I had occasion yesterday to be back in a small town, one that I was very familiar with growing up and a place that holds some not-so-small sentimentality for me.
One of the features of the town was a large quasi-mansion that once served as the go-to meeting place for home-cooked meals. Converted to a restaurant, the old three-story home contained four large dining rooms on the ground floor, a suite of rarely-used bed and breakfast type rooms on the second, and storage on the third. It served breakfast and lunch every day but Saturday and evening meals Thursday - Sunday. The evening meals were buffet style with southern delicacies like squash casserole, sweet potatoes, frog legs, quail, snap peas with jowl, turnip greens, cabbage,... or you could order steaks (perfectly seasoned) and more from the menu.
When i went back yesterday, that place was abandoned. For sale. The porch rockers where I once waited on a table to open or where I rested after a fulfilling meal were still there, so I parked in one, rocked and watched the street for about an hour.
From the porch, you could see into a once-thriving downtown where pharmacies, clothing stores, hardware stores, banks, five-and-dimes, restaurants, jewelry stores, dry cleaners, the theater, and more once stood. Yesterday all I saw was broken glass, crumbling facades, boarded windows, empty shells.
The entire time I sat there, I didn't see a single person. Only one car cruised slowly past. After about 45 minutes, an ancient stray dog came angling out from behind the abandoned grocery store and loped across the street before disappearing into a vine-choked drainage ditch. It was like a zombie apocalypse had happened, or worse.
Got into my truck and out of curiosity, drove to what used to be the economic engines of the community. Auto parts plant? Closed and padlocked. Lumber mills. Closed. Textile mills. Abandoned. Enormous plant that once made lighting fixtures? Empty, doors kicked in, windows broken.
What happened to this town, that about 30 years ago was thriving?
Two words: Bill Clinton. One word: NAFTA.
Those plants and factories had provided employment for multiple generations of families who called that small town home. With the advent of NAFTA, they packed up and went to Mexico, leaving the workers and their children stranded. The kids had to leave.
In retrospect, I can now see it was purposeful. The strength of this country lay in its working class, small town, church-going citizens. To break America, the globalists had to break the small towns. Force families to give up that traditional upbringing where parents could control what their kids were taught, what they saw, who they associated with. Where they could raise their kids in the way they had been raised, applying the social codes and sense of morality they had learned from their own parents.
NAFTA has done its job. Drive through Alabama. Drive through any state. Take note of the hundreds and thousands of small towns that are boarded up and decaying, very little left. These were proud towns, with a strong sense of community. And now, they're dead - or on their last legs.
The decline has accelerated in recent years, but make no mistake. The globalists, the communists, are playing a long game - a game going back a hundred years or more. And they are winning.
NAFTA was the single worst policy ever enacted. When history is re-written a hundred years from now, it should be recognized as the killing blow for the US. More than anything before or after, it shredded the fabric of the American family and destroyed the sense of community that was once America's greatest strength.