From Beth Macy 'In Love But Locked Out'
Before he wrote his viral essay, “Living in the Shadow of the American Dream,” and sent it off to The Daily Yonder and two Shenandoah newspapers for publication, Andrew Tait shared it with Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his congressman, Ben Cline (the Republican No Show who refuses to hold a town hall) and got—you know how this sentence ends—zero response.
In the piece, Tait recounted his life as a small-scale farmer and factory worker in the Shenandoah Valley town of Mt. Jackson. His partner and he are raising two girls, including one still in diapers and one who needs ongoing specialist care and physical therapy.
They would love to get married. But if they did it’s likely his partner would lose the Medicaid that she and the two girls rely on. “My employer offers insurance, sure—but only if I pay nearly as much as our mortgage,” Tait wrote. “I can’t, so we stay as we are; in love but locked out.”
So, they make do as working-class people have been doing forever. They chop their own wood for heat, raise sheep for meat, sell eggs from their chickens, and keep goats for milk. At the food processing plant where Tait, 36, works as a supervisor, lunch is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day. They rely on a cistern for water, but it sometimes runs dry so they’re saving toward having a well drilled.
In the meantime, most evenings are spent tending animals, hauling hay and feed, fixing fences, and filling water buckets. Most days the Taits are up working from “can see to can’t see,” as sharecroppers used to describe it—“can to can’t” for short.
“It’s not like everyone else isn’t also going through this,” he told me, of record inflation and soaring health-care costs. “But we’re being exploited. How are we the wealthiest country in the world, but everyone I know is living on a shoestring?
His friends are so beaten down that they rarely talk about it. Some disassociate from the pain by bingeing Netflix and booze.
When Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill into law, Tait knew his health care coverage would likely worsen. People will be kicked off Medicaid, possibly even his partner and the girls, and will end up seeking treatment at emergency rooms. And rural hospitals like the ones nearest his family are in jeopardy of closing. Once a songwriter and short-story writer, Tait hadn’t written anything in fifteen years.
“Getting older, the world tends to grind you down and shaves the creativity away, but this got me going again,” he said in an interview last week. “The whole thing has me so pissed.” He tries to frame his story less in terms of left vs. right and instead as a reminder that more American families than not are struggling with the same kitchen-table realities, regardless of politics.
The $1 trillion Medicaid funding cuts are going to hit every one of us directly or indirectly, including my musician kid and their partner—both of whom work their share of can-to-can’t shifts and are also on Medicaid. With more people predicted to utilize emergency rooms—where, for now anyway, by law people can’t be turned away—everyone’s premiums are predicted to go up. Affordable Care Act premiums are expected to increase 75 percent early next year, and some 4.2 million additional Americans will join the pool of uninsured, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
These cuts, engineered to make the already wealthy even richer, are heartless, and they’re just the beginning. New Horizons, the federally qualified health care center that serves fully one-tenth of Roanoke’s population with its sliding-scale services—is arming up for the cuts by being nimble, fine-tuning sign-up procedures to make it easier for patients and reassigning staff to shepherd the more onerous workforce requirements mandated by the OBBB.
“Almost every single one of our patients has expressed concern about what’s going to happen,” said Patricia Spangler, who directs the behavioral health team. Particularly worrying are the $1 billion in cuts Trump officials made for mental-health counseling in public schools.
Other local nonprofits whose federal funding has already been chopped include Ryan White funding for the Drop-In Center (there goes HIV/Hepatitis C testing and treatment), Family Service of Roanoke Valley (youth development and counseling), Local Environmental Agriculture Project (USDA funding to support local farmers), Catholic Charities (refugee resettlement funding, as I reported earlier in this space), United Way (community health workers who deliver food and health-care resources to rural homebound people, affecting 1,162 people), and Feeding Southwest Virginia, whose ability to serve area food pantries took a half-million-dollar hit under DOGE’s nonsensical slashes, in a double whammy that hurt area farmers too.
All those cuts, of course, aren’t the half of what’s pouring out of Trump’s fire hose. According to a nonprofit survey conducted by United Way of the Virginia Blue Ridge, our region has already lost (or is at immediate risk of losing) $2.3 million in federal funding, directly reducing or eliminating services for at least 10,034 people. Such cuts are affecting critical supports such as childcare, mental health counseling, healthcare access, workforce development, housing assistance, and food distribution. In our rural service area, some parents can’t get to work because transportation assistance has dried up. Some are choosing between paying for gas or groceries.
“I’m so anxious not just for myself but for all of us in the nonprofit sector,” said United Way of Virginia’s Blue Ridge president Abby Hamilton. “Everything feels out of control. Much like during COVID, we’re not only pivoting—we’re learning to function in entirely new ways.”
