Listening on Cleveland's west side

Getting an ear full.

Yesterday I visited Cleveland's West Side Market.  Foodies, if you are ever in Cleveland, pay it a visit.  I didn't go just for the food, but for the opinions as well.

Cleveland is divided culturally, ethnically and sometimes racially into the east and west sides by the Cuyahoga River.  It is hard to understand what that means unless you have spent some time here.  I am from the east side, and am proud of its diversity, its museums, its symphony orchestra - its culture.  

If a west sider doesn't know that you are from Cleveland, they may tell you to avoid the east side, where you are likely to be robbed or murdered by a "diverse type" person.  (Times have changed, and that may not be accurate anymore.)  From my grossly prejudiced statement, you can probably guess that I think  Cleveland's east side is liberal, and the west side is conservative.

I went to the west side, hoping to talk to some people who might feel differently about politics than I do, and listen to them.  I spent a lot of time listening to this fellow, while I was eating ice cream and congratulating myself on how many people I had listened to already (more on that later.)

I was eating my ice cream (chocolate peanut butter cup), and he sat down near me with a double scoop of ice cream on a cone.  He started talking immediately, so I figured that he was probably game to tell me what he thought about the direction of the country.

He told me that he was a 57 year old father of five daughters; he has several grandchildren.  He got an associate's degree in mechanical engineering, and had a good drafting job using AutoCad until the early 1980's.  That's when his job, and others like his, were outsourced to India.  Since then, he has been doing construction work all over the country.  He had even worked in Lowell, MA.

He said that it is a lie that manufacturing jobs are coming back.  Despite that firm opinion, he believes that Trump will help the country.  Trump does not "need the money", and will "shake up Washington".

He believes that Hillary should be in jail,  and that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. want to keep the status quo because they benefit from it.  He does believe that we should build a wall, although he has no problem with immigrants, just as long as they come here legally.

Trump says what is on his mind, and he is being unfairly bashed by the media.  Trump really wants to help people like him, the little guy - and will even bring back manufacturing, even though he told me that that was not going to happen.

Whoever is president needs to do a few things to help bring back the middle class, the man told me.  They need to lower the price of gas, utilities, and food.  Although he gave no suggestions on how to accomplish these goals, I can sympathize with him.

The man, whose name I never got, was tickled when I asked if I could draw him.  I didn't agree with a lot of what he told me, but he didn't need to know that.  As he left, he told me that I was the most interesting person he had met in a long time!

Before I sat down with my ice cream, I met a disabled woman selling the Cleveland Street Chronicle, a newspaper written by the homeless.  I bought a copy (I recommend everybody buy one at some point; the articles are eye opening.)  This woman HATES Donald Trump.  He is trying to take money away from the poor - from her.  She relies on Social Security to survive.

Because she was trying to sell papers, I thanked her for her time and moved on.  I approached a woman and her daughter - clearly from the suburbs (as it turns out, they are from Stark County - home of the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.)  I asked her if she could answer a question for my blog, and she said "sure".  "Do you think the country is headed in the right direction?"

Simple question, right?  She said she did not know.  She did not have enough information.  I pressed a bit, she still professed a complete lack of an opinion.  I then asked her daughter, who looked to be at least sixteen.  "Oh, she doesn't know anything, she's in high school."  I kept my horror at that response to myself, thanked them for their time, and moved on.

I then approached two men, wearing identical polo shirts bearing a distillery logo, what they thought about the direction of the country.  One of the men volunteered that the country was definitely headed in the wrong direction; in fact, it was spiraling downward.  Before I could ask "why", he said that Trump didn't know what he was doing.  He didn't have much hope for any politicians in Washington solving the problem - he compared the Democrats and Republicans to two bad football teams battling it out - specifically, the Browns and the Bengals.

The more reserved man said that he doesn't like Obamacare because his premiums keep going up and up.  He did not have much hope for the recently passed Republican version, either.  It turns out that these men owned the distillery whose logo was on their shirts.

I got more opinions than I bargained for, and I was surprised by some of the response .  That shows me that you really have to ask people what they think, and listen to their responses.  You cannot assume anything.