Do you ever think about the fact that the US has created and legitimized a system of institutionalized inequality by funding schools through property taxes? That basically a child’s education is only as good as the value of the property in their neighborhood. Funny how education is so often viewed as an equalizing factor when there is nothing equal about it.
I really don’t care if I’ve already reblogged this
Because this needs to be reblogged….
I remember learning this for the first time as an adult. I had grown up thinking education was the great playing field leveler. So I was so furious to find out how very much it wasn’t anything of the kind.
This is a big part of why you’ll often see rich white people fussing about school district lines, because they hate the idea that their money is going towards the education of poor children.
Baby boomer goals: home ownership, 2.5 kids, dream vacations to florida/hawaii
Millenial goals: having any money left after bills, an apartment without roommates, dying quickly and painlessly in the initial nuclear exchange to avoid witnessing the collapse of humanity
Accurate
Guys, the fear of nuclear annihilation hung over half the 20th century, it defined the entire boomer generation. Other boomer goals included not getting drafted, marrying someone of a different race, and living past 70.
My mother’s goal was to not have her friends return from Vietnam in pine boxes
My grandmother was a boomer born in a tar paper shack on a river and her goal was to not have to live in a tar paper shack, and also not have all of her brothers die before age 30.
A lot of baby boomers are finding themselves without jobs, no savings, no retirement, no home, and having to move in with their kids while their health rapidly declines with age and drives up medical costs. The idea that they’re all wealthy and secure is bullshit. We’re all struggling.
i hate when someone says “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies” and some white 21 year old trying to be ‘woke’ says “haha… go ahead and cry your white tears sweatie (:”
no one thinks it’s a racial issue against white people. that’s not why people say to stop that shit. it’s an issue of classism. because the truth is that the majority of y’all who think you’re amazing activists just REALLY fucking hate appalachian people, and i know that because y’all think it’s funny to say “karma’s a bitch!” when something bad happens to an appalachian state.
you don’t care about the poverty in the appalachia and you don’t care about queer people and/or people of color who live in the appalachia. you don’t care about education in the appalachia and you don’t care that these low rates of education mean higher rates of poverty and child poverty, which persist over the years. rural children are twice as likely to live in areas with persistent poverty. you care that poverty stricken children are statistically less likely to not have timely immunizations, have higher delinquency rates, and have lower academic achievement — but only when we’re talking about urban areas outside of the appalachia.
people in our region die earlier than most. mortality rates are higher in the appalachia, and they’re even higher for people of color that live in the appalachia. suicide rates are higher than anywhere else in the country by 17% — it’s 31% higher in central appalachia, and in rural areas within the appalachia, it’s 27% higher than metro appalachia. cancer morality rate is 10% higher, and it’s 15% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. COPD mortality rate is 27% higher, and 55% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. injury mortality rate is 33% higher, and it’s 47% higher in rural appalachia than in metro appalachia. stroke mortality rate is 14% higher — and you guessed it’s, these rates are higher in rural areas vs metro areas by 8%.
the rate of Years of Potential Life Lost, which measures premmature mortality from all causes of death, is 25% higher in appalachia, and 40% higher in rural vs metro areas.
the appalachia has an opioid epidemic. in 2015, our rate of death with drugs was 65% higher than the national average. 69% of those drug deaths were from opioids. these deaths have a connection to our poverty and education rates. the poorer you are, and the less educated you are, the more likely you are to die from an opioid death.
when i say “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies”, that doesn’t mean i think you’re being racist against white people (and again — the majority of people who claim this also happen to be white 🙄). i say that because you are perpetuating extremely toxic rhetoric about our region, you are promoting stigma, you are encouraging blatant classism, and you are furthering the idea that we somehow “deserve” it because our elected officials vote republican. it’s not cute. stop acting like none of us have the right to call you out on your classist bullshit. like i’m sorry if this comes off as too aggressive but i am sooooo sick of y’all thinking it’s funny that our region is suffering.
