Where have all the fast-food workers gone?

WARNING: This column discusses the horror of child sexual abuse. If you don’t want to read about any of that, I don’t blame you and please don’t! With my blessing, as well as my best wishes personally.

DATELINE: ANYTOWN, RR4, box 32—There are some abysses even I’m afraid to stare-down. Stuff I absolutely don’t want to be writing about. I’ve waited and waited for some major media entity to put together what seems obvious to me and make clickbait out of it. And this is national-level stuff I’m about to plow into, thus the whisper of patriotism in my conscience, urging me over another cliff.

I’ve gone out of my way to not reveal which rural Red state I live in. That’s because I assume that, for the stuff I’m writing about, my state is representative of ‘the rural red state culture’ and to cite it by name would be to unfairly single it out among its equally ghastly brethren.

The town I live in is hundreds of miles away from any city of commensurate size or population. Before the internet, in most of our lifetimes and dating back to literally forever, living hundreds of miles out in the Boonies meant you were a cut-off, cloistered community. The invention of the telephone lessened some of that social isolation, but the geographical distance remained daunting. Over the decades and generations, this isolation created a climate locally of, “What happens in Anytown, stays in Anytown.” And it implies exactly what the Las Vegas Tourist Council ad did in its day.

Due to the factors contributing to the Petri dish in which this particular depravity thrives, it’s impossible and foolish not to extrapolate this paradigm to other isolated communities. In America. In the world. Throughout history. 

I’ve lived in many cities, towns and states of various configurations, and this rural backwater is the first place I’ve ever been where I’ve experienced this phenomenon on such a massive, socially-accepted scale. It’s everybody’s little open secret.

I was on a gig the other day, talking to a born-and-bred Anytownian Grandma who was in the park with her three granddaughters, aged 7 and under. Five minutes hadn’t passed before she was spilling her guts to me about one of the girls’ dads, and what happened to all 3 girls when they were left in his care recently. I felt dizzy and sick, even though I’d been queasy ever since Grandma mentioned ahead of time that she had 3 grandkids under 10, all girls. I knew the odds were stacked against them, living in this state, but oh Lord my God.

As the Grandma sought to comfort me [oh brother, I know] she mentioned as if to soften the blow somehow that the same thing had happened to her, and when she spoke about her own childhood abuse, she shrugged. She glanced at me briefly, sadly, then went on talking about the weather or something. But the guy who hurt her grandkids? She wants that SOB DOA. 

The phrase I’ve been dancing around, trying to avoid, is rape culture. And Anytown is neck-deep in it. None of the adult locals, my peer group, want to have anything to do with talking about it. The men get defensive and play dumb and the women get worried and suddenly look older. But my gig brings me into contact with college-aged locals, townies, and they’re willing to talk about, what to them, are still relatively recent events. The wounds haven’t calloused-up yet.

I had one young woman tell me, “I think I was raped yesterday” in a small voice, mid-conversation. She thinks? Another mentioned, in the course of telling a longer story, “…and I got raped by my [dealer] a couple days ago…” and blew right past it in her narrative. I have scads of such stories.

And it’s never just them, it’s always their sisters, too. Somebody in the family is always at the age mommy’s boyfriend is looking at. And Mommy? Also a childhood abuse victim. She should know better, but Mommy is broken. What she knows better than to do is go the police, the good ole boys in blue. Daddy will be very angry when the police drive them all back home.

Because the police, the born-and-bred ones? Most of them have been there themselves, doing the abusing, and didn’t suffer any consequence at all. Hell, they’re policemen now lol

It would be dirty pool to wreck this poor fella’s life for the same thing. This is part of what “holding onto traditional values” looks like out here. Systemic childhood sexual abuse is one of the traditions they simply don’t want to let go of. 

I’m gonna go take a shower with pumice soap and lye, then come back and unleash my couldn’t-be-more-obvious revelation.

The big reveal, Part One: The reason why minimum wage employers can’t find teens and 20-somethings to fill their open positions? Friends, this generation of Anytown townies (at least) is graduating from high school and going straight into DIY, from-home online porn production. A McDonalds paycheck just can’t compete, even at $15/hour. And the boys? They act and treat their girlfriends like they’re pimps. They don’t need to work either, just hang around with and commoditize and mooch off their girlfriends. A more despicable bunch of young men I’ve never met, the townie boyfriend class.

Why hasn’t anyone with a higher-profile and higher IQ than I puzzled this out yet? All kinds of well-coifed media dolts everywhere are bleating in confusion and wonder about all the mysterious trouble that minimum wage-payers are having with hiring, but no one is asking, “Well, then what are this generation of kids doing for money instead?” Kids still want and/or need money, these days more than ever. How can they afford not to jump at big-city minimum wages for what’s always been reliable, steady fast-food work?

Yup.

And it’s not just the ‘bad’ girls either; the ones with the lurid reputations in high school. The lure of ‘easy’ money plus internet adulation cuts across all class lines. I guarantee, if you’re reading this, you know someone—or more likely, their kid—you’d never suspect in a million years is making big bank selling fantasies online. 

Dang it, this is gonna have to be two columns.

The thing happening culturally, nationally, that (apparently) it falls to me to point out connects directly to this, but it requires more column inches than I have left this week.

I usually try to end on a positive note, or even a suggestion to fix the problem, but all I got right now is two different crises that are feeding off and amplifying each other and nobody else has picked up on it yet.

Putting off finishing this for a week won’t make a damn bit of difference. Hopefully CNN will beat me to the scoop. 

Nothing would make me happier.