One day soon, Jim Jackson will close the doors on a drug store in the small northwest Georgia town of Summerville that has been in the family for 114 years. Shuttering Jackson Drug Co. wasn’t an easy decision, because Jim was the third in a line of family pharmacists who had weathered panics and depressions. But the state had announced yet another cut in Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement, and since most of his customers are uninsured, cash was going to drain from the business like, well, that once in the coffers of Bear Sterns, only in smaller amounts.

Follow up:

Fortunately, Jim had a buyer, a national chain. He discussed the matter with me, his sister, and his son, Rob, and we gave him our blessing. Neither of us ever had the capacity for sustained concentration while standing in one place for long hours, an absolute necessity for pharmacists.

Jim said the decision to sell was a little less painful after he delivered the eulogy in August for the store’s long time (and long-retired) manager who was 93 and the last employee who remembered the old days. Our father had died in 1981 after spending most of his adult life in the store; some people assumed he and Frank were brothers. Telling stories about the eccentrically fastidious and strictly honest manager had started the grieving process. Once the news got out that he was selling, he shed a few tears every day with a customer or one of his three remaining employees, all of whom knew the time had come.

He’ll work for the chain in a modern, efficiency-designed facility in a mall at the end of town. The hours will be shorter, and there’ll be health insurance and a 401K plan. And, if the economy doesn’t completely collapse, he’ll work harder and earn more money. Eventually, he’ll try to sell the building where our grandfather lived upstairs and brought his bride after taking over the business. That’s not bad for a guy who admits that lately he had played too much computer solitaire to distract him from the worries of going broke.

After years of frustration, he is not only walking away from the store but from his well-earned anger and resentment at the insurance and drug companies, state and federal government, Walmart and the big chains that dominate pharmacy today. “I’ve gotta lay that burden down,” he says.

I’m sure his doctor would agree. Independent pharmacies are not the only small businesses that have suffered since the 1980s. In my mind’s eye I see the town’s broad main street, Commerce, and all the stores that lined it when the drug store was in its heyday in the late fifties and the sixties—a competing drug store, three clothing stores, two hardware stores, a movie theater, a five and dime, a shoe store, two grocery stores, a jeweler, a shoe repair shop, and several gas stations. This was not considered unusual for a town of 5,000. Now, the most prominent buildings are the county courthouse and the post office. You can’t buy groceries or fill your tank there, and the only nail business is cosmetic.

As happened in a number of small towns, the downtown had begun to lose vitality when Walmart dropped in and opened a store north of town some twenty-five years ago. Then the oldest bank built a new facility at the south end. Suddenly, the empty store fronts on Commerce multiplied. The town looks a little better now, because a few people were smart enough to spruce things up. There are restaurants and a florist shop and a gym. Jim won some sort of award for the care he gave the planter in front of his store. He also ripped out the glass and aluminum façade applied in the fifties and restored the Victorian entrance.

But that was cosmetic. Truth be told, Jim’s former customers are the people America has forgotten.

The textile industry that dominated the county’s economy has been moving abroad at a depressing pace. Even when the mills were in full production, workers were socialized to see unions as dangerous and greedy. Hours were erratic and wages low. If workers received health insurance, it was cheap and restrictive. Worse, the mills suppressed the county’s tax base so that schools, even after they were racially integrated, could never be first rate. Some educational leaders blamed the population for limited aspirations, but in fact those aspirations often mirrored the possibilities.

Given low educational standards and poor employment opportunities, many people turned to street drugs. Marijuana became a local crop. Later, methamphetamine became even more popular. It was not uncommon in Jackson Drug to see people with mental problems that could be traced to the illegal drugs they used in sixties and seventies. And there was a high proportion of other common mental health issues. Jim won an award from a local mental health group because he treated patients kindly, handing out calendars and marking them up with patients’ medication schedules.

For a time, his client base was dominated by mental patients and school teachers. The first had Medicaid and the others had an insurance plan that allowed them to fill their prescriptions anywhere. And then they couldn’t. Just outside town is a state park named for a state representative who once chaired the House education committee; he thought teachers were overpaid.

There are whole swaths of rural America like my hometown, and if we want to have a productive economy, we can no longer write them off—or buy them off with cheap imported goods and too many choices for fast foods. We can’t raise “standards” for public education unless we properly fund schools and teachers. The government may no longer have the funds to loan students money for college, but it can insist that banks that do charge low interest rates and not entice the young with credit cards whose interest rates suddenly skyrocket. More of those laid off textile workers could grow the foods we need to restore nutrition to our tables. Yet others could help create a green economy. It’s no accident that the county’s most reliable payroll is a prison, a device used by too many states to prop up rural economies.

Last week, Barack Obama drew some 28,000 people to the city of Asheville, North Carolina. This gave me hope, because Asheville has an even smaller percent of African Americans than Summerville. More noteworthy, on Billy Graham’s home turf, people skipped church to attend this rally.

When Barack Obama spoke at a California fund raiser about people who are bitter about the way they’ve been treated and cling to their guns and their religion for reassurance, I checked that remark against the people I know in my hometown. Certainly there’s lots of hunting and church-going among the working class, but the most bitter people I’ve encountered are not poor. They’re the better off folks who vote Republican. They’re convinced that Democrats would care for the poor and working class at their expense. They fret that Mexican immigrants will pour in if more jobs are created, as they have in nearby counties. They are appalled by the local schools and obsessed about teenage sex and the availability of abortion.

Jackson Drug was destined to fold anyway when my brother retires, but nothing would make me happier than to see Commerce Street revive. Now that gas prices make driving 25 or 50 miles to shop or see a movie extravagant, I’d love to see some new faces in those old storefronts and customers with money to patronize them. They might even revive that old custom of a date at the local movie theater.