A Debilitating State
What makes life in Ohio so bleak?
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Ohio is a state that I used to take pride in. So much so that I’ve had its unique outline tattooed on my ribcage for almost half my life. “Come to Ohio!” I used to say. “You can live any kind of life from metropolitan to out in the sticks in a shanty without running water or electricity. Go Bucks and Michigan sucks!”
The troubles started when I developed the mental illness known as following state politics. I was previously under the illusion Ohio was a swing state considering we had voted for America’s first gay Muslim black president not once, but twice!
The hope that I felt has since been stripped away much like Democratic chances in a statewide election. Sure, Sherrod Brown was able to defeat Jim Renacci’s half-assed campaign in 2018, but his eroding support among white working class voters is a canary in the coal mine for his chances in 2024.
I’m not under an illusion a communist revolution is coming anytime in my lifetime, so I’m resigned to living in Ohio for at least two more years. The sad thing is I could tolerate living here a lot longer if we had basic 21st century amenities like:
High-speed (or even normal-speed rail!) connecting Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus.
Legalized marijuana.
Legalized sports betting.
Scrapping our puritan liquor control laws like a normal state instead of shunting all the proceeds into an unaccountable patronage slush fund at the governor’s discretion.
I don’t feel like I’m asking for the moon. Just enough to numb my brain from the rest of their psychotic agenda. Yet, I feel the response from most state legislators would be, “Eat shit and die you socialist pig.”
Let’s say, magically, Dayton mayor Nan Whaley clips Mike DeWine or Jim Renacci in the 2022 gubernatorial election. She would be able to do fuck all for this state because the Republicans would still control super majorities in the Statehouse and a majority on the Supreme Court.
The Ohio GOP apparently doesn’t even think that’s a possibility. They’re so satisfied with their position they’re not even bother to follow the lead of their colleagues in Georgia by stripping voting rights from minority communities or criminalizing the distribution of food or water to voters waiting in line.
They refused to obey the shutdown last March. They refused to social distance. They refused to wear masks. Now they’re refusing to get the coronavirus vaccine despite 500,000 of their countrymen being dead from government ineptitude.
They don’t believe in public education. They openly peddle anti-vax nonsense. They think a woman who gets an abortion should have to make funeral arrangements for a cluster of cells but any nutcase off the street should be able to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.
It’s 2021 and they’ll still let landlords deny gay people housing or let bosses fire employees due to their sexual orientation. They refuse to curtail farmers from dumping toxic chemicals into our lakes and rivers that create algae blooms but stopped Cleveland from banning plastic bags to curtail Lake Erie pollution.
They’re trying to criminalize protesting while allowing the RICO-indicted Larry Householder draw a state salary and benefits package. They allowed charter schools to profiteer on our children’s public education and didn’t send a single person to prison when the largest charter school in the state stole $200 million in public money and kicked tens of thousands of students to the curb in the middle of the year when their scam finally caught up with them.
They’ll spend $50 million on a coastal advertising blitz aimed at business owners who could be enticed by our nonexistent corporate tax rate then pretend they don’t know why young people flee this state en masse.
Truthfully, they have no problem with Ohio’s demographic trends. They have no problem with our brightest liberal minds fleeing for bluer pastures because they watched in horror when former conservative bastions like Arizona and Georgia flipped the presidential election to Joe Biden.
The last thing they want is young people moving here, flipping the state government like in Virginia, and then suddenly feeling like an alien among their own people — the existence they have forced on everybody who didn’t vote for them in the last 20 years.
They’re bereft of any policy idea that would help regular people. Yesterday, Arkansas became the first disgusting and stupid “pro-life” state to restrict transgender children from receiving healthcare.
I have no doubt some homophobic luminary like Rep. Jena Powell or Senator Andrew Brenner will be introducing similar legislation in the near future to further propagate their culture war bullshit, which is all any of our Republican overlords have at this point.
Why would anybody in their right mind move here if they weren’t some hobgoblin business executive looking to exploit our tax code in their favor? A cheap cost of living only goes so far when you live in a state that actively works to make life harder for working-class people at every possible turn. Working people have no representation at the local or state level. Even our big cities are run by corrupt Democratic machines that are propped up by real estate interests.
The FBI has arrested city council members in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, and Dayton in the last two years. God willing the feds will visit Columbus in the near future because they won’t have to look hard to find blatant corruption operating in broad daylight.
Ohio is a psychotic place, and it’s not hard to see why so many of our residents suffer from drug and alcohol addiction, which of course our Republican overlords only pretend to care about when they’re using suicide and overdose statistics as a prop while arguing in bad faith against pandemic restrictions placed on businesses that none of them follow anyway.
John Cranley, Cincinnati’s corrupt mayor who is laughably running for governor in 2022, tweeted this last week:
He has over 14,000 followers and received a paltry 17 retweets — a majority of them mocking him for this dumb-ass tweet.
The truth is, I don’t see better days for Ohio. Go to any city like Marion, Chillicothe, Zanesville, or Troy and you will see historic, industrial remnants of when this state was truly great, back when we made things and had jobs that put money in people’s pockets.
Those days are gone, and the only people who seem to think they’re coming back are gasbag politicians who want to sell us a false notion of nostalgia because they see us as simpletons who can be easily bought. And a lot of times it’s a smart gamble.
For a long time I thought I would die in Ohio and be buried in the same graveyard as Warren Gamaliel Harding, our 29th and greatest president. I now realize that will only happen if something has gone drastically wrong in my life.
I’m not sure where I’ll draw my breath, but Republicans will delight in knowing that it will be far, far away from their cursed vision of American life.
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