Do you ever get a sad pang of nostalgia about the place you came from? Do you look back at a town, and get sad about the potential it once had, and despair the decline it met instead?
@cidney I’m sorry, I can’t even imagine what that’s like.
I hope that you are safe and happy where you are now. 🙂 But, I can understand that looking at what DeSantis and his cronies did to Florida is deeply painful.
I feel that way about Peoria, Illinois, and the surrounding area. It was once prosperous. As a kid, it was on the up-and-up.
But, that city has long been a symbol of its own problems: an abandoned downtown, companies that mostly offer dead-end careers, and a frustrated, depressed population that would rather live anywhere else.
After Caterpillar moved their headquarters, there’s been a black hole in the economy there. Cat used to employ thousands of people in the area - blue collar, white collar, you name it. It propped up everything around it - small businesses, restaurants, bars, and music venues.
That place just feels like it’s barely holding on now. It would take a lot of work to improve anything, from starting businesses to making transit more accessible to getting rid of food deserts. Everything depended on one company for like 80 years, and the layout and flow of things required workers to live in small towns half an hour away.
The Midwest in general just feels kind of fucked nowadays.
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