In 2011, my papa was laid off from a Whirlpool manufacturing plant, the kind that had for so long made America great. In the wake of the financial crisis, the C-suite had decided to offshore operations to Mexico.

The plant they shuttered was a 1.2 million sq ft manufacturing plant, and overnight, 1,000 people lost their jobs. Many of whom had been working there for decades.

My papa was 57 years old when he got laid off. He had worked at that very same plant for over 30 years, and snap just like that, it was all gone.

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2011年、私の父は、長年アメリカを偉大にしてきたワールプール社の製造工場から解雇されました。金融危機を受けて、経営陣はメキシコへの事業移転を決定しました。

閉鎖された工場は120万平方フィートの製造工場で、一夜にして1,000人が職を失った。その多くは数十年にわたってそこで働いていた人たちだった。

父は57歳のときに解雇されました。父は30年以上同じ工場で働いていたのですが、突然すべてが消えてしまったのです。

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When I was a little girl, from as far back as I could remember, my papa woke up at 3:30 am and drove the 40 minutes to the plant from the rural 1,200-person town every single day. And for 30 years, he worked what were often 10-12 hour shifts with no complaints.

I grew up a Navy brat, so I didn’t get to see my grandparents except for a few months during the summer, but I remember my papa exerting the last drop of his energy so he could spend time with us going to the creek, building us a tree house, riding horses, and playing cowboys and Indians.

Every evening, starting from when I was in grade school, my papa and I would sit in the living room and watch the History Channel, Animal Planet, and Bill O’Reilly and hee-haw together about what the Democrats were doing, as much as an eight-year-old can.

My papa and my nana had been together since they graduated high school; they got married at barely 18 and had my mom less than a year later and my aunt soon after that.

They had a small homestead, owned most of what they had outright, and they were poor, but poor doesn’t have to mean that much when you can work the land.

My nana worked as the local school’s secretary, and my papa had good benefits with his manufacturing job. They only ever went out to eat on special occasions. McDonald’s was a birthday-only type of affair. They had a one-acre garden, a few head of cattle, would can fruits and vegetables at the end of every summer, and freeze chopped okra, blueberries, meat from wild hogs and venison in an old chest freezer in the workshop.

私がまだ子供だった頃、物心ついたころから、父は毎日午前 3 時半に起きて、人口 1,200 人の田舎町から工場まで 40 分かけて車で通っていました。そして 30 年間、父は不満を言うことなく、10 時間から 12 時間のシフト勤務をこなしました。

私は海軍の子供として育ったので、夏の数か月を除いて祖父母に会う機会はありませんでしたが、父が最後の力を振り絞って私たちと一緒に小川に行ったり、ツリーハウスを作ったり、馬に乗ったり、カウボーイやインディアンごっこをしたりして時間を過ごしていたことを覚えています。

小学生の頃から、毎晩、私とパパはリビングルームに座って、ヒストリーチャンネルやアニマルプラネット、ビル・オライリーを見て、8歳の子どもができる限り民主党が何をしているのか一緒に大笑いしていました。

私の父と祖母は高校を卒業して以来ずっと一緒にいました。彼らは18歳になるかならないかで結婚し、1年も経たないうちに母が生まれ、その後すぐに叔母が生まれました。

彼らは小さな農場を所有し、所有物のほとんどを完全に所有していましたが、貧しかったです。しかし、土地を耕作できるなら、貧しいということはそれほど大きな意味を持つ必要はありません。

私の祖母は地元の学校の事務員として働いており、父は製造業で良い福利厚生を受けていました。外食するのは特別なときだけで、マクドナルドは誕生日にしか行かなかったのです。彼らは 1 エーカーの菜園と数頭の牛を飼っていて、毎年夏の終わりには果物や野菜を缶詰にし、作業場の古いチェスト型冷凍庫で刻んだオクラ、ブルーベリー、野生のイノシシの肉、鹿肉を冷凍していました。

Despite never having been on a plane and seldom ever having been outside of Arkansas, they managed to put both my mom and aunt through college and graduate school without requiring them to incur even a dime of debt. This was the 1990s.

Then at the age of 57, my papa and 1,000 of his coworkers were thrown away like a piece of trash after giving that company decades of their lives. And what were they told to do? What was their consolation prize?

Learn. To. Code.

My papa and nana were born in the 1950s in a place that was quite literally the Wild West just mere decades before their birth.

Growing up, neither of them had running water—they drew water from a well, washed up in a tin tub heated over a fire, and went to the restroom in an out house. They were both educated in a one-room schoolhouse and both came from families that relied on their farm’s livestock to feed themselves. People like my grandparents built this nation. They built this nation for their children.

But because the thing they sought to build wasn’t a stock portfolio or real estate portfolio, the preservation of their homes and communities was not something that Wall Street nor Washington saw as having enough value to be anything more than apathetic about blowing up.