Thomas Wilberding's List: Meth

• There, the people who grow our food are argribusiness oligarchs, and the  people who run our factories have cut their workers’ wages by two-thirds,  dissolved the unions and shipped in illegals to work for a paycheck that would  barely pay for dog food.

   

  Meth is a symptom of this collapse, not a cause. And though its presence in  small towns can be cancerous, it never took over rural America. The latest  national surveys suggest that there are about 1.3 million regular users of meth  — hardly an epidemic in a country where 35 million people said they had used an  illegal drug or abused a prescription one.

• Still, meth is different in at least one respect. Reding says it is “the only  example of a widely consumed illegal narcotic that might be called vocational,  as opposed to recreational.” It was given to starving Nazi soldiers to keep them  in warrior mode on the Russian front. Now it’s a preferred stimulant for people  working two jobs in low-wage purgatory.

   

  “Rural America remains the cradle of our national creation myth,” Reding  concludes. “But it has become something else, too — something more sinister and  difficult to define.”

• Oelwein, like so many small towns trying to shape its destiny in an America  that may have passed it by, has spruced up its Main Street, modernized its  infrastructure and constructed a spec building ready for any employer who wants  to move in. Alas, it’s the same story in thousands of Oelweins: if you build it,  they won’t come.

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