and before anyone asks me for resources and links: google exists. i did my research and you can do it too.
a big problem with the people who say stuff like this is they don’t realize just how many “rednecks and hillbillies” are non-white. there are so many appalachian and southern POC that also suffer through these conditions but people like to cling to their idea that the only hicks are white hicks, so they couldnt care less if places like WV or KY just fell off the map, and to hell with who it is that’s actually hurting.
people also act like it’s only appalachian and southern whites that voted for trump and that vote republican and it’s not true – half of all white women voted for trump. the rich ones and the poor ones. it’s not a problem that’s tied specifically to southern and appalachian white people but it’s an easy scapegoat and allows people to not think about what they’re actually saying.
as long as they can say that it’s just them shitty racist white hicks that are suffering, then they don’t have to actually care about them. they can ignore them and not do anything to help them. like another person said in the notes, the teacher strike in WV is a better example of leftist organization than a whole lot of the people saying shit about hillbillies have ever done but they don’t care about that because, well, theyre just white hillbillies so what does it matter?
Because I have gotten a lot of anti-rural life jokes thrown at me. Most people don’t know I’m from a rural area, because I currently live in a big ass concrete city, so like… The concept of rural is super obscure. I told someone where I live, and they thought I meant some place with some farms, so they were like “ugh, rednecks, that must be awful.” Fuck off, because I come from a place with real farms & rural land, and just cause you think we work at a super progressive place, and because you think “rural” folks are all Trump-humpin’ far religious right, LGBT-hatin’, POC hatin’ folks, that’s your problem.
So the place I grew up in? Yes, it tends to vote Republican, but in the current primary? There are folks runnin’ for Republican that very specifically want to support things what we need: there’s a major development that the city side of the state wants to produce, which means it would royally fuck over the rural side–it would destroy environmental reserves, especially, which is what we all survive off of in the rural areas. The Democratic side is literally the “bad” guy in the race. Destroying the natural resources of the area would be terrible for everyone–if you only care about POC, yes, it would screw them over too. Because we all live off the land.
A lot of the redneck types require the land, because remember: it’s cheaper to buy a box of bullets than it is to buy meat for the year. That’s how most folks I know who are poor survive… And this is why I struggle in the city. I’m used to thinking “If I need to, I could always trust the forest & river.” If I need food, it’s there. It’s in the land; I can plant it, or I can hunt, fish, and forage. If I need something, I could… Make it. Because materials… They exist. Somewhere, out there. But the city? I have to fucking buy berries? So I don’t eat them too much. I need wood? I have to fucking buy it, what the hell??? I need leather? I have to buy it; I can’t just ask a friend to barter for it (or maybe pay ‘em, but the leather out here is more pricey). Especially as an artist, this astounds & disgusts me in some way. You can barter, too. I helped out a friend on their family cow farm; they gave me meat & a skull. You can weave and whittle. There’s a sort of backup.
But the city is harsh and expensive. We can’t maintain a garden here. I can’t trust the land to provide. Even suburbia suffers that. So the poorer you are, the less you can live in a city. And its not like it’s all happy & fun in the rural areas. Poverty is shit. But to me, I feel a little safer. Sometimes you barter… (At least its pretty; the city isn’t very peaceful or beautiful.)
And yea??? There are queer folks in rural areas. And a lot of the ones I know find it horrifying, the idea of leaving. I went back early this year & chatted to one woman I know, who is a lesbian, and she was… Sort of disgusted at the idea of leaving and of the hatred that city folk have of rural areas, especially through an LGBT lens. There’s a major communicative disconnect, because what works for LGBT rights in the city doesn’t work for the rural areas, and this ends up drowning out the rural folks’ voices. Which is especially dangerous, because they may not be great support for the issues of rural LGBT folks. This stereotyping or hate of rednecks/hillbillies/rurality is damaging the people ya’ll claim to say you’re trying to help.
I’m going to co-sign all this and also go a step further.
