gilda_elise

The town of Urbana, Ohio was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the 70’s and 80’s, certainly not for her family. Her dad was an alcoholic who only fitfully worked, and people called him the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy enough economy, and there were middle class kids at school whose families became her role models. People in Urbana were proud of their schools, and the library, and the history of their town, an important stop on the Underground Railroad. Macy loved Urbana, and though she was able to make it to college on a Pell Grant and then follow a career in journalism that took her far away, she still clung gratefully to the hometown that helped raise her. On the surface it was still picture-postcard cute.

But as Macy’s mother’s health began its final descent in 2020, on more frequent visits home to Ohio, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened in ways she couldn’t process. Beth grew up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was like civic glue, mirroring the community back to itself. Now there was no local paper, no paper girl, and precious little civic glue. Yes, a lot of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, along with all that went with it. But that was an old story that didn’t begin to cover the forces turning her town into a poorer and angrier place. High school graduation rates were plummeting as absenteeism soared in the public schools and in the workplace. A mental health crisis gripped the small city, along with a litany of other pathologies. Urbana’s pride in its institutions was parents were opting to home school, or transferring their kids elsewhere, in record numbers. Even more painfully, many of her own family members and old friends had gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracies like QAnon, and worse. What happened to Urbana?

This was not an assignment Beth Macy ever wanted to take, but she felt she had no choice. Two years ago, she began to return regularly, to deploy everything she’d learned to figure her hometown out. The result is an astonishment, a book that takes us into the heart of one specific place and through it brings into focus in a new way our most urgent set of national issues.

I was hoping that there was more to this book than the pity-party that’s J.D. Vance’s book. I was not disappointed. Rather than focusing only the people who didn’t make it out, Macy also covers those who did, who managed to fight their way to a better life.

Coming from a western city that has only continued to grow, I’ve often been perplexed by how so many cities and towns in the rest of the country have drowned in poverty and drug abuse. Macy answers many of my questions, showing the best of even those who have a totally different mindset. Still, it was sometimes difficult to read. Many of the people in the town hate immigrants, gays, liberals,. Their anger at these groups, and the thought that something was taken from them and given to these groups, fuels their anger.

I’m not sure if Urbana was survive. It has some great people fighting for it, but it seems to be an uphill battle.