I asked why more non-profit leaders weren’t screaming publicly about the cuts—just as builders and factory managers aren’t screaming about losing some of their best employees to ICE deportations (likely because they will out themselves to ICE), and Virginia Tech-Carilion Research Institute refused comment on the gutting of its NIH-funded research projects.
“Nonprofit leaders are all nervous,” Hamilton explained. “They work hard to demonstrate strength and stability, but we also need a safe space to be honest and vulnerable so we can move forward together.”
Retired Carilion psychologist and addiction pioneer Cheri Hartman worries the Medicaid cuts will devastate the ability for men with substance use disorders, who are most likely to die from overdose, to access treatment. “Medicaid passage in Virginia was the number one way we got these young men SUD coverage,” including medications along with new and robust treatment clinic offerings in Roanoke, she said. (Many mothers with SUD were already covered.)
“My fear now is we’ll go back to 2016, when we couldn’t cover men, and they were caught in this despairing cycle of not being able to get well enough to keep their head above water. Then, of course, the drug problem just gets worse and worse, and that spirals into public safety issues. We’ll all be affected by it. It’s a perfect storm of disaster coming down the pike.”
A longtime friend and mentor of mine, Hartman hated that so many leaders were “cowering” rather than actively resisting the changes. She cited the work of the late writer Joanna Macy (no relation, alas), who urged people to transform their despair over the heating planetand rising authoritarianism into compassionate action. “Pain shouldn’t be pathologized; it alerts us to what needs attention,” Macy has said. “The key is in not being afraid of the world’s suffering. If you’re not afraid, then nothing can stop you.”
As Hartman put it: “We have to embrace the joy we still have for the world—by becoming activists, basically. If you let the despair energize you, you can dance with it and turn it into something that achieves the changes we need.”
• • •
This past Monday marked the 27th week in a row that Roanokers have rallied, chanted and sung protest songs outside of Congressman Ben Cline’s Roanoke office. Around 250 people turned out, many to cheer the billboard erected across the street. Paid for by a small group of Roanoke rally goers under the official umbrella of DoGood Virginia, a local nonprofit, the billboard features a picture of Cline and the words: “HIS VOTES. OUR DEFICIT. Favors Billionaires. Fails Constituents. Fiscally Irresponsible.”
“We knew he could see us protesting, and yet why won’t he meet with us? Why won’t he see us?” one of the organizers explained. “He’s even been calling us ‘paid subversive reactionaries,’ ” she added. “But most us here have never protested before in our lives.”
I had nothing to do with the billboard, though I agree wholeheartedly with its sentiment. To me, it’s clear that Cline has decided that remaining a Congressman is more important to him than upholding the oath he took to the Constitution. The Sixth District deserves a leader who responds to and reflects the community, not someone whose only fealty lies with an authoritarian president who operates without any guardrails.
We need a leader who’ll tell the truth and put regular people ahead of billionaires; someone who’ll stand up for farmers, factory workers, and family men like Andrew Tait.
• • •
AND SPEAKING OF EMBRACING JOY. . . .
I couldn’t shake despairing over the loss of Mavis, our wire-haired terrorist rescue mutt who died recently at age 11. But a new friend I met at the rallies also volunteers with local animal shelters, and when he texted me a photo of a new pound puppy about to come up for adoption, I wanted to pounce.
She is eleven pounds of cuteness, a total snuggle-bunny (and wiggle-butt), and though my husband wasn’t sure he was “quite ready yet,” I took it as a sign from above when I woke up the morning after meeting the dog to crazy wiry hair that looked exactly like Pippa’s. We brought her home an hour later and haven’t looked back.
She’s the perfect companion when we find ourselves slumping into the couch and bingeing a TV series to avoid cable news—we’ve been loving BritBox’s Code of Silence and the new prequel to the soapy Outlander series, Blood of My Blood.
Some early praise for Paper Girl, including from the Boston Globe’s Kate Tuttle for putting it on the paper’s fall recommended reading list: “Macy has built a career with tender accounts of gritty places and this new book, a memoir of her own childhood in Urbana, Ohio, promises an honest and painful assessment of the decline of what we once called the American Dream.”
Librarian Toni Cox, reviewing the book for Library Journal, weighed in with: “Well researched and befitting her journalism background, Macy’s memoir is raw but full of resilience and hope for the future.”
If you’d like to pre-order a signed (and discounted!) copy of the book, please do so through Porchlight Books: https://promo.porchlightbooks.com/pages/promotions/papergirlps
Lastly, thanks to my dear friends at Roanoke’s VPS Studios for helping me record the audiobook last week. Steve Hobbs and Karen Maslich-Russell made it a joy as usual; it was our fourth project together. Our Austin-based producer Staci Snell was a gem, too, her sharp ears attuned to slight slurs on words like “regularly” and “rural.”
Dog-lovers Steve and Karen even called ahead for me and let me go early so we could get our first look at Pippa before the pound closed. Talk about great engineers!