I was born in the 1940s, and grew up (in Little Rock Arkansas) during the post WWII years when there was massive growth of American industry, all essentially targeted at providing all the goods and services we wanted, along with major technological advances (for that time). The automobile and general manufacturing industry, the textile industry, the tobacco industry (as unhealthy as that is/was), the transportation industry, and the construction industry. Companies were American owned, and most employees were themselves American by birth. Communities grew based on specific industries—such as the textile and furniture industries in Virginia and North Carolina. People were born, educated and then employed essentially for an entire career by local companies. Today, all this has changed, and you can see the results almost everywhere you go.
City centers, once vibrant and healthy economically, have declined drastically. In many smaller towns and cities across America, empty store windows and "closed" signs are the norm. People no longer live or shop uptown like they once did. Strip malls, fast–food places, car dealers, payday loan companies, and Dollar General stores and Wal–Marts clutter areas surrounding the older urban centers. And most important, because of a lack of jobs locally, many young people move away after they finish high school or college, never to return. What were once "family" communities are now more transient in nature.
I see this all the time in the region where we live and it makes me very sad. American cities and small towns had so much before, and seemingly so little today. But, is that really the case—so little I mean. Even with the decline of American industry along with city and town centers, many communities and businesses have found ways to re–invent themselves. What once were empty warehouses have become renovated apartments. People have figured out that diversification is much better than specialization. And, "being small" is not necessarily a bad thing from a business standpoint.
So, even though America is hardly the America I remember from my youth, it is "America". We should keep that in mind when we start to wring our hands about how "bad" things supposedly are today.
