Well, if you know how to bring back the “old Pittsburgh”, and without fucking up the environment again, please, we’re all ears.
Jesus. What the fuck is a “hipster” and why are they so terrible?
It seems what you mean by “hipster” is “someone who doesn’t work at a blue collar job”. Except WTF?
You’re conflating a whole bunch of shit. That guy with 27 piercings who works at the indie coffee shop might be a hipster, but he’s making $7.45 an hour. Hipster doesn’t mean “has a high paying technology job”. And lots of technology jobs aren’t that high paying. For every developer or PM making six figures there are 3 grunts doing contract work making half that. Yeah, that’s good money compared to making coffee drinks, but it’s not affluence.
What makes someone working class or not working class? Going to college? If you go to college, you’re hipster scum? Is it how much money you make? Is it making hourly wages instead of a salary? Is it being younger than 30? You can’t be working class if you’re 25? Is it wearing silly hats? If you wear the wrong clothes you’re not working class? Is it just whether your hands get dirty at work?
You’re extremely confused about what you want. You love working class people and hate hipsters and millennials, we got that. But you don’t seem to understand what those things are. My family background is solidly working class. My grandmother grew up on a farm in North Dakota. One grandfather was a mechanic and a carpenter, the other was a lumberjack. My dad worked as a union electrician and my mom worked as a secretary. Nobody in my family had a college degree.
And what about me? I went to college and work at a goddam computer company and tap away at a keyboard all day. So I’m a hipster millennial now? Except I’m fucking 51, so how does that make me a millennial? And how exactly am I a hipster?
My point is that I don’t work at a blue collar job. I don’t get my hands dirty at work. Except I don’t make six figures either. I work in an air-conditioned office and sit at a chair in front of a screen, but that doesn’t make me special. Working at a coffee shop isn’t a blue collar job either, but it’s much lower paid than any real blue collar job, so what does that have to do with anything?
If the kids of the guys who worked in the steel mills go to college and get shitty jobs working in offices tapping on keyboards, are they no longer working class? Or are they still working class, just a different kind of working class.
Plus those working-class parents and grandparents working as farmers, mechanics, carpenters, lumberjacks and so forth want, for the most part, for their children and grandchildren to go to college and do well for themselves. Even if that means the kids move away from home to the cities, where they might live in a hipster enclave.
I get the impression he thinks that there are still former steel workers, waiting for their old jobs to come back. But that’s not the case – even the youngest ones would be in their late fifties.