I found the ‘Left Behind America’ episode on Dayton to be deeply disconcerting.
I’ll be entirely honest: when ‘Left Behind America’: Forgotten in the Post-recession Rust Belt came on late at night at what should have been way past my bedtime, I was inclined to give it the miss. However, I was quickly drawn in by what I thought were staged drone shots of the beautifully wide but entirely empty streets of present day Dayton, Ohio. Then came the black & white, Mid-Century film from the days when Dayton was bustling — the ‘Silicon Valley of its day’. I’m a sucker for this kind of history and before you know it I was watching the entire film without entirely knowing the underlying reason why.
I should have followed my first instinct and gone to bed.
Not because it wasn’t a beautifully crafted piece by Alec MacGillis of ProPublica. In fact, it was likely the opposite — the story was so gripping I simply couldn’t turn away. At the heart of my dysphoria were images that left me to wonder if a similar fate awaits my own home town. The open-ended question to which I have yet to find an answer is whether those optimistic, busy faces in the 1950s footage had any inkling of what lay in store for them just not that far in their future?
I had an obtuse stab at this subject in my 2016 essay The Collapse of the Cornish Tin Mines. In it, I wrote about the almost instantaneous collapse of the tin mining industry in Cornwall, England after nearly 4000 years of continuous operation. Although I suspect it was a little too obtuse for many, I was trying to work out my own deeply-seated fears that we may be approaching a predicament here in Calgary, the Canadian Prairie city which is the heart of the domestic oil & gas industry. Triggered by a precipitous, worldwide decline in oil prices in 2015 — coupled with abysmally poor planning of transportation infrastructure — the Canadian oil & gas industry is in a life and death struggle. However, we have no problem that if we work feverishly starting right now we won’t have solved in ten years time. In other words, this is all going to get worse before it gets better.
Calgary continues to battle 30% vacancy rates in the downtown core which have triggered a precipitous decline in tax revenue. Things are already beginning to look a little rough around the edges. City cheerleaders talk about new and exciting opportunities to diversify our economy and have it become stronger as a result. Like those industrious Dayton factory workers of the 1950s and those honourable Cornish tin miners, I really want to believe them.
I’m distracted, though, by the possibility that this may be just the leading edge of a storm we are trying to wish away, and which has a duration and ferocity we do not yet fully comprehend.
©2018 Terence C. Gannon
