Talk to white Indiana residents, and you’ll hear a hundred different disparaging remarks about Gary, Indiana. Repeating them all here would be like listing the 100 worst things said by Huck Finn, but without Mark Twain’s sarcasm.
So the indifference of Gary’s plight to most Indiana residents doesn’t come as a surprise.
But does the rest of the nation care that Gary has been without power for twelve straight nights? Thanks to a series of deadly storms and hurricane winds and a hapless utility, Gary is America’s Cuba. Blacked out, with few people noticing or caring.
Reverse the numbers you see in this chart, then convince me that if Gary were 79% white, most of those 85,704 residents would be in the dark for twelve days.
Comments are open.
There have been accusations that the power company involved,1 NIPSCO, is slow-rolling a fix because of racism. I would argue that the real problem is that the company is overwhelmed. Its resources, compared to the Chicago urban area’s utility monolith, ComEd, which quickly got people back online after a rough battle with the same severe thunderstorms Gary endured, are minuscule.
What is criminal is that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) has not made an appearance, and that state and federal responses in general have been nonexistent.
You can be sure that the round, orange ball of toxic sludge sitting in his gold-plated Oval Office doesn’t give a damn.
Sadly, in a way, the problem is more nefarious than NIPSCO’s inability to fix the power outage. Black enclaves in America like Gary are still regarded with the same disdain and disinterest as third world countries and other far-off places have been for decades.
Most Americans tolerate these places by avoiding them.
A modern nation overflowing with data center money could, if it wanted to, flood Gary tonight with portable generators for every person without power there. Billionaires could send food, water, even stocked refrigerators and trailers.
The problems of Gary could be resolved in about an hour. It’s right next to Chicago. The travesty is astounding. The lack of concern among Americans is, frankly, kind of scary.
This is a nation that just spent $20 million on shock gloves to help shove immigrants into cages:
Why I’m Applying to Be an ICE Stormtrooper
When I saw that ICE was going to use some of its $39 billion in funding for the 2026 fiscal year to purchase gloves that electrocute people, I finally said, “Damn, give me some of that action.”
For that money, FEMA could purchase 40,000 portable generators, enough for half the population of Gary, and probably most of the households currently without power.
Indiana is another failed red state
As always, there is some history to consider here.
Indiana is in a deplorable state. Its small rural towns are ruined shells filled with decaying reminders of an agrarian past that now consist of farmers either hoping to sell what’s left of their farms or trying to, as massive agricultural companies, data centers, and urban sprawl close in on their land.
The state lost 345,700 acres of farmland between 2010 and 20222. This is a common tale in Midwestern rural areas.
They’ve moved beyond prejudice to anger. That they don’t quite understand who they are mad at doesn’t matter.
Whatever exists of an Indiana economy is centered around whatever they can leech out of Chicago, a city Indiana residents are happy to also denigrate while living off its cosmopolitan successes.
Red state socialism
Indiana’s attempt to lure the Chicago Bears to a new stadium location at a former slag waste site near the Illinois border is an example. It’s also classic red state socialism, and why the residents of Indiana’s rural counties are spinning their Caterpillar wheels in the mud.
The Bears’ owners, as part of a nearly decade-long effort to bully Chicago and Illinois into embarking on a corporate socialist sports experiment, have had an easy time convincing Indiana state legislators to try feeding from the Chicago cash trough.
The Bears have tried so many gimmicks trying to cajole Illinois legislators into funding a new stadium that they’ve finally thrown up their hands, realizing that red staters will fawn over the possibility of using public funds to build the infrastructure the team craves.3
So the team marched into Indiana and said, “Hey, we love red state socialism. For a steep price that your constituents will pay, we’ll build a new stadium on some of your expired steel slag!”
The real shame is that the Indiana location they’ve identified is a rare successful red state foray into environmentalism partly funded by the now nearly extinct EPA to transform a former slag site into a place called Lost Marsh Golf Course in Hammond, Indiana.
If you don’t know what slag is, it’s about as bad as it sounds. It’s basically the excrement of steel mills that deposited the stuff all around Chicago’s south suburbs and parts of Northern Indiana when the area had a thriving steel industry.
That industry left behind massive piles of toxic, porous steel slag in the area, much of which seeped into the ground.
