Background
I was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. I left for college in Atlanta, and moved back to Charleston shortly after graduating sans-ceremony in the summer of 2020. In my life here, I’ve worked in food & bev, events, landscaping, office furniture, film, TV, digital media, live music, and education. Working in so many local industries has given me a sort of begrudging sibling relationship with my hometown. I appreciate a lot about it, from the food and beaches to the local creative and music scenes. Local minor league and small-market sports teams bolster great turnout and are currently performing exceptionally well in their respective leagues. History has been rather well preserved here, and more museums and preservation efforts are being made to display the city’s whole dark history, not just the romantic Antebellum history tourists get served on a carriage tour. It’s an immaculate place to visit and explore.
What I’ve come to realize, especially after moving back post-college, is that Charleston can be a brutal place to live and work. Roads are in rampant disrepair, and often cannot handle the traffic strain of the multitudes of cookie-cutter suburbs, hotels, and apartments that pop up around them seemingly overnight. Grocery stores close and either turn into firearm megastores, are left virtually abandoned as “For Lease” eternally, or bulldozed. The economy of the whole state, not just Charleston, seemingly only functions via coastal tourism. If you’re not interested in the medical field, becoming an executive chef or a personal injury lawyer, good luck finding adequately compensated, meaningful work here. Don’t even get me started on housing.
Why does any of that matter?
Charleston is a microcosm of the US as a whole - in parts simultaneously beautiful and unrefined. What I’ve noticed lately though, is that the unrefined parts seem to be getting worse and worse. And in beautiful, sunny Charleston, not enough are talking about these problems. The beautiful parts are getting more skewed to the recently arrived and monetarily elite. The unrefined parts are malignant; displacing and destroying families that built and still run this city.
What will I get out of this newsletter?
I am staunchly pro-worker, equalitarian, and inquisitive. If you’re curious, open-minded, and want our city, state, and country to more readily provide basic necessities to make our lives as Americans less miserable like I am, I think
you’ll like what I write here. The grassroots efforts to fight these issues are growing in the South and their kindling must be fostered to light the fire of progress under the bellies of the elite ruling class that would see everything here stay the same. Ideally, these elites want conditions to get even better for them and only them. More work for us, more pay for them. Less green space for us, more golf courses for them. Less culture for us, more corporations moving in for them. We can and will reclaim our city from their greedy, gluttonous grasp.
I’m working three jobs concurrently, so will post here as often as I possibly can. To start, I hope to produce a deep-dive style piece once a month with some shorter commentary pieces sprinkled in between. Some of these shorter pieces may contain stuff about local and state politics that don’t warrant a deep-dive, my beloved Charleston Battery football, and anything else going on around here I feel like I can weigh in on.
Thanks for reading and see you soon.