If there’s one question on the minds of my friend group these days—old friends, fellow teachers, new acquaintances, anyone paying attention—it’s this: How can anyone, let alone a third of the population, look at current events in the United States in the past year, and believe that we are on the right track, doing OK, making our people and nation stronger?

I don’t really have to spell it out, although I am mindful of Rachel Bitecofer’s principle: repeated negative messaging works in elections—because voters will  only be mad about what we tell them to be mad about.

So here’s the bottom line: we are in real trouble, as a nation, on dozens of fronts, beginning with the fact that we are being lied to—vicious lies, filthy lies, heedless lies—on the regular. Even teaching the truth about history and science in ordinary classrooms, museums and national parks has been explicitly forbidden, plaques removed, educators silenced.

Teaching has never been easy, but it’s really a miracle that so many fine teachers are still in the classroom and finding some satisfaction in their work there. According to an EdWeek Research Center survey on teacher morale, teachers described their feelings about teaching as a very lukewarm positive—a +13 on a 200-point scale, ranging from -100 to +100.

Last year, teachers were slightly more positive, at +18, but that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the world’s most important and rewarding profession. Interesting nugget: teachers in Arkansas reported the highest morale (+24); Pennsylvania, the lowest (+1). Make of that what you will.

Which is why I loved reading Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy.  Macy, who also wrote Dopesick, a book that helped me understand opioid addiction, travels to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio, once a thriving town with good schools and a solid middle class. She was looking for reasons that people there voted—three-quarters of them—for Trump.

Among her heroes, the people who are still seeking to preserve what’s good and healthy in a failing Midwestern town, are teachers. The teachers she interviews, and whose work with and dedication to Urbana’s public school students is fierce and clear-eyed, are one of the last walls between kids making headway in life, and disaster. 

Macy also remembers the teachers who helped her get away from a working-class background with the help of Pell grants, talent and a lot of luck. Her siblings were not so lucky—one of the most painful parts of her narrative are conversations with her brother and sisters, and her niece who suffered from a stepparent’s abuse.

It is through these conversations and seeing how despair and the empty promises of preachers and politicians impact the down and out, that I began to understand who votes for powerful liars, and why.

It also helps explain why Americans hate each other:
The Pew Research Center finds that 53% of American adults describe the morality and ethics of our fellow citizens as “bad” (ranging from “somewhat bad” to “very bad”). In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States is Canada, where 92% say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7% say they’re bad.

Macy does a superb job of weaving anecdotes and memoir about growing up in a town that feels very familiar to me, also a Midwestern girl. She analyzes just what went wrong, much of it having to do with international trade, the dangerous equity gap, decades of negative political messaging about welfare queens. The demise of empathy, and the rise of right-wing pole-barn churches with fundamentalist men at the pulpit. Greed. Racism. Sexism.

Although the book won a number of awards (and was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books in 2025), I found the comments from readers enlightening. Either people loved it, finding that it deepened their understanding of just what is happening in the forgotten little towns across the country—or they hated it, believing Macy is encouraging people to talk to the enemy.

Which is a strategy that has not worked, commenters say. Unless we fight back—the “pound the negative message” model—we keep losing ground. Forget people in your past, your family. They’re the ones who voted him in. The enemy.

Who’s right?

I looked for a photo of Beth Macy and discovered she’s running for Congress in a ruby-red district in Virginia. It’s apparent to me (if not to her readers) that she’s willing to fight hard against the damage to our democracy.

She’s also right about teachers—especially those with the courage to stand up for truth, for the kids they serve, no matter their prospects. Donation sent.

Here in northern Michigan, an elderly gentleman who’s spent his life working for progressive causes was so upset about seeing Barack and Michelle Obama portrayed as apes that he called his neighbor, offering to fund signs to place around our small county, saying HATE HAS NO HOME HERE. She honored his request, designing and ordering signs.

During this process, the gentleman died. The signs will be ready next week, and planting one at the end of my driveway will be both advocacy and memorial. What I’d really like to see is a couple of those signs posted around our local school. Because that’s one of the few places where hate speech and hate actions are actively discouraged and prohibited.

Read Paper Girl.  If you’re like me, you’ll love it.