And not only industries.  Local farmers, those who for years have toiled in their fields to provide food for their families and neighbors, are dying out, some because their children don’t wish to continue the tradition of fighting to stay above water, and facing ever-increasing governmental regulation and interference, rising taxes and health care.

Small businesses, faced with the same glut of new regulations and the threat of a government-imposed minimum wage that would make being successful almost impossible, are choosing to shutter their doors, or balk at trying to expand, even though the market at this time would allow for such.  And who knows how many just look at the numbers and decide it is too risky to invest their life-savings to start a new enterprise.

You can advocate the virtues of climate change, income equality, and increasing government control from the safety of your big-city apartment, secure in your service industry position or job with the government itself, but rural and low-income families don’t have that luxury.

Economic recovery has passed them by.  Those factories that re-located or closed did not re-open in the last decade, and no new ones are taking their place.  These people want jobs, period.  Most don’t want to become wards of the state.  These are people, blacks, whites, Latinos and all other races, who do their own home and auto repair, mow their own lawns and don’t want to be dependent on someone else.

They want to be free to make decision about the way they raise their children, where they go to church, or even if they don’t want to go to church at all.  To work hard and be successful, and they want their neighbors to have the same opportunity.  And they see the government today as encroaching on their freedoms every day.

They see a Donald Trump, who has been a businessman, investing his own money and building a fortune, as opposed to a Hillary Clinton, who has amassed a smaller yet substantial fortune, while claiming to be a public servant.

And Clinton in not the only one.  These Americans see all politicians in the same light, more concerned with their personal growth than the problems and issues that plague the country.

They see the system as broken, and they don’t know if Trump will fix it or not.  But they know for sure Clinton won’t.