Even if someone IS a white, straight, Trump-supporting Republican redneck, you should still care if they’re suffering due to issues facing rural people. No one should suffer needlessly because of the limited resources, lack of access to education and medical care, or structural poverty in their home. We should always care about those issues no matter who is being afflicted.
^Cosigned.
I live and work in a very rural county, which also happens to contain the (small) capital city of the state. Our county court system, I am learning firsthand, is absolute fucking bullshit at dealing with rural, white, Trump-voting people’s extremely real and pressing legal problems, because they refuse to understand that living on the edge of crushing poverty, even on large pieces of land, with half your “income” coming directly from what you plant, hunt, or barter for yourself, is a legitimate and widespread way people live, and it presents a serious access to justice issue. Our bureaucracies and our systems for providing assistance depend so much on someone being able to provide detailed information about their income. In a tight-knit rural community of exclusively very poor people, where people constantly help each other out of simple economic necessity, using systems of barter and payment dictated by a complex and long-standing social structure and informed by what needs the participants have that specific day, asking someone to provide the kind of close documentation needed in a normal court case is idiotic. And judges won’t believe someone from a rural part of the county who tries to explain that – it’s seen as laziness, as an irritating lack of education about how the system works, and, sometimes, as outright lying.
I listen to one of my white, rural-born, Trump-votin’ clients talk about how they feel walking into any kind of government office or courtroom, and I’m not going to sanctimoniously inform them how much worse people in other places have it, if they’d only ~educate themselves~ and ~care about other people.~ They have every reason to believe this system’s not on their side and the people assigned to deal with their affairs don’t understand them, even on this very local level. And holy shit: That’s not even touching the situation of the many, many South American immigrants living in our rural county, often speaking indigenous languages for which interpretation is not available, connecting with the system only as undocumented persons or criminals. I can’t speak to those issues as closely because we can accommodate maybe 1% of their cases. They’re here, on our farms, in our trailer parks, working the land; we simply don’t see them, because the system has not created a space for them to exist.
The survival issues that rural people in poverty struggle with are incredibly different from those that urban people in poverty struggle with – even when they’re not that far removed from our small city. Even when the rural and urban people you picked off the street to make the comparison were the same race, the same age, etc.
Also, goddamn, cosigned about queer people in rural areas. Here’s a hint: Don’t insult someone’s intelligence or tell them you’re sorry for them when they tell you where they live, ever.
This is true for a lot of other places too. Prior to colonization, Southeast Asian women had a lot more autonomy, sexuality was not seen as shameful, and being gay/or and transgender was more accepted and sometimes even revered. SEA history can basically be summarized as “everything changed when the white men attacked.”
Before Europeans came to the Americas, Cherokee women had more political and social power (matriarchal lineage, land was passed down to daughters since women were responsible for farming, husbands moved into their wife’s house, children belonged to their mother’s clan, etc).
Additionally, they also didn’t view sexuality (specifically regarding women) as shameful and sexual assault was almost unheard of.
“Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Indians of the Southeast)” by Theda Perdue is an excellent book that describes life of Cherokee women before, during, and after colonization, and how Cherokee society and culture was affected.
I would strongly recommend Barbara A. Mann’s Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas.
Which looks specifically at the Haudenosaunee, but a lot of similar patterns apply to other Eastern Woodlands people with similar social setups. Including the also-Iroquoian Cherokee.
IMO, Mann is much more careful not to take colonists’ interpretations of what they were seeing at face value. (An unfortunately common problem.) While dealing with sufficiently different cultures, where they didn’t always understand what they were even observing very well.
At any rate, a lot of other cultures just did not have the same ideological/religious investment in homophobia or anything like the same kind of gender systems as Europeans at the same time.
laws about minimum wage should apply to disabled people
laws about minimum wage should apply to incarcerated people
everyone deserves a fair living wage for their labor
wait, they don’t???
Not even close. Disabled folks can be paid as little as $1 an hour in some cases at whats called “subminimum wage.” Prisoners are sometimes forced to work without pay at all.
