The Backlash by Will Bunch

Author:Will Bunch
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

THE FIRST THING that you learn about Homer, Georgia, is not to go there hungry at dinner time. The county seat of Banks County, population 950, was—for many years, anyway—home to the world’s largest Easter Egg hunt, but it’s difficult now to find a place to get so much as an egg-salad sandwich. The Tiny Town Restaurant with its twin Coca-Cola signs and its faded white coat of paint is shuttered tight at 5:30 p.m., the gravel parking lot empty, its rusted sign—“Open 2 Chicken”—looking out on both an auto-salvage graveyard and the town cemetery for humans. A Sherman tank proudly guards the American Legion post on the bend in Highway 51, but several run-down strip malls are comprised mostly of vacant shells interspersed with a doctor’s office or a “Sleep Center.” Junk foodstuffs are available at the busy Golden Pantry gas station—“Always Convenient Always”—where a group of about twenty hawks is circling ominously overhead.

You pick up the local newspapers inside the Golden Pantry and it confirms what you are seeing with your own eyes: that Banks County is roughly the epicenter of a region that is faring the Great Recession even worse than most. The Athens Banner-Herald—Representative Paul Broun’s hometown paper, printed about twenty miles south of Homer—is reporting on this day that Metro Athens lost two thousand more jobs in the last three months of 2009, a time in which the government claimed the economy was recovering. In fact, in Athens, government was the only sector that added jobs in late 2009. Below that is a feature about a “job fair” for schoolteachers at the University of Georgia at which teachers who showed up were told there were virtually no jobs. The banner headline the next day would be that a copper wire manufacturer in Watkinsville, Georgia, was cutting its workforce in half because of the slump in construction, and the day after that was a report that the university itself—the largest employer in Broun’s Tenth Congressional District—was “facing ‘extreme’ cuts” because the state of Georgia was virtually broke. In late 2007, the largest private employer near Homer, a massive garden store and warehouse called The Pottery, abruptly closed because of changing consumer habits, a reflection of working-class jobs that did not come back.

“It’s terrifying at some points to see all the people coming in for benefits,” says Debbie Paulk of the Georgia Department of Family and Children’s Services, which deals with unemployed people from Banks County as well as surrounding areas. She adds that requests for food stamps and temporary public assistance have risen by 30 to 50 percent in various Georgia offices over the prior year—in part because the state agency has made it easier to apply online instead of making a potentially embarrassing visit to a welfare office. “It’s not as much of a stigma,” she says. The newly unemployed in northeastern Georgia are much more likely than in the past to have college degrees and to come from better-paying jobs; Paulk says she and her co-workers advise them to take anything they can get.

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