One slag mountain, near 129th Street and Calumet Avenue in Hammond, Indiana, was known as Bairstow Mountain. It was a mound of slag collected by industrialist Harry Bairstow, who sent trucks to local steel mills to collect their metallic, toxic excrement and haul it to the mountain, where it became a 3.5 million-cubic-yard mound of slag, oil drums, and abandoned, decaying cars.4
The Hammond eyesore, which was as mountainous as the name implies, was a template for how the Black community was treated during the post-World War Two industrial era in that part of Indiana.
When Bairstow abandoned his mountain of metallic sludge (because of course he did), local officials tried to cut it to pieces and remove it, but the industrial-size augers and drills used to bust the thing open got busted by the mountain instead.5
So they just covered it up. Eventually, human ingenuity and a whole lot of work turned it into a golf course.
The area was governed with the same mentality that resulted in freeways slicing through quiet, well established working class Black neighborhoods throughout the country, including Chicago, where I-57, also known as the Dan Ryan Expressway, cut open Chicago’s South Side, gutting its neighborhoods and creating rows of crappy, cheap housing like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes.
Black neighborhoods were treated with such disdain that eventually the troubles created by white power brokers needed someone to blame, so people started blaming the Black residents whose neighborhoods were ruined by industrial poisons, mass incarceration (aka modern slavery), and freeways. “Black on Black” crime became the accepted explanation for all the problems of these ruined neighborhoods as education and economic opportunity got buried under the toxic sludge of industry.
Most of this narrative was bipartisan. It still is.
There was so much slag during steel’s golden era that a canal in the South Suburbs called the Cal-Sag Channel was used to help move the stuff. Its name was likely a typo: Cal-Slag Channel was most likely what whoever invents those kinds of names had in mind.
The channel was intended to help halt pollution and sewage from the southern suburbs from flowing directly into Lake Michigan. God forbid wealthy north shore residents get a taste of metal in their morning espresso.
EPA Sidebar: Lost Marsh is part of a larger story involving the EPA: The U.S. EPA Brownfields Program, which began in 1991.6
Indiana used socialism properly in those days by contributing to the cause, along with private industry and the EPA, to convert a slag field into a meadow full of butterflies and other life, and, eventually, a popular golf course, which, of course, will be paved over by any future Chicago Bears stadium.
1991 is ancient history. A brownfield reclamation project such as this is not exactly top of mind for the current crop of Indiana’s politicians, who would rather pave it over and re-industrialize the place while lining their pockets with Chicago money.
The Bears’ threats to move to Indiana are likely a ruse, just a way to treat its majority minority population (65% Black or Latino or Hispanic) with the usual contempt.
The Bears purchased Arlington Park Racetrack for $197.2 million in February 2023. They did this after convincing the city of Chicago to use public money for renovations to their current Bears home at Soldier Field in 2002, a corporate socialist project for which Chicago residents still owed $640 million as of 2023.7
That $197.2 million is probably less than they’ll pay their new quarterback to continue being the Michael Jordan of the football field, but it’s still a lot of money.
The Arlington Heights racetrack was demolished in 2021, so the Bears essentially purchased a big empty bargaining chip for their nearly $200 million, hoping to grab some corporate socialism cash to help build what modern sports real estate hucksters like to call a mixed-use project, full of trendy restaurants, bars, and gambling. They’re not walking away from that. Eventually, they’ll wrangle something out of the Illinois legislature.
But they’ve convinced Indiana politicians and anyone who will listen that they will walk away from Illinois. That’s catnip to a red-state socialist, who is always eager to give Chicago a black eye and hand money to corporate interests, especially now that there is a federal regime in Washington, D.C. that’s eager to encourage graft. You can be sure that if a deal with Indiana somehow goes through, each Indiana politician involved will find a way to grab enough cash from actuarial dead zones to pay enough for a new house or three.
This is the essence of red state governing: corporate socialism that ignores places like Gary, where people have been without power for twelve days. If you read the stories about the power outage, you’ll find that some Gary residents are so used to this treatment that they shrug it all off as just another day, just like many Black U.S. voters shrugged off Trump’s first election.
