DC-Main Street Divide Deepens

Member Group : Salena Zito

HARMONY – If one French-Indian guide had not been a particularly bad shot, George Washington would have died in this Butler County village when he passed through at the age of 21, after failing to negotiate a treaty with the French.

Washington dubbed the village "Murdering Town" in his journal of 1753. That was
after he and guide Christopher Gist nearly lost their lives as they returned from delivering a blunt message from England’s King George, telling the French to get off his land.

Washington and Gist received a polite but curt French refusal. They made haste
back toward Virginia, only to lose their canoe in icy river rapids. Arriving here, they met an Indian guide who agreed to show them the fastest route to the forks of the Ohio.

Just a few yards along the path, the Indian turned and fired his musket
point-blank at Washington. "Luckily, he missed," said Martin O’Brien, a retired Butler County judge and local historian. "Democracy and the world would not be the same if Washington had lost his life here. I sometimes wonder if people grasp that fact."

O’Brien believes the nation that Washington and America’s other Founding Founders put in place represents the height of human history, by proving that free people can govern themselves. "At the founding of America, few folks had ever had the right to elect their own government," he said.

Last week, Butler County seemed to be a million miles distant from President
Barack Obama as he dismissed gun-owners’ concerns that gun-control legislation
would lead to gun confiscation, declaring that he was "constrained by a system our founders put in place."

The disconnect between Washington and Main Street has deepened in the past seven
years.

It began under the presidency of George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled
Congress that spent like drunken fools.

Voters threw out those Republicans in favor of Democrats in the congressional
midterms of 2006, followed by Obama in 2008. But voters quickly learned that
Democrats spent like drunken fools, too – and with an added insult: government
overreach.

Out went the congressional Democrats in 2010.

Obama kept his job in 2012 because of rhetoric that divided the country on class, race and intellectual elitism – and also because folks like those who live in Butler County, Democrat and Republican alike, stayed home and said, "To hell with all of you!"

The divide between Main Street and urban American has become more toxic than ever, yet no one in Washington seems to notice. A CBS News survey last week showed that eight in ten Americans are unhappy with Washington and that Obama’s approval has plummeted seven points in one month.

Todd Kozik’s family business in Butler County, a small earth-moving company
specializing in residential construction, took a big dive in 2008 as the economy
sank. "I went from 50 employees to under 20," Kozik said, an impact he feels was lost on the White House.

When the shale company Rex Energy came to Butler in 2010, Kozik’s fortunes
changed. Today, his company builds access roads and prepares the ground for
drilling sites, he said.

"We built our company back up, and now we are doing better than we were before the recession. And you see the trickle-up effects, other small businesses in town are beginning to flourish," he said.

"But what we still don’t get from Washington is clarity, what regulations or new
policies are going to impact our bottom line," he said of his and other small
businesses in the region. "In many ways, you are hesitant about where and when to spend to grow."

Butler County’s place in America’s energy industry isn’t new, said William
McCarrier, a county commissioner and retired school teacher. "One hundred years
ago, when Edwin Drake first proved that oil could be tapped from underground for
consistent supply, we were providing 80 percent of the world’s oil supply," he
said.

Only 266 miles separate this county from Washington, D.C. Part of that distance
follows along Washington’s Trail, a commemorative route marking young Washington’s first military and diplomatic ventures.

Many Butler County residents think it is high time that Washingtonians travel it
again, to better understand the America that feels left behind.