Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair

In today's Virginian Pilot, Dick Meyer does a cut-and-paste job on an article printed in the Atlantic about increased mortality among "uneducated" white Americans dying of alcohol and drug abuse.

He ends with this:

Politics makes for an especially depressing subplot of the current mystery. In the last election, Donald Trump preyed on losses experienced by the white working class, offered no honest prescriptions and no realistic course of treatment. Instead, Trump and his party exploited the pain of the white working class — and some better educated, wealthier whites that feel and remember their pain — and channeled into resentment and anger at blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants as well as the “establishment” elite who rig the system.

That is a prescription that ensures no one will get better.

The new word for acknowledging people's issues is "PREYING" if those issues affect the low-skilled white working class and if the one who is paying attention is Donald Trump.

Bill Clinton was hailed by clowns like Meyer when he famously used and re-used the phrase "I feel your pain." But let Trump feel the pain of the people like Meyer despises - white men without a college degree - and it's "preying." And since Donald Trump, a few months into his Presidency has not solved this problem he's "preying."

Let me buy Dick Meyer a hint: the despair of white men without a college degree is caused by joblessness because factories that once employed them have closed and moved their jobs to Mexico and to China. This was done by the Establishment to fatten the bottom lines of corporations and promoted by the Washington Establishment who made trade deals that erased the jobs of millions of American men without a college degree.

So when Donald Trump made speech after speech promising to bring those jobs back he gave hope to the hopeless and reduced their despair. We have, mere months into the Trump administration, seen large corporations like Ford announce major investments in factories in this country.

People like Meyer are sightless because they will not see; they are blinded by their own political biases. Like Meyer and the rest of the press, they are Democrat operatives with bylines.  These are the people who wear elitist, bigoted and racist blinders. Thank God, they are going to be left in the dustpan of history.