It’s Not About the Cats. It’s About America.

I feel somewhat obligated to comment on the cat thing. I grew up about 30 minutes from Springfield, Ohio — in fact, I still live within an hour of the place — and, as far back as I can remember, it wasn’t a “good part of town.”

In high school, I was frequently my younger siblings’ chauffeur (not something I complain about, we listened to plenty of John Denver and memorized the whole The Greatest Showman soundtrack at the top of our lungs). I did the drive to Springfield once a week for nearly a year, shuttling the violinists in our family to orchestra practice. We kept the car doors locked and were convinced that an old, abandoned, Victorian house on a hill in our path was likely haunted. 

More to the point, Springfield in the mid-2010s wasn’t an up-and-coming place. Nobody in Ohio was “going” to Springfield, and a good many people were trying to get out. That’s not to say there aren’t nice areas of Springfield (downtown is small, but cute if you ignore the abandoned industrial buildings), but it is the picture of the post-industrial Midwest — a once booming town brought to its knees by high taxes, bad government, and worse management.

And then there was the crime. What I didn’t know in high school was that I-70 is a major artery of drug and sex trafficking. Springfield, Englewood, and Huber Heights, etc. — all run-down small towns that are near the intersection between I-70 and I-75 — are major hotbeds of serious crime, and they have been for years.

Why do I tell this story? Well, all of this was before the Biden administration decided to put Haitians on airplanes and fly them to Springfield. 

And it was long before JD Vance and Donald Trump decided to turn reports that Haitian immigrants are eating Ohioan cats and ducks into possibly the most effective meme campaign in presidential campaign history.

When people talk about this story on X, you get the sense that they think Springfield was a cute, prosperous, small town in America and that the Biden administration is ruining it. The real story is much more tragic in that the Biden administration is just the latest in a long train of federal and local governments that have failed Springfield.

At the moment, I can guarantee that enterprising journalists are descending on Springfield. Correspondents from ABC, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and more are likely booking hotel rooms at the Hilton on I-70, eager to answer the all-important question: Do Haitians actually eat their neighbor’s cats? Are the ducks in the park ending up on dinner plates? 

It’s quite possible that they’ll discover the answer to that specific question is no. Pets are safe (at least, according to police reports, YouTubers say otherwise). All the memes of Donald Trump saving cats and ducks are internet hyperbole. But if that’s where their investigation ends, they’ll have missed the point.

The snapshot they’ll get of Ohio in the three days they’re on the job chasing down stories of missing cats is just that, a snapshot. This is a moment in time that has been decades in the making. 

It’s not even really about the Haitian immigrants. Look, Haiti is a horrible place. I wouldn’t want to live there either, and I don’t blame anyone for getting on the first airplane to get out of there. They couldn’t help that the airplane they boarded landed them in Springfield, Ohio — which is a place Ohioans want to get out of as well.

In the interest of writing this article accurately, I spent about 30 minutes this morning driving through neighborhoods and past abandoned warehouses in Springfield. It looks exactly how I remember it. I spotted two stray cats, neither of which appeared concerned for their lives (for any interested parties, they’re hanging around Broadway St.), but perhaps more importantly, I took note of the neighborhoods. Many of them are rickety, multi-colored, and peeling paint, but they’re all on roomy plots of land on streets lined with ancient trees once planted to make it a pleasant place to live.

Once, perhaps 60 years ago, this was a place where the American Dream thrived: Buy a house, raise a family, have a pet, work a good job. 

Now it’s a shell, and you can’t blame the cats or the Haitians. 

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