re much better distinctions than are made in American Nations because they account for class, education and urbanization. Arnade also discusses race, as race divides “back row America” into black and white or immigrant and non-immigrant. One deficiency of the book, especially in comparison to Our Towns, is that it offers no solutions except listening to one another, which was disappointing.

               The book is full of good quotes from people and there are two that I want to point out as especially good. One is that “the harder you work, the less you make.” This is a fucked up thing that I find to be largely true. It seems like the jobs where you have the fewest breaks and the least time off are the jobs that pay the least. Meanwhile, if you work a white-collar job in an office building, it’s very easy to slack off and screw around without anybody noticing for most of the day. You can’t do that so much as a waiter or as an assembly line worker. All those blue-collar jobs have some supervisor that makes sure they’re doing something all the time while so many white-collar jobs just let you do whatever you’re doing on the computer. It’s not 100%, but it feels like a trend. Another good quote is “What’s going to happen if you give only nine bones to ten dogs?” This is in the context of jobs. When there isn’t enough work to go around, people are gonna fight and bad things are gonna happen. The most important thing in our society is that we have enough work to go around to keep people busy, because when we’re not busy, bad things tend to happen. Having jobs also brings us into contact with more people in a positive environment, making it a social experience too.

               While the author offers no solutions, I think that I can point out some general things that need to happen to improve life around the country. A lot of trouble comes from the fact that when industrial jobs left communities outside of cities, nothing replaced them. As a result, the most talented and lucky people went to universities and moved to cities because they could never go back to their hometowns that had no opportunities. These are “front row Americans” and the brain drain that puts them all in cities is a huge problem. Similar to the way that old people are leaving their old communities for retirement paradises in Arizona and Florida (which I read about in Leisureville), massive problems in American life are emerging from a sort of segregation and secession on the lines on age, education, wealth, and race. It results in a geography of small havens of globalized, educated, wealthy, and often white elites in urban havens, surrounded by the opposite communities in other parts of cities and in the more suburban and rural areas.

               This means that the solution is to either get these people back into the smaller towns or to create a way for people in the future to prosper where they already are. I think this means the development of skills using the internet, which can cheaply deliver courses to people in their homes wherever they live so long as they have a connection. Hopefully, it would result in businesses going to where the skilled people are. It means low taxes on businesses, so that they can develop easily and profitably, yet higher taxes on the wealthy, to pay for projects that can revitalize poor towns. I think it also means a replacement of prisons with rehabilitation programs for people with drug addictions. Like I mean a serious effort at stopping addiction, since that is costing our country massive amounts of time, money, and emotional pain. We also need to promote more spiritual belief and faith, whether in religion or something else, but whatever it is, there needs to be some kind of spiritual awakening. Religion has a huge power to save people and if we can’t get people to go back to church, we need to develop other institutions that can fill the same societal hole.