An email from Bill in California:

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Your mention of Gary, Indiana reminded me of a childhood ride home from a trip to Michigan. We approached the Chicago area via the Chicago Skyway, which runs through the Gary and Calumet City (IL) area, and the smoke from the still-running steel mills completely obscured the highway for several miles; it was a new experience for me. Some years later I found myself on a flight coming into Chicago from the east, and by then the area had already died--it looked like a moonscape, just like some of those grisly photos of industrial sites in mainland China.

I also know of that “biggest steel mill” you mentioned near Pittsburgh. It is just down the Ohio River in Aliquippa, which is in Beaver County PA. I lived and worked at the Beaver Valley Nuclear Plant for 3-1/2 or 4 years between 1998 and 2003 (two stints), and heard all about the mills from the people I worked with who had been lifelong residents of the county. When I was there, the front window of the McDonald’s in Baden had a fine view across the Ohio River, but one of the locals told me that when he was growing up, the smoke was so thick that you could never see across the river. But nevertheless, most of the residents wish they had the smoke (and the jobs) back. Now you can travel downriver all the way into West Virginia, and most of what you see is one empty mill after another. The power plant where I worked had some of the only good jobs left in that county. But there were probably more body shops and bars than anywhere else I’ve ever been.

On another note, you mentioned being able to walk anywhere, any time, in Belgrade, and observed how different that was from most US cities. My experience in Taipei is identical--I feel safe going anywhere, any time. My (Taiwanese) wife first came to the US in the mid-70s, and one of the first things her new friends explained to her that she thought strange was that you needed to avoid certain neighborhoods because they were unsafe. Despite growing up in a foreign city that was still struggling economically, that was an alien concept to her.

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Not sure what the future holds here in the US at this point. My only daughter lives in Portland OR, and her neighborhood is very close to where a lot of the trouble spots there have been. She says she is friends with two people that got swept up by the plainclothes Feds they had running around up there for a few days. She is a small businesswoman, is completely marinated by the progressive thought in that neighborhood, and seems to accept the bulk of the prattle without challenge. (I must have dropped her on her head once when she was a baby.)

The real chaos hasn’t reached the sleepier parts of the West coast like ours yet, although we did have one of those “block the freeway” BLM “protests” down in San Luis Obispo a couple of weeks ago. Nothing busted up or burned, and no one beat up or shot as far as I know, but Highway 101 is the main north-south thoroughfare through this county, so it inconvenienced a few people. Emigration is again a topic of discussion in my living room.





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