'Someplace Like America'

By Bruce Springsteen
The Washington Post via reader supported news
December 20, 2011

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/8998-someplace-like-america

 A new book gave Bruce Springsteen the chance to write his
thoughts about three decades of tough times in our nation.
The following are excepts of his foreword to "Someplace Like
America," by Washington Post photographer Michael Williamson
and writer Dale Maharidge, both Pulitzer Prize winners.

Someplace Like America: Tales From the New Great Depression,"
the latest collaboration from Columbia journalism professor
Dale Maharidge and Post photographer Michael S. Williamson,
tells the story of American industry and its workers - a
story the two began to document more than 30 years ago and
published in the mid-'80s in "Journey to Nowhere." That work
inspired Bruce Springsteen to compose the lyrics to
"Youngstown" and "The New Timer."

The Boss agreed to write the introduction to "Someplace Like
America." His words are adapted for publication here, along
with some of Williamson's pictures.

had completed most of the "Tom Joad" record when one night,
some 15 years ago, unable to sleep, I pulled a book down off
my living room shelf. I read it in one sitting, and I lay
awake that night disturbed by its power and frightened by its
implications. In the next week, I wrote "Youngstown" and "The
New Timer."

That book - "Journey to Nowhere," by Dale Maharidge and
Michael S. Williamson - put real lives, names and faces on
statistics we'd all been hearing about throughout the '80s.
People who all their lives had played by the rules, done the
right thing and had come up empty, men and women whose work
and sacrifice had built this country, who'd given their sons
to its wars and then whose lives were marginalized or
discarded. I lay awake that night thinking: What if the craft
I'd learned was suddenly deemed obsolete, no longer needed?
What would I do to take care of my family? What wouldn't I
do?

Without getting on a soapbox, these are the questions
Maharidge and Williamson posed with their words and pictures.
Men and women struggling to take care of their own in the
most impossible conditions and still moving on, surviving.

As we tuck our children into bed at night, this is an America
many of us fail to see, but it is a part of the country we
live in, an increasing part. I believe a place and a people
are judged not just by their accomplishments, but also by
their compassion and sense of justice. In the future, that's
the frontier where we will all be tested.

How well we do will be the America we leave behind for our
children and grandchildren.

Now, their new book, "Someplace Like America," takes the
measure of the tidal wave 30 years and more in coming, a wave
that "Journey" first saw rolling, dark and angry, on the
horizon line. It is the story of the deconstruction of the
American dream, piece by piece, literally steel beam by steel
beam, broken up and shipped out south, east and points
unknown, told in the voices of those who’ve lived it. Here is
the cost, in blood, treasure and spirit, that the post-
industrialization of the United States has levied on its most
loyal and forgotten citizens, the men and women who built the
buildings we live in, laid the highways we drive on, made
things and asked for nothing in return but a good day's work
and a decent living.

It tells of the political failure of our representatives to
stem this tide (when not outright abetting it), of their
failure to steer our economy in a direction that might serve
the majority of hard-working American citizens and of their
allowing of an entire social system to be hijacked into the
service of the elite. The stories allow you to feel the
pounding destruction of purpose, identity and meaning in
American life, sucked out by a plutocracy determined to eke
out its last drops of tribute, no matter what the human cost.
And yet it is not a story of defeat. It also details the
family ties, inner strength, faith and too-tough-to-die
resilience that carry our people forward when all is aligned
against them.

When you read about workers today, they are discussed mainly
in terms of statistics (the unemployed), trade (the need to
eliminate and offshore their jobs in the name of increased
profit) and unions (usually depicted as a purely negative
drag on the economy). In reality, the lives of American
workers, as well as those of the unemployed and the homeless,
make up a critically important cornerstone of our country's
story, past and present, and in that story, there is great
honor.

Maharidge and Williamson have made the telling of that story
their life's work. They present these men, women and children
in their full humanity. They give voice to their humor,
frustration, rage, perseverance and love. They invite us into
these stories to understand and allow us to experience the
hard times and the commonality of experience that can still
be found just beneath the surface of the modern news
environment. In giving us back that feeling of universal
connectedness, they create room for some optimism that we may
still find our way back to higher ground as a country and as
a people. As the folks whose voices sing off the book’s pages
will tell you, it's the only way forward.

___________________________________________

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