Lessons from the Jeep Wrangler

This year in Toledo, we have awoken to the news that, in all probability, the Jeep Wrangler will no longer be made at our home plant.  Due to fuel efficiency regulations, the Jeep has had to be re-engineered, and the frame will have to be made out of aluminum.  Fiat Chrysler has done their analysis and found that it wouldn’t be cost effective to retrofit the factory with all new equipment necessary to produce the Wrangler.  Apparently, this change won’t affect employment, Jeep won’t be shut down and moved to Mexico, Toledoans will simply continue without the Wrangler.  The unions have asked GM to reconsider, the mayor has petitioned Sergio Marchionne in person to change his mind, and he has said that as long as he is in charge the Wrangler will continue to be made in Toledo.  Of course this isn’t the best news because he has also announced he will be retiring in 2018.  So it seems inevitable that 70 plus years of a proud tradition will come to an end.

On the surface, it isn’t a major affair, but the reactions of the people around here speak to a broader point that I never hear addressed in the media.  I count myself a believer in global warming, and I understand that humanity has caused immeasurable damage to the environment.  I don’t need the science to believe what I see with my own eyes.  We consume and discard with abandon, we build and destroy, and we waste energy and material.  I don’t get my information from some source that other people don’t, I listen to the same media outlets as everybody else, and the only conclusion I can reach is that there is now no place on Earth that we aren’t affecting negatively, and it’s time for a change.  However, there are many skeptics who seem to be actively ignoring the truth of this.  The power elite who are invested in the industries that are doing the most harm have been spreading false accusations and people are swallowing it whole.  They say that science is corrupt.  They say they’ve been misleading people in order to keep money coming in from government grants.  They say the sun is the real cause of global warming, not us.  In my mind, it is a form of self-delusion that is born of something deeper.  The only way to address the problem of delusion is to address the root causes, and I think the Jeep Wrangler story illuminates one of the major problems that is stagnating the debate over global warming.

The Jeep Wrangler has become an icon for Toledo.  Alongside the Mud Hens, Jamie Farr, and Tony Packo’s hot dogs, we speak of the Jeep Wrangler in hushed and reverent tones.  Here is the vehicle that won World War 2… Here is the car that carried people over this country’s mountain trails and wilderness.  Jeep workers go back generations.  Grandfathers welcomed their sons onto the line, then the grandsons joined the Auto Workers Union.  I think nowadays we can’t imagine what it meant for people to have a steady factory job.  Our grandfathers’ generation grew up in a time when they had to hustle for every penny.  A job at Jeep meant a steady paycheck, money that could be saved for a future.  They could get a loan to buy a house, get married and have a family.  It wasn’t just some illusory American Dream, it was a foothold in the world.  They were invested in something other than hard struggle and survival.  They could settle in and raise kids who didn’t have to leave school to work in the fields.  They were contributing to a war effort against an oppressive enemy, and they could lift themselves out of crushing poverty.  Loyalty to the company became an extension of their lives.  The men and women who connected their lives to Jeep, in much the same way the men and women who worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, or the ranches in Oklahoma, or the oil fields in Texas, or the loggers in Wisconsin, played the game by the rules.  They worked hard and earned a happy life.  They bought cars and televisions and watched their country become wealthy and powerful and it proved beyond doubt that our system was a path to peace and freedom for the world.  Our way of life not only worked for us, but it was exportable.  We were that shining city on the hill.

Now, the scientists and the lefties are telling us that it has all been a big mistake.  Our grandfathers and all those preceding generations that we turned into myths and heroes have created a society that is destined to fail.  The hard work, the success, has created a sickness in the world and unless we drastically alter our lifestyle the air will be poisoned, the water will be toxic, and food will be scarce.

