Reply #6: As someone who grew up near Longview, I think I might be able to provide some insight. [View All]

[stevedeshazer]

I was raised about 20 miles from there in the Oregon Panhandle.

My oldest living relative lives there, and I still visit Longview about twice a week in the course of my job.

Longview was a planned lumber town. It didn't exist until 1921.

Union labor has controlled that town since the beginning. When I was a kid in the sixties, that place was booming. Lumber mills, paper mills, stevedoring, and an aluminum plant.

You could get a good paying union job right out of high school and make enough to support your family, buy a house, raise your kids, the works.

Plus, Longview is an hour from the beach and an hour from the mountains and right on the confluence of three rivers with great fishing.

Since the late seventies, Longview has deteriorated enormously. The aluminum plant and others have since closed. Kids there now can't wait to leave. There is no hope, and no future for them. Meth and alcohol and despair now rule.

These longshoremen are their dads and grandpas. They are pissed, because this new grain terminal was expected to put a little bit of life into town. Instead, they got jerked around.

I'm their age, and though I'm not a longshoreman, I know many of them and their families. They are just regular blue-collar workers who have finally had just about fucking enough. And I support them. For their union jobs are all that is left from turning southwest Washington and northwest Oregon into the new rust belt.