The area has been slow to educate its workforce, slow to understand the departure of industry mainstays, slow to recognize technological changes and their implications — so will the Next Big Thing again find the Triad ill-prepared, late to respond, and timid when it finally takes action?From a great enough distance, even a tsunami looks small.
Because we in the Triad don't learn from past tsunamis, we tend to connect change with fear. To say that the Triad is a conservative place doesn't account for its slow reception to new ideas. Emotion lives on even while we suppress history, forget it, or erase visible reminders of its influence in our lives today. What other explanation can there be for the long delay in the opening of the civil rights museum in downtown Greensboro? The kind of social conservatism that lives on in the area is a consequence of past failures. Over the long run it has proven to be weak magic in the face of textile plant closings, furniture plant closings, and the downsizing of tobacco. In a few decades these area mainstays tumbled, doomed as much by globalization as by a local population sure that the best way of maintaining their way of life was to uphold the past. In the 1980s, my first wife, a nurse, had been treating factory workers with all kinds of avoidable health problems like diabetes and emphysema in the Greensboro area. Nor has this brand of conservatism kept up with social change as the area has seen an influx of out-of staters and a growing Latino population.
In Alamance County, after years of delay, several printing companies began sending their workers to the community college where I worked in order to learn basic computer operations, the Mac, and desktop publication, but it was too late. When these workers showed up they goofed around, happy to have paid time off to play. By the early 90's, many positions in paste-up, layout, and typesetting were gone, and my young design students, some just 20 years old, were hired to oversee workers twice their age. By the mid-90's, I was pushing hard for curriculum courses in multimedia because we were already seeing wages flatten as programs like Pagemaker made it possible for just about anybody to call themselves a graphic designer. After the county lost a big bid to get BMW to locate a plant there it seemed pretty clear to even the slowest politician and dullest college administrator that the region could not count on Santa Claus or any sort of miracle to save it. But the good news was that area fast food restaurants were finding it hard to hire help and began paying wages above the minimum. My best students got jobs in RTP, sometimes competing against NC State and UNC grads, and easily making enough to justify the extra 30 minute commute. The high schools finally let us in to teach college level photography and video courses on their campuses. We had lots of area business support for our innovative training methods, but it was all on a shoestring budget, with some of the lowest salaries in the nation to pay our staff and almost nothing for computers.For a brief time we were the most advanced graphics program in the state and then one day we weren’t. By then UNC had an excellent journalism course that covered Director, State had gotten its Mac labs online, and the state's larger community colleges with bigger county support and better leadership surpassed us.
Two reasons give me hope about the Next Big Thing. One, the population has changed. Besides more Latinos, we have more of everybody else in the Triad — people from all over the country and other nations who are used to or ready to demand better government services, better education, better recreational and cultural resources, and better paying jobs. The second reason for hope is a new generation less burdened by racism and which sees a direct connection between technology and its future.