Is it really so simple to turn off peoples’ sentiments?  Is it enough to simply say, “the facts are on our side.  If you can’t accept these facts then you are a fool.”  We need to take a step back and reframe the debate.  I have tried my best to understand the world better and the only way I could was to try to see the next person’s perspective.  If the facts that we state over and over don’t convince people of the truth, then we need to at least listen to them to try to get at the heart of the problem.  For the people in Toledo who are angry that the Administration has instituted reforms that are straining industry by making them conform to “Green” regulations, the same advice applies.  Things need to change.  Sacrifices need to be made and I don’t necessarily agree that a manufactured product copied a million times from an original model is the “heart and soul of this town.”  We can be proud of our tradition, proud that we made a great and popular product, and we can still be proud of this town, but we need to take a serious look at how we are walking on this precious ground.

Life in America: a follow up

After reading my last post, it dawned on me that in all my dramatic assertions the bigger point I was trying to make might have gotten obscured.  I'm not wholly satisfied with this post after all because of a lack of clarity.  So I've decided to provide a better and clearer outline of the things I was trying to say.

The point wasn't necessarily to bash on the kid who threw the Big Gulp cup.  Really I was describing a stereotypical young and disillusioned boy from an economically downtrodden part of town.  It might have sounded like I was criticizing the boy and his actions without looking at a bigger picture.  At least the "bigger picture" wasn't very well composed.  I was trying to describe his alienation from society and the actions that stem from that alienation, his sad life and the effects he has on the world around him.  I don't hate this boy, I empathize with him.  My point is that he was born into a situation that is truly impossible and his actions reflect an anger at an enemy he can't see or understand.  His lot in life was cast generations ago by large social forces and it is this that I'm trying to highlight.  We can't pretend to advance as a higher species until we address the issues that create a group of angry young men who only think of meager short term goals.  If we are to be proud of ourselves, if we are to live together on this planet, then we must look at this boy without animosity so that we can solve his problems.  As well, we must get over our own initial response to these young men.  It's easy to curse him then move on with our lives... it's much more difficult to face the situation with a mature attitude and an open mind. 

Hopefully the reader finds this a little more helpful.  Thanks.

