Jesus Christ, man. I'm from Dayton, Ohio, and this entire conversation could just be about Dayton. The old factory with dangerous shit falling off of it behind our high school (since bought by a rich guy, torn down, and turned into a football stadium and training center), the old abandoned downtown Arcade we used to drink across the street from atop an adjacent parking garage because downtown was deserted at night (reopened as a civic meeting place right when everybody had to stay in their homes for two years), the old GM plant featured in that documentary Obama produced (I was just glad they showed the old fishermen in the beginning being kind to the Chinese dudes)...and this was before fourteen tornadoes blew through town in 2019 and wiped whole areas out, businesses destroyed, trees uprooted, endless sky visible where once there was woods, and a lot of that damage is still there, empty buildings abandoned years before the tornadoes came that weren't leveled just boarded up and left to crumble from there.
But way before Mother Nature intervened, we grew up in fresh ruins, and the psychological damage of that is only now becoming evident in so many of the people I grew up around and those who raised us. It didn't have to be that way, and everybody suffered. Things are better in certain parts of town now, but those improvements were not holistic, and a lot of people (especially older people) are sort of just hanging out wondering what the fuck is going on and when any of this is going to get better, though I think most of them know the answer to that one by now.
Anyway, thank you for this. It really is a thing nobody talks about, not in a way that feels anything like healing.
I love decay. Needs a photo of my body…
Jesus Christ, man. I'm from Dayton, Ohio, and this entire conversation could just be about Dayton. The old factory with dangerous shit falling off of it behind our high school (since bought by a rich guy, torn down, and turned into a football stadium and training center), the old abandoned downtown Arcade we used to drink across the street from atop an adjacent parking garage because downtown was deserted at night (reopened as a civic meeting place right when everybody had to stay in their homes for two years), the old GM plant featured in that documentary Obama produced (I was just glad they showed the old fishermen in the beginning being kind to the Chinese dudes)...and this was before fourteen tornadoes blew through town in 2019 and wiped whole areas out, businesses destroyed, trees uprooted, endless sky visible where once there was woods, and a lot of that damage is still there, empty buildings abandoned years before the tornadoes came that weren't leveled just boarded up and left to crumble from there.
But way before Mother Nature intervened, we grew up in fresh ruins, and the psychological damage of that is only now becoming evident in so many of the people I grew up around and those who raised us. It didn't have to be that way, and everybody suffered. Things are better in certain parts of town now, but those improvements were not holistic, and a lot of people (especially older people) are sort of just hanging out wondering what the fuck is going on and when any of this is going to get better, though I think most of them know the answer to that one by now.
Anyway, thank you for this. It really is a thing nobody talks about, not in a way that feels anything like healing.
Wonderful, but sad, article. Thank you.