Hi, I am an attorney in the disability field. Many disabled folks make well under $1 an hour in what are called “sheltered workshops”. There are only three states right now that require people with disabilities to be paid at least minimum wage, and they are Alaska, New Hampshire, and Maryland. Goodwill is a major offender, but there are many, many others.
Also minimum wage actually needs to actually be a fair living wage.
Another especially horrific thing about this:
Sometimes voc rehab counselors will… strategically avoid saying much about a sheltered workshop not having opportunities for advancement.
So people will assume that their low pay and dull tasks are temporary and that they can earn promotions or raises, when actually those things are pretty much nonexistent.
So you get people being like “I’ve done this for 20 years, why have I never gotten promoted?”
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
>The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
Uh-huh.
Take away billionaires and you just put millions or possibly billions of people out of work.
Glad to know you hate the working class.
That’s literally the opposite of how reality works but keep going
Do you know how many people work for Walmart?
Get rid of Walmart and you have millions of students and the elderly who needed that paycheque suddenly out of the job.
What about construction workers? Who depend on rich businessmen a lot to get good contracts with good pay.
People have the right to accumulate money and the moment you say they can’t or that there’s a limit that is an issue. The idea that billionaires are exploiting the people they give money to. Is a completely idiotic idea.
The vast majority of the working class is indirectly working for and paid by person or people richer than them. Because you kind of need to be rich to hire thousands of workers.
The rich are an important part of how the economy works. Don’t beleive me? As the Soviets they figured that out the hard way.
Ooooooor maybe Walmart should pay all those students and elderly people a fair wage, and their CEOs can just be fabulously wealthy and not disgustingly wealthy.
Like, this isnt a question of “should ANY amount of wealth inequality exist.” Its specifically about BILLIONAIRES. Not even millionaires. BILLIONAIRES.
Presumably Walmart employees agreed on their terms of payment or they wouldn’t be working there.
Sounds like a fair wage to me.
Not if it forces them onto food stamps to avoid starvation. Without the ability to negotiate for wages on equal footing (through collective action) and without a strong social safety net that ensures temporary unemployment won’t lead to homelessness, then no. Just agreeing to a wage doesnt inherently make it fair.
You act as if people are incapable of collective action. Bad companies lose employees, good companies keep them. A company can ignore this if they like but they’ll suffer for it.
The employee is free to go to another company or become independent if they so choose. they may not get the wages that they want but just because I’m not able to sell something for astronomically more than it’s worth doesn’t make my agreement to the sale price any less legitimate.
The free market is what assures fairness not government action.
I think reality has proven that an unregulated or poorly regulated free market does NOT guarantee fairness in the absence of collective bargaining and strong social safety nets.
If employees can only choose between starvation level wages or potential homelessness then they aren’t REALLY free to quit in search of greener pastures.
As I have said, you premise that there is no collective bargaining is flawed collective action is taken all the time without even mentioning unions.
As a matter of fact collective bargaining, both formal and informal is a part of the free market.
Likewise your premise that people’s only choices are homelessness and starvation wages is also flawed; it’s actually an either or fallacy.
People have potentially limitless option in a market economy and they also have the option of becoming independent. And if people really can’t survive in a situation with so many options they can still leave whichever free market economy that they’re a part of and go to a country with your preferred system.
Your argument is that if a person is worried that quitting their minimum wage job will leave them homeless due to a lack of social safety nets during unemployment, they should MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY?
Because emigrating is sooooooooooo cheap and easy, right?
Hello, real world calling.
That’s oversimplification to the point of childishness but yes.
I will remind you that you’re saying that if a person is doesn’t like their pay they should wait for a revolution to steal money from other people instead of improving themselves or just finding a different job.
At least my extreme option gives people agency which you seem to forget that they have.
But that’s the point isn’t it? If people were really on starvation wages then it would be cheaper in the long run to emigrate with their meager possessions now rather than wait and hope someone will give you stollen money.