Life in America

On a weekday afternoon, at the beginning of the summer, I witnessed a sudden and small violence that crowded my thoughts in the ensuing months.  By small I mean no person was hurt.  No sad creature lost its life from hard deprivation.  It was an action of complete disregard, and I keep dwelling on it as if it was more important than I know. 
I was driving... making my way east on Navarre Avenue in the east side of Toledo.  I was nearing Navarre Park next to the Sun Oil Refinery.  For many who have driven around this area they know it mostly as a bleak and depressed part of town.  Most of the houses were probably built in the Twenties, when plots were narrow and deep, and the houses were all two stories high and five feet apart from each other.  Back then immigrants would move into these houses and form neighborhoods and work towards a life.  But as time moves on so do their children, and those children spread out from the old neighborhoods into areas further out on the highways.  The old neighborhoods became commodities and the houses were converted by the next owners into duplexes for cheap rent.  Poor, lower class families moved in.  Over time these proud old neighborhoods became surrounded and cut off by industry, ugly highways, and lousy strip malls.  It doesn't matter, necessarily, that I'm speaking of an old suburb of Toledo... Everyone in America knows these parts of town.  The differences between the east side and some low down part of Philadelphia or Charlotte is only superficial.  And the boy I'm to speak of... well everybody knows this boy.
The house is probably about twelve feet above the street with a three foot retaining wall and the sidewalk right on the street.  He must have parked in a garage off an alley behind the house and walked around the side to the front.  He was probably either seventeen or eighteen years old, and as I approached (in my Prius, to add a bit of irony), he swung his arm out away from his body and cast out into the street a Big Gulp cup filled with soda from some gas station carry out.  That's it.  This is the act of violence I spoke of.  It was as if he was making a dramatic statement, an impertinent gesture, holding out his arm after the throw as if he were Kobe Bryant posing in the process of draining a game winning three pointer.  He must have felt my presence as well because as I passed the house and the sad thrown cup he turned back to the west and held his chest out as if he were about to be confronted for this pathetic sabatoge, and he was ready for a fight.
I can tell you my first reaction was shock and disgust.  A younger and less civilized Sean Lynott would have pulled his car right into the middle of the road, put it in park, gotten out, picked up the cup, ran up the stairs to his stoop and shoved that cup right in his face, yelling "finish your dinner boy! There are starving people in China!"  The problem is, we all know the futility of confronting a kid like that... We know that we would be talking to a brick wall of obstinance, and nothing would be accomplished.  So we drive on, filled with angst and hating the world.
After the anger subsided, I thought more about that kid and the way he threw the cup.  Always, I question motives, and putting aside my own ego and self righteousness, a whole world of intuition opens up.  Contained within that Big Gulp, besides Dr. Pepper, are all of our civilized ideals.  The slow descending arc of the tossed garbage is a perfect metaphor of the disdain this kid has for all of your petty theories of economics, environmental degradation, and sense of communal living.  The glittering drops of soda are as important as all the great battles of history.  Build your monuments to the past, they are nothing to him.  No learning, no civilized advances, no technological breakthroughs, no art, no atomic bombs, nothing can penetrate this boy.  Everything humanity has built, everything we hold dear, comes tumbling onto the street with an unceremonious... splat.  Try to talk sense to Joey.  Try to explain to him all the ways he is wrong to throw that cup into the street.  All your reasoning, logical though it may be, true and honorable as you are, will be met with three simple words.  I.  Don't.  Care.  Joey from the East Side is one of the true outcasts of this world.  When the equation doesn't balance, he is the Remainder.  We've all seen him before.  We've watched him spend what little money he has on cheap Nike rip-off clothes and gregarious NBA caps.  We watch him walk into a fast food joint with his high tops untied and his shorts down below his waist.  We've seen him get into fights with his dad, get his girlfriend pregnant, fight with her sister, lose jobs, fail at school, and join the army.  He abuses weed and shitty beer, he yells offensive gangster rap lyrics in public, he drives like a maniac and gets lousy tattoos.  We, who are invested in this world, hate this boy, and his response to that is to create mayhem in his life.  He will spend the rest of his shortened life railing against the world.
It's easy to hate Joey.  When faced with such a stubborn mule as this my blood gets up.  I have been fighting against this kind of rude boy my whole life and he is just one of an entire class of rejects.  They trash every part of town they occupy and the rest of us avoid the area like a quarantine.  When I look at his neighborhood, I see a kind of grimy squeezed out essence of all the things that are wrong with the world.  These boys, they are taught from birth to Want.  They are told to look into the store window, to want all the pretty things inside, then left alone to keep wanting without any of the resources necessary to obtain the pretty things, or even to ask why they want the pretty things.  This desire for the world of material objects, coupled with an angry home, or an underserved education, creates an alienated beast.  He feels no ties to the people around him, indeed they are all more or less combatants.  His only goal is to get his.  He immediately looks to satisfy his senses because he feels empty inside.  Communion with other people would help alleviate his loneliness but he avoids it because he's angry.  Eventually he'll lose whatever women he gets in his life, and he'll alternate his time between his job and the bar.  This is a true American.
This is a competitive world we inhabit.  We are a part of a great race... we strive to be better, bigger, and faster than our competitors, and when we win, we are rewarded.  Success is defined by our wealth and power.  Truly, it's power that we're after.  The lust for power has always justified the means of obtaining it, and once it's obtained, the competition is squeezed out of existence so that the empire can remain.  But with all this talk about competition and winners, it's the loser that is forgotten.  For every winner there is a trail of losers left behind.  And what becomes of them?  Do they just disappear?  Are we supposed to exile them?  Should they just be left to starve by the roadside?  They still occupy space.  They still exist... they're still human...
When they talk about the poor, when they talk about welfare recipients, when they speak in broad terms about poverty being generational, the wage gap, Capitalism vs. Socialism, lazy shiftless people, American Exceptionalism... when this great war of words reaches a crescendo, East Side Joey stands facing the sun, chest out, middle finger up, asking the question, "what about me?"