Nothing lasts forever

A blow was received by the Southeast Missouri economy earlier this month as Tyson Foods announced it will shutter permanently its poultry processing operations at the cost of nearly 700 jobs.

Any job loss is wrenching and painful.

If you've had a job and lost it, which is something for which this columnist is unfortunately personally familiar, the impact is immediately crushing.

I was reared in a region where massive job cuts were not at all uncommon, having grown up in steel mill country in western Pennsylvania.

A steel fabricating plant near Pittsburgh, where I'd spent two of my college summers in the mid-1970s, has vanished.

The company, Pittsburgh Des Moines Steel, general contractor for St. Louis' Gateway Arch built in the 1960s, was sold to Chicago Bridge & Iron, and the Pittsburgh plant was dismantled.

It's eerie to drive by, as I've done infrequently over the intervening years, and see the hulking remains of what was once a bustling hive of steelmaking.

A three-story office building where my father labored for 35 years, where I painted window woodframes as an inexperienced collegian, is now a large brown spot in the ground.

Wisdom from literature

The fictional town of Buell is set in the very real Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in Philipp Meyer's splendid 2009 novel, "American Rust".

My childhood memories are summoned in the book about a steel town nestled in a valley that saw 150,000 people unceremoniously sacked.

Many of those good-paying jobs went to countries where labor was much cheaper.

The following excerpts resonated with me.

• "Most of the town of Buell could no longer afford basic services, and there was no longer a police force in town."
• "Half of Buell went on welfare, and the other half went back to hunting and gathering. That's an exaggeration but not by much."
• "A place that had recently been well-off, its downtown full of historic stone buildings, are mostly boarded now."
• "On certain blocks, there was still a pretense of keeping trash picked up, but other blocks were abandoned completely."
• "We called Fayette County 'Fayette-nam'."

There was an older machinist in the PDM plant, probably the same age then as I am now, who used to tell temporary workers like me: "Stay in school. Get a degree. Don't follow my example. Get out of here."

Taking him to heart and much to the consternation of my late mother, that's exactly what this writer did.

For almost 35 years, Missouri has been home, and I've never gotten close to mill work since.

Millworkers, I'll tell you truly, are honorable people. Salt of the earth and honest. At least that's been my experience.

Decisionmakers, though, often have to make hard decisions.

Plants close, workers lose jobs, everybody moves on.

Wisdom from Scripture

In what may be a source of momentary solace to production workers who will shortly lose their jobs in our region, the New Testament offers the following.

In a text attributed to St. Paul but which scholars agree was probably written in his name, we are reminded nothing lasts forever.

"We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."