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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAppalachia: The big white ghetto
The irony of this is that most of these folks dependent on government are registered Republicans.
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http://theweek.com/articles/452321/appalachia-big-white-ghetto
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THERE ARE LOTS of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Breadhued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation, as peasants. Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky's Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. and they are getting shorter, women's life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007.
If the people here weren't 98.5 percent white, we'd call it a reservation.
Driving through these hills, you aren't in the Appalachia of Elmore Leonard's Justified or squatting with Lyndon Johnson on Tom Fletcher's front porch in Martin County, a scene famously photographed by Walter Bennett of Time, the image that launched the so-called War on Poverty. The music isn't "Shady Grove," it's Kanye West. There is still coal mining which, at $25 an hour or more, provides one of the more desirable occupations outside of government work but the jobs are moving west, and Harlan County, like many coal-country communities, has lost nearly half of its population over the past 30 years.
There is here a strain of fervid and sometimes apocalyptic Christianity, and visions of the Rapture must have a certain appeal for people who already have been left behind. Like its black urban counterparts, the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. As they go, businesses disappear, institutions fall into decline, social networks erode, and there is little or nothing left over for those who remain
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Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)But then again if we could put a bit of manufactory in the area it would surely get good dedeciated workers.
Brigid
(17,621 posts)-- Apocryphal quote from an Irishman when asked why he left Ireland. Same applies here.
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)Factory jobs with livable wages and regular income.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)So even if they get welfare they pretend that they don't and act like they can pick up themselves from their bootstraps when in reality many can't.
kentuck
(111,079 posts)...with a family, but you cannot find a job, what do you do?
Do you steal? Do you try to sign up on "disability"? Do you get involved in the illegal drug business? If your family is hungry, how do you survive? How do you eat? How do you provide shelter over your head? These are questions these folks face each and every day?
Even if we grant that they have become "dependent" upon the "draw", how do we fix it? Do we just let them fend for themselves without any government assistance? Republicans are very good at describing and defining the problem, but they offer few solutions? They offer platitudes about bootstraps and opportunity and freedom and the people can eat only so much of that.
Brigid
(17,621 posts)Documentary was made in 1976, but nothing has changed, except, apparently, to get worse.
cwydro
(51,308 posts)I visited that area during that time.
Brigid
(17,621 posts)Unlike "Matewan," it got the treatment it deserved. Funny thing about "Harlan County" -- Barbara Koppel set out to document a UMW election. She went to Kentucky to get some background, and got far more than she bargained for.
kentuck
(111,079 posts)I was on a construction crew that put power lines over the mountains from Pineville to Harlan. You can still see the steel towers that we built on the mountaintops.
However, it is a different world today. It is much worse off. It is in a deep depression. People have become "dependent" on government. There are no jobs and no way for a lot of people to survive. There is a drug epidemic that is probably the worst in our nation. It is a sad state of affairs. Republicans offer nothing but the promise of bootstraps...
nomorenomore08
(13,324 posts)advocate - these people would be starving to death.
ReRe
(10,597 posts)... that piece on Grundy, VA (right across the border of eastern KY) that appeared the other day. The other article I mention was about the number of people in Grundy, VA who were on disability. Poverty is a killer, for sure. Thanks for sharing the link and reminding us that this never-ending sad story still exists in the "richest country in the world."
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Why not give more money if the kids succeed in school?
Because Republicans wouldn't see them as poor and deserving and would demand that the aid be means and needs tested.l
You can't win with the greed and pettiness and nastiness of Republicans.
This article would have been worth something had it contrasted the misery of the people in the Appalachians with the moral nothingness of the CEOs that take huge salaries and whine about taxes going to the poor not just in Apalachia but across the country.
The alternative to poverty is a middle class income. But to have a middle class income, there have to be jobs and opportunity. The article does not suggest any way to bring jobs and opportunity the Appalachian mountains.
What a waste of ink. I traveled with my family to the Appalachians back in the 1950s during the Eisenhower era. The present was just as bleak then as it is now in that area. Let's see. We had Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and to Bushes. And none of them improved the lot in the Appalachians. At least Johnson tried. What a useless article.
LeftyMom
(49,212 posts)The only people quoted are the police chief, the unnamed shopkeeper, and Nicholas Kristof. The latter is quoted rather late and very little considering the whole thing is essentially a rewrite of his already terrible piece on the same subject.
LeftyMom
(49,212 posts)daredtowork
(3,732 posts)This sounds condescending: it is the sort of language the cool, middle class academic observer would use to analyze the poor, stupid redneck "subject".
There was a post on DU about "the sickest town in America" a couple of days ago that I thought clarified the situation a lot. Here was a county full of people on disability benefits, with no other means to survive - and who came out politically to "stop Obama". Why? Because they believed EPA regulations had contributed to putting them out of work. Whether that's true or not, the underlying issue there is that in Virginia (and I can personally vouch for this) there is heavy shame involved in taking disability benefits even if you are indisputably disabled and everyone else around you is on disability benefits! The culture of human dignity is around working. Even if that work involves being exploited by Robber Baron capitalists - at least those greedy bastards at the top somehow made things so you got a job. When unions were strong the same thing could be said of them - they made a niche for you to get a job. The important thing, especially for men, is to "be a man" and earn a living through an honest day's work.
The rage against Obama is somewhat an externalization of guilt and rage people feel at themselves when they can't meet the expectations of set by the society around them. In Virginia, and I'm sure in other Red states, that means having a job. The GOP have this situation wonderfully rigged in their political favor since once Big Government was reduced, only the private economy dangles the jobs. If there is mass unemployment, it's because Democratic employment policies aren't working (even though the GOP has been blocking most of them in Congress). If there is healthy employment, the GOP shines a light on the drop out rate or looks at the quality of the jobs. But frankly, the GOP is right to question the meaning of the Recovery: they know it's been poor because they've done everything within their power to make sure it would be poor under a Democrat President. They know there is not much he can do about it because Government is Small and not all that powerful. Private capital is powerful, and private capital is interested in exploiting people not upholding the greater good.
So...if Obama really wanted to be smooth back in, say 2010, he should have revved up efforts around union support and hiring. He should have expanded government in the name of direct hiring (and provision of more services and development of infrastructure) instead of cutting back. He should have set up outposts of government employment in these rural areas or facilitated the movement of these families so they could get the frak out of dodge.
It is the fact Obama left them with no choice but to apply for SSI/SSDI in a system where it takes up to 3 years to apply (and you can't work in the mean time) in an area that humiliates you for doing so that drives people to make a show of "stopping Obama".
Just my two cents.
CBGLuthier
(12,723 posts)to tell them how miserable they all should be.
Oh well, they did not think much of Rory Kennedy's work and I doubt they would think much of this tripe either.
JonLP24
(29,322 posts)why a concentrated economic effort bought & paid for on their politicians but discredited with the Great Depression now they're alternative theories that Roosevelt's subsidies, safety nets, & infrastructure jobs policies slowed the recovery when it was "trickle-down" (a phrase used by Hoover era Republicans) and its effects on under consumption which was a killer during the Great Depression. That had to do something to get spending back into the economy. But he is that key guy that speaks their language that the wall-street Republicans are looking out for them and more government is a way for them to keep tabs on you & also the wedge issues when it comes to the Christian & evangelical base.
I shit you not, I heard someone object to Obamacare because she doesn't to give all her information to the government. The irony alluded her as well as the person she said that to because she was standing in a food stamp line, on her way to give all her information to the government. Dead serious. I was amazed her own words went over her head & her friend's head.
appalachiablue
(41,127 posts)Anyone know what's going on? Hope everything's ok.