“Next year won’t simply mark 30 years of writing. I’ll mark 30 years of bearing witness.” — Matt Alley
This article was first published by Matt Alley in BlueCollarWriter Labor Media here.
Next year marks thirty years since I first started writing professionally. I’ve written about music, culture, addiction, Appalachia, politics, labor, and eventually found the work that mattered most to me in activist and labor journalism.
At the time, each article felt like it was about the issue sitting in front of me. Looking back, I realize I wasn’t writing dozens of different stories at all. I was writing one story over and over again, just with different names, different faces, and different headlines. The tactics evolved. The players changed. But the goal remained remarkably consistent: concentrate wealth, consolidate power, and convince ordinary people to blame each other instead of the people pulling the strings.
During the George W. Bush years, I was writing published opinion pieces warning about the Koch network, the Heritage Foundation, the slow erosion of organized labor, and what happens when corporate power captures political power. People told me I was paranoid. They said I was overreacting. They insisted America always corrects itself.
I never wanted to be right.
Watching your worst fears slowly become reality isn’t vindication. It’s grief. Every institution hollowed out, every attack on workers, every erosion of democratic norms wasn’t an isolated event. It was another step down a road many of us could already see.
What has surprised me isn’t what happened. It’s how many people still believe the next election, the next administration, or the next news cycle will somehow restore the normal we remember.
I don’t think that’s possible anymore.
History doesn’t run in reverse. The America we remember isn’t waiting on the other side of the next election. Once institutions are weakened, norms are abandoned, and power is consolidated, the path forward is exactly that: forward. We don’t get to go back. We can only decide what comes next.
We’re no longer living through the warnings. We’re living through the consequences.
Somewhere over the last twenty years, I exhausted most of my outrage. You can only sound the alarm for so long before anger hardens into resolve. That’s probably why my writing has changed. I don’t spend much time trying to convince people determined not to see what’s happening. I write for the people trying to survive it, organize against it, and build something better despite it.
Next year won’t simply mark thirty years of writing. It’ll mark thirty years of bearing witness.
I still believe workers deserve dignity. I still believe democracy is worth defending. Those beliefs haven’t changed.
The only thing I wish had changed is that I’d been wrong.
Matt Alley, BlueCollarWriter Labor Media
matt@bluecollarwriter.com
Find Matt on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/bluecollarwriter
