Reporter Ashley Bunton at the Washington Court House paper challenged me on a statement that the heroin epidemic has taken hold in areas where people have lost hope due to economic decline.
She said all people have some kind of hope.
I’ve been thinking about that as we study people who are at different levels of Maslow’s hiercharcy, particularly as it relates to Ohio’s troubled manufacturing economy and our heroin epidemic. People who are more comfortable week to week, month to month, have hopes far different from those who are existing in a shorter cycle.
She forwarded a very well written story by Chris Arnade of the Guardian, who has spent a great deal of time observing life in Ohio’s heroin-ravaged Ohio Valley.
He’s a great writer (and I envy his travel budget). As I think about solutions to the crisis — which is the thrust of the Your Voice Ohio project — he mentions some solutions in his story, but maintains a theme of devastation and hopelessness.
“The city peaked at 40,000 people in 1940, and as it emptied of factories and jobs – some made obsolete, some moved away – it also emptied of people and hope.
“Now it is a town half the size, filled with despair and filling with drugs.”
Before Bunton, I would have agreed with Arnade. Economic decline begets despair and welcomes heroin. Post Bunton, I’m inclined to believe that economic decline instead changes culture and redefines hope.
How could the story have been reshaped with that in mind?
I drove through Ironton, Wheelersburg, New Boston, Portsmouth and Lucasville a few days ago. Stopped at McDonald’s. To me, they are indeed quite forlorn, yet businesses were busy, traffic was on the streets, school buses carried children, and there were elderly in McDonald’s with coupons, just like home.
Bunton is onto something that journalists have to consider.
Are we imposing our own ideas of hope on people who come from different cultures? If you’re in a grocery cart pushed by addicted parents, you have something different than the hope of a child driving a battery-powered ATV through the manicured yard of college-educated parents.
Journalists, with weekly income, college educations and a mission, don’t consider that making it through a day with a little bit of food to be a success. That’s not something for which we have hope. But for some people, that’s their hope, and to achieve a meal is success.
It’s interesting that Arnade’s story did in fact list the hopes of the protagonists.
Would the story have been better if those hopes had been contrasted with hopes where a day-to-day existence isn’t an issue?
I think about Vicki’s wishes for her granddaughter.
“Now I want her to get out and see how other people live the good life. If you are young, you better leave Portsmouth, or else you will get into drugs.”
Well, contrasts are a lot of work, but when the lawyers wrote the briefs for Ohio’s DeRolph school funding case in the early 90s, they proved the state’s system of public education to be constitutionally inadequate not by depicting just poor districts, but by contrasting the educational experiences of those poor districts with those of the rich. The contrasts were startling, offensive and, more importantly, defined what could be.
Ashley Bunton, it’s time to rest your case.
