by Muskegon Critic
It happened about a half century after lumber barons and business interests clear cut almost the whole state of Michigan. The lumber companies, they sent the logs on down the Muskegon river, which stretches up into the northeast of Michigan all the way to the West Coast of the state where the massive old growth trees were turned into lumber and sent around the world or the Grand Rapids for furniture. Muskegon was full of millionaires back then, booming, booming, booming right up until the trees in the whole state very literally ran out from the mad lumber dash. And then the monied interests pocketed their money and left, leaving the city to fall apart. That was back in the mid 1880s through the early 1900s.
And more or less 50 years later my grandmother, at the age of 16 was found driving her father's body across the state. All by herself. A young girl. He had been working in a factory building airplane parts, got hit on the head on the job and died outside the factory, somehow.
Having died outside the factory, the company refused to pay a cent in compensation to the family, or to the funeral, or to travel expenses.
Just another dead worker in the early 1940s.
<...>
In the 1940s the city of Muskegon was in manufacturing overdrive, making tank parts, plain parts, engine blocks, making the tools of war to beat back Nazis who were murdering people by the tens of millions. The sky in Muskegon was black with coal smoke and iron. From the foundries, even into the 1960's if you went to downtown Muskegon in a white shirt, you'd go home in a reddish-brown shirt, before the Cuyahoga River caught on fire and before my father was shipped off to Vietnam shortly after marrying his wife, and shortly after watching his candidate of choice Robert Kennedy killed.
Is America falling apart,
now?
Are corporate entities now taking over,
now?
<...>
Think of the image of a 16 year old girl driving her dead father three hours across the state because a factory wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't put out a dime in reparations, fifty years after companies cut down nearly EVERY single tree in the State.
Progressivism has come a long way. America has come a long way. We have a lot more work to do. But we're not falling apart. Same fight, different day.
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