Even if you’re right and the poor are in oppressive system that’s keeping them poor if they’re not willing to do something as simple as leave, then they may be beyond help.
People can’t emigrate to Sweden if they are living paycheck to paycheck working at Walmart. “If people arent willing and able to flee the country, they deserve to starve” is a bold take.
And no one is saying ~wait for the revolution ~ I’m saying we need legal reforms to the entire system, rather than expect individuals to try and parlay with mega corporations one on one.
Funnily enough this is exactly the way the US worked in the 1950′s. And you can say a lot of terrible things about the 50′s and the conformity and the way anyone who wasn’t a straight white man was treated, but you can’t say American business wasn’t prosperous, and you can’t say American employees weren’t either.
These guys talk like this is a pie in the sky ideal that no one has ever tried, rather than business as usual between the 1940′s and the 1970′s. Even the terrible recession of the 1970′s didn’t leave people in as dire straits as they’re in routinely nowadays.
Those who don’t study history are not only doomed to repeat it, sometimes they’re doomed to believing it wasn’t possible.
We have entered a phase of regression,and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics.
In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check.
The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check.
Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check.
The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check.
Social and economic mobility is low. Check.
Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.
Even with a diploma, you will likely find that high-paying jobs come from networks of peers and relatives. Social capital, as well as economic capital, is critical, but because of America’s long history of racism and the obstacles it has created for accumulating both kinds of capital, black graduates often can only find jobs in education, social work, and government instead of higher-paying professional jobs like technology or finance— something most white people are not really aware of. Women are also held back by a long history of sexism and the burdens — made increasingly heavy — of making greater contributions to the unpaid care economy and lack of access to crucial healthcare.
How did we get this way?
What happened to America’s middle class, which rose triumphantly in the post-World War II years, buoyed by the GI bill, the victories of labor unions, and programs that gave the great mass of workers and their families health and pension benefits that provided security?
Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.
Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”
What can we do?
We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging.
If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly.
The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions.
We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans.
We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector,
reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and
focus on embracing an integrated American population.
We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.
We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone — including some of the rich people.”
Along with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines historical and modern inequality, Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority.
Without a robust middle class, America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.
In Other Words Revolution
Capitalism’s bad
I really hope i don’t see any fellow white Americans on this post talking about how we don’t deserve this because we’re “the greatest country in the world” or how “this shouldn’t be happening in America of all places”. It shouldn’t be happening ANYWHERE, it doesn’t need to be happening anymore, and the fact that it was already happening in predominantly nonwhite countries is largely the fault of white supremacy
i hate when someone says “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies” and some white 21 year old trying to be ‘woke’ says “haha… go ahead and cry your white tears sweatie (:”
no one thinks it’s a racial issue against white people. that’s not why people say to stop that shit. it’s an issue of classism. because the truth is that the majority of y’all who think you’re amazing activists just REALLY fucking hate appalachian people, and i know that because y’all think it’s funny to say “karma’s a bitch!” when something bad happens to an appalachian state.
you don’t care about the poverty in the appalachia and you don’t care about queer people and/or people of color who live in the appalachia. you don’t care about education in the appalachia and you don’t care that these low rates of education mean higher rates of poverty and child poverty, which persist over the years. rural children are twice as likely to live in areas with persistent poverty. you care that poverty stricken children are statistically less likely to not have timely immunizations, have higher delinquency rates, and have lower academic achievement — but only when we’re talking about urban areas outside of the appalachia.
people in our region die earlier than most. mortality rates are higher in the appalachia, and they’re even higher for people of color that live in the appalachia. suicide rates are higher than anywhere else in the country by 17% — it’s 31% higher in central appalachia, and in rural areas within the appalachia, it’s 27% higher than metro appalachia. cancer morality rate is 10% higher, and it’s 15% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. COPD mortality rate is 27% higher, and 55% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. injury mortality rate is 33% higher, and it’s 47% higher in rural appalachia than in metro appalachia. stroke mortality rate is 14% higher — and you guessed it’s, these rates are higher in rural areas vs metro areas by 8%.