Indiana’s governor has recently made a few performative statements, but meanwhile, Gary resident Melissa Dixon is trying to figure out how to feed her three daughters tonight on a thirteenth night without power. No cold food to rely on, not even a Taylor Farms explosive diarrhea salad. No lights, no air conditioning, no fan.8
She stumbled into her home the other day sobbing after spending the day in line in the summer heat waiting for food rations from local charity groups. Those rations were mostly gone by the time it was her turn to outstretch her palms.
52% of Gary was still without electricity on Day 11, a Saturday. Residents were forced into cramped school gyms to catch a little air conditioning and charge their phones and maybe scrounge for some food donations.
This is not the kind of thing you expect to see in a nation where billionaires and trillionaires are polishing their yacht decks and chartering flights to tropical islands. It’s not even the same nation where some people can afford the high-end Disney World while others have to stand for hours to jump onto crowded rides because they aren’t part of Disney+ or whatever Disney calls their premium offering.
Gary has entered the third world. Americans have never paid much attention to the third world. I doubt they’ll start now.
Melissa Dixon has another thought about this. If she were unable to provide essentials for her children like food and power, the repressive conservative Indiana government would call her an unfit mother and try to take away her children.
What does that make our government? What does that make us and our silence?
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Footnotes
Johnson, Rebecca, and Allison Kiehl. “Indiana Power Outage Presses on after 10 Days Leaving Thousands in the Dark.” Chicago Tribune, August 20, 2026.
🎁 Ruminato Gift Link https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/08/20/northwest-indiana-power-outage-nipsco/. 🎁
Bonilla Muñiz, Leslie. “Indiana Lost Nearly 350K Acres of Farmland in 12 Years, State Estimates.” Indiana Capital Chronicle, July 2024. https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2024/07/01/indiana-lost-nearly-350k-acres-of-farmland-in-12-years-state-estimates/.
Bears Owner Identifies Indiana Stadium Site | 94.5 WPTI. “Bears Owner Identifies Indiana Stadium Site | 94.5 WPTI.” 94.5 WPTI, August 17, 2026. https://945wpti.iheart.com/content/2026-08-17-bears-owner-identifies-indiana-stadium-site/.
Chicago Tribune. “From Dump to Fields of Green.” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 2003.
🎁 Ruminato Gift Link https://www.chicagotribune.com/2003/11/16/from-dump-to-fields-of-green/. 🎁
Chicago Tribune. “From Dump to Fields of Green.” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 2003. See above for link.
Region 5 Brownfields Team. “EPA Brownfields in Chicagoland and Northern Illinois.” ArcGIS StoryMaps. Esri, January 7, 2025. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/059a4923062e4cdf9097024182815218.
Check out the interactive Chicagoland Brownfields map here:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/059a4923062e4cdf9097024182815218
I don’t have more recent figures than this handy:
Sharkey, Dylan. “Bears Buy Arlington Park, but Chicago Still Owes $640M for Soldier Field.” Illinois Policy, February 16, 2023. https://www.illinoispolicy.org/bears-buy-arlington-park-but-chicago-still-owes-640m-for-soldier-field/.
Malagón, Elvia, and Ashlee Rezin. “12 Nights without Power in Gary, Indiana, ‘Why Is This OK?.’” Chicago Sun-Times, August 24, 2026. https://chicago.suntimes.com/graphics/weather/powerless/12-nights-without-power-in-Gary-Indiana/.
Everyone should remember this at election time because, if trump doesn't like you, your race, or your politics, he will allow you to die when catastrophe hits. Guaranteed.
“Melissa Dixon has another thought about this. If she were unable to provide essentials for her children like food and power, the repressive conservative Indiana government would call her an unfit mother and try to take away her children.
What does that make our government? What does that make us and our silence?”
I’m happy you mentioned us and our silence. What does that say about people turning away from their neighbours’ hardship. They should all watch the video “No More Turning Away,” song by Pink Floyd. They may learn a thing or two about compassion and lending a hand. It’s shocking that Gary Indiana citizens are suffering like this. It’s heartbreaking.
But corporate industry has also affected the livelihoods of many First Nations in Canada who are no longer able to practice their indigenous way of life. The racism is on display here too.
Rant over. But the anger remains.