By John Vincent<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Further Review<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The question was raised recently by Jonathan Dudley of Healing Our Communities about whether the deindustrialization of America was leading to higher rates of depression and suicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And he came to Gardner on March 5 to give a talk because Gardner has higher-than-normal rates of depression and suicide. His group is a partnership between the Chair City Community Workshop (which produces mini books about Nichols and Stone workers) and the Montachusett Suicide Prevention Task Force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, in the newspaper business, there are certain stories that are particular to one person or one city, and there are others that resonate everywhere because everyone is going through something similar and can relate to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you want to find out why all those people voted for Donald Trump, you go into \u201cTrump Country\u201d which evidently is wherever there were large numbers of people voting for him. If you want to find out why all these people are down in the dumps and killing themselves, you go to Gardner, unfortunately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s the problem here? Does it involve the deindustrialization of America? Hell, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gardner had its motor ripped out, the manufacturing of hardwood chairs and other furniture, in the late 1980s and has running on fumes ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back in the day, things were better in some ways. And I\u2019ve heard people say they don\u2019t like it when I say \u201cback in the day,\u201d that\u2019s like all those old people harkening back to a time in their mind that\u2019s never going to happen again (and probably wasn\u2019t as good as they\u2019re making it out to be), it\u2019s Bruce Springsteen singing about \u201cGlory Days,\u201d \u2026 get over it already.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it\u2019s not that easy to get over it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everyone would love to move on to new better days, but it\u2019s easier said than done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the old days, you\u2019d get a job somewhere, and there were a lot of places to get fairly good-paying jobs, Heywood-Wakefield, Conant Ball, Nichols & Stone, Hartshorn, Gem Industries, S. Bent, Temple-Stuart, and the list goes on and on. And you\u2019d work all day, physically working (getting tired as the day wore on) to make a product that was useful and that people paid good money for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And at the end of the day you\u2019d go home, have dinner with your family, which you were providing for, and you\u2019d be satisfied with your \u201cWonderful Life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, that\u2019s right out the window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You want to know why George Bailey is going to jump off that bridge? It\u2019s because sometimes, with all the stuff that goes on, now more than ever, it\u2019s hard to see the wonderfulness underneath all the other not-so-wonderful stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the reasons I\u2019m so aggravated that the drug epidemic is just as bad in Gardner as everywhere else is that I always had a homer mentality where I thought the place I came from was better than everywhere else, that maybe we were just a little smarter or trying just a little harder than people in a lot of other places, so getting embroiled in drug addiction? Really? That\u2019s dumb. We\u2019re smarter than that. We can see a bad deal coming down the pike and avoid it. At least that\u2019s what I thought. But evidently, it\u2019s not that easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And where\u2019s our footing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do we have a good family life, are we working hard and providing for our family and making good lives for ourselves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The answer should be yes, but in a lot of cases, it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where are these good jobs and how do you get them? We\u2019ve all been trying to figure that out for 40 years. Gardner and every hollowed-out, run-down mill town in America have been trying to reinvent themselves ever since the jobs flew the coop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And Gardner has been trying hard, people do whatever they have to do to survive. Some people have come up with new companies where a lot of people work, but a lot of the jobs are not all-that-good-paying and a lot of the jobs are on a computer or over a counter and no one is working with their hands, putting their back into it, crafting a piece of quality workmanship and coming home tired but satisfied that they did the work needed for them and their family to get by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s more a nebulous thing now. Maybe you\u2019re stuck selling doughnuts or Slim Jims, or maybe you find a job where you use your mind or your fingers to produce a good paycheck, but a lot of people haven\u2019t found such jobs and they\u2019re not getting that good paycheck. And even if you have that high-tech, new-age job, it\u2019s not that satisfying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let me quote the 1999 \u201cclassic\u201d movie, \u201cOffice Space.\u201d That whole movie is like a dissertation on everything that\u2019s wrong with America these days, but there\u2019s one scene where The Two Bobs, efficiency experts, are going around doing interviews prior to deciding who to let go, and one of the Bobs says to one of the mid-level executives, \u201cWhat would you say you do here?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the guy blusters and says, oh he does \u2026 well, you know, he does a lot \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What are any of us doing here anymore?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, back to my homer theory (which has already been disproved by all the drug addiction), I was thinking, and you and everyone else is going to tell me this is wrong, but what if the people around here are little smarter than your average Joe, and they see all this adding up and the numbers aren\u2019t turning out in their favor. If you\u2019re playing poker and you know you have a losing hand, sometimes you keep playing to see what the other guys has, as maybe they have even worse cards than you. And other times you know you don\u2019t have the winning hand and you just fold. What\u2019s the use?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I\u2019m not saying that\u2019s the thing to do, especially if you have people that rely on you. But I can see how it happens. I sympathize with the plight a lot of people are in these days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When everything you try isn\u2019t good enough, day after day, year after year, it\u2019s frustrating, it\u2019s discouraging, you want to keep going, doing your part, but really, that\u2019s barely even helping, so what\u2019s the point?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My standard answer is just that you never know what each new day brings and if you clock out of that big Simplex time clock in the sky, you\u2019re not going to be around for whatever good could happen tomorrow or the next day, or the next year. There might be a lot of bad that happens, there\u2019s a good chance there will be more bad than good, but for me, I want to be around for the good. Something good is going to happen sometime, and I\u2019ll still be here to enjoy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And maybe if we keep working on it, we can find a way to turn more of those bad days into good ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twenty years of the \u201cGreat Recession\u201d and no raise year after year, no good jobs to be found, no one who really gives a damn if you can\u2019t figure it out, it can get to you, sure. But inside all of us is that worker bee who really does want to do a good job and get things done and while there aren\u2019t a lot of obvious good options for that in this day in age, in this economy, we can all be part of figuring out how to reinvent ourselves for the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This column previously appeared in The Gardner News.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By John Vincent On Further Review The question was raised recently by Jonathan Dudley of Healing Our Communities about whether the deindustrialization of America was leading to higher rates of depression and suicide. And he came to Gardner on March 5 to give a talk because Gardner has higher-than-normal rates of depression and suicide. His […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","hide_page_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinionpieces"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93,"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/93"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsandviews101.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}