the rate of Years of Potential Life Lost, which measures premmature mortality from all causes of death, is 25% higher in appalachia, and 40% higher in rural vs metro areas.
the appalachia has an opioid epidemic. in 2015, our rate of death with drugs was 65% higher than the national average. 69% of those drug deaths were from opioids. these deaths have a connection to our poverty and education rates. the poorer you are, and the less educated you are, the more likely you are to die from an opioid death.
when i say “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies”, that doesn’t mean i think you’re being racist against white people (and again — the majority of people who claim this also happen to be white 🙄). i say that because you are perpetuating extremely toxic rhetoric about our region, you are promoting stigma, you are encouraging blatant classism, and you are furthering the idea that we somehow “deserve” it because our elected officials vote republican. it’s not cute. stop acting like none of us have the right to call you out on your classist bullshit. like i’m sorry if this comes off as too aggressive but i am sooooo sick of y’all thinking it’s funny that our region is suffering.
and before anyone asks me for resources and links: google exists. i did my research and you can do it too.
a big problem with the people who say stuff like this is they don’t realize just how many “rednecks and hillbillies” are non-white. there are so many appalachian and southern POC that also suffer through these conditions but people like to cling to their idea that the only hicks are white hicks, so they couldnt care less if places like WV or KY just fell off the map, and to hell with who it is that’s actually hurting.
people also act like it’s only appalachian and southern whites that voted for trump and that vote republican and it’s not true – half of all white women voted for trump. the rich ones and the poor ones. it’s not a problem that’s tied specifically to southern and appalachian white people but it’s an easy scapegoat and allows people to not think about what they’re actually saying.
as long as they can say that it’s just them shitty racist white hicks that are suffering, then they don’t have to actually care about them. they can ignore them and not do anything to help them. like another person said in the notes, the teacher strike in WV is a better example of leftist organization than a whole lot of the people saying shit about hillbillies have ever done but they don’t care about that because, well, theyre just white hillbillies so what does it matter?
Why does everything have to be a race issue? Can’t we just see people in poverty as just people in poverty and help them?
This is important. I’m not saying there aren’t “racist white hicks” living in the Appalachia. But as someone who is from that area, everyone of every color is suffering.
My hometown has around 30,000 people. 16% of those people are living in poverty. That’s 4,800 people. A lot of these people are children. How do i know? I’ve worked in the school system and Ive bagged up food items and placed them in kids lockers while everyone was in class so they didn’t get embarrassed but they would have food over the weekend since they wouldn’t be getting meals from school.
The median household income for my town? $37,048. The median household income for my state? $68,114.
Its hard to live on $38,000 a year. And that’s the average of TWO income families. It’s nothing. Especially when the cost of living comes into play.
I don’t like when any person, but especially an innocent child has to suffer or go hungry.
The bizarre nature of the US economic system means that poor people in the US can have a smartphone (under $30) and a choice between 20 different colors of $1 socks but then have no choice but to die of a tooth infection because that costs hundreds of dollars in order to access treatment.
This shit that “nobody starves, doesn’t have running water, has untreated parasitical diseases, etc. in the US” is flat out nonsense. And I can’t imagine how these beliefs could withstand any actual extended contact with poor communities in the US unless someone was intentionally refusing to acknowledge what was right in front of their eyes.
Because america is so segregated. Not only by race but by class.
I grew up 7 miles from the poorest county in America, in one of the wealthiest, and didn’t even know until I read about it in college.
America is amazingly fucked up.
I grew up where poaching was a big part of the diet, where low tides had the beaches covered with poor families gathering shellfish. Huge home gardens were the difference between survival. And my stepdad was lucky and normally employed. Until he broke his back in a mill, but at that time they had training programs and he got his GED and Assoc. Degree and combined with his experience he got a good job, we could actually buy all we needed in stores. Amazing.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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