The White Working Class Will Still Suffer, Trump or Not

Matt Purple

Society, Americas

The GOP nominee is a howl of rage on behalf of a desperate people.

As a child, I spent my share of time in my father’s hometown, the northwestern Massachusetts hamlet of Greenfield. A patchwork of rolling pastures with a main street that seems sprung from those light-up Christmas figurines, Greenfield is dozens of miles removed from the Boston hubbub and, it seemed as a kid, outside the jurisdiction of civilization itself. It still calls to mind the creak of my grandfather’s rocking chair, glimpses of the dairy farmer across the road, checks of my watch after an hour had seemingly transpired only to find it had been fifteen minutes. Serenity reigned there; a white church steeple peeked over the treetops.

Today, Greenfield is one of the epicenters of the heroin epidemic that originated in . . . is it New England? Baltimore? Appalachia? No one knows for sure, but it metastasized outwards from all those places until it reached the capacity of national crisis. One of its main smuggling routes is I-91, known as the “Heroin Highway,” which runs right through Greenfield. The town’s dope addiction has gotten so bad that travel journalist Anthony Bourdain recently profiled it on his CNN show Parts Unknown. Asked by Bourdain who these heroin buyers are, one anonymous former dealer sighed, “Practically all of Greenfield.” “There’s going to be more robberies,” she warned. “There’s going to be more killings.”