I agree. For some reason, though, when it happens to black families, there isn’t the same level of concern and understanding.
I doubt if many of them would relocate. It’s the only life they’ve ever known. You’d have to get them early in life, before their dreams were shattered one by one. And they would have to want to go, would really want to do better and avoid that fate.
I have an equal moral duty to help all poor Americans. Imagine that the resentment and zero-sum thinking that has found a home among the poor faded and was replaced with a coalition across racial and ethnic lines. That coalition could achieve great things for this country. I’m sure that legions of liberals would support those efforts that might include properly funded schools for all children, affordable colleges, affordable healthcare with a desire to help all Americans have a brighter and more productive future.
I like this thread. Thanks for sharing. Our moral responsibility is real. We have, perhaps unknowingly, but truthfully been complicit in creation of much of the current economic situation. I’m thinking of big coal and the bosses that gleefully raped mountains and valleys, streams, skies and neighborhoods for generations to give us cheap electricity, steel, and heat in the dead of winter. We preferred ignorance about where that energy came from, and at what price. Not unlike blood diamonds, “Oh, honey it looks so wonderful on your finger!”. Again, this is an illustration of how we are all interdependent. No easy solutions at this point but true progress can be made when we work together.
Don’t worry. The GOP has solutions.
Freedom Caucus:
Impose a work requirement on those receiving disability checks.
Rand Paul:
Allow private, for-profit sale of organs, so people don’t have to become dependent on the government just because they can no longer work.
There’s a good piece on This American Life on the disability subject. A TAL reporter was curious about a county in Alabama where a full 25% of working age adults are on disability.
She found that a large number of those on disability had used the same doctor. Many of them also seemed no more disabled than some of the people she works with. Fraud, right? No. The doctor pointed out that many of the people on disability are unable to stand for long hours at a time, and that there are very, very few jobs in the area where you aren’t on your feet most of the time. The dream job of one woman the reporter talked to was a clerk job at the local Social Security office – it was the only job the woman knew of that was done sitting.
There’s a response piece from the WaPo’s wonkblog that provides additional context. The two pieces together are a quick education on a topic a lot of us have been lucky enough to mostly ignore.
Got to have people with cash or very good (“Cadillac” even?) insurance for a chiropractor to get paid. If the free clinic is doing all that business and he doesn’t have a real good ambulance chaser or disability lawyer, he’s going hungry.
You won’t see this one trotted out nearly as much as Reagan’s welfare queen.
Can’t get the meth back, and single-wides have zero resale value.
@chelsea530 so does the one about free milk and a cow. Also applies to his lawyers’ assertion that he’s always come back from his foreign jaunts. He had no reason to stay away when all that nice blue state money was dripping into his hands.
@ncsteve As always, an impassioned and insightful look at an intractable problem. The assonance wasn’t deliberate. I have inish-laws who have done the same thing. The manufacturing base walked out twenty years ago, and people drive to the Wal-mart 35 miles away for third shift $9.00 / hour jobs and think they’ve got it made. People 15 - 35 haven’t known anything outside their county, so they smoke and screw and let their anger simmer until someone like Dump comes along. Even the guys who joined the military and traveled the world come home to nothing rather than try to find something somewhere else. It’s frustrating to see them living like this and frustration easily turns into anger.
You’ll love this: Ralph Stanley & the Obama Girl with Eric Conn. And so much more. LOL
Endless fun:
Many more on You Tube.
You need to check out the videos I posted down thread. 
Amen to that.
And all the pinheads who sustain Frankenputz will use something like this as a “hammer” to excuse trying to knock hundreds if not thousands of genuinely disabled people off of Disability. I can still hear that Greasy Haired B-movie actor ranting about “welfare queens” while he took money away from people in need.
Same Republican slime…The only thing that seems to be different are the slimeballs who sell it as “reform” to low foreheads.
First, thank you so much for putting a human face on the misery. Here and elsewhere I too often see “liberals” mirroring the worst of GOP/Trump supporters’ traits and it’s really disturbing.
Now, however, I’m going to be hard on these folks myself…in a different way. I get the sense they could do more to help themselves but the will to do so simply isn’t there. It’s much easier and also more gratifying to whine about how unfair The System is and to seek out scapegoats. I get that this comes from wanting to feel better about one’s self and one’s situation. But that doesn’t justify it.
Example of that I’m talking about: In West Virginia, there’s opportunity for businesses based on wind power. There are local people seeking to promote that as a way forward. But it runs into the resistance of other locals who are the greater majority and believe that coal jobs would come back…if only the damn EPA would stop oppressing us…if only Obama’s war on white people would stop holding us back…if only, if only, if only. It’s easier than facing reality. I don’t believe it’s utterly intractable. However, they need to become willing to help themselves before anything can change for them.
I agree. You know who knows exactly what conditions are, and have been, in Appalachia? Mitch McConnell and all KY reps and senators. I hold them responsible for not lifting one damned finger to help bring improvements and new types of income-making into their area.
Appalachia was not inherently poor: it became that way because of an underappreciated environmental catastrophe, and because moneyed interests (coal companies) staged a colonial style takeover of the region.
People do not appreciate much the American chestnut supported both wildlife and human populations in the area. This is not just a North American phenomenon. Italian peasants in certain mountainous areas depended on chestnuts, in places that were too steep to plow: that life was probably less backbreaking than traditional agriculture.
The colonial takeover of the area by coal companies was so complete, that when my great grandfather ran for sheriff, even his brothers wouldn’t vote for him for fear of retribution. During a union dispute in Matewan, an elected sheriff was killed, probably by coal company goons; the murder was never solved. More recently, Don Blankenship was convicted, not for turning 27 miners into charcoal, but for misleading investors. Joe Manchin stated he was surprised that Blankenship was convicted of anything.
A Hopi Indian acquaintance of mine observed that Appalachian people deal with obstacles similar to that of American Indians.
A lot of the young males exhibit dependency to an abnormal degree - they are afraid of becoming independent and leaving home, and cling to Mommy and their relatives, and would NEVER leave to take a job in a new city. I’ve seen the mentality in my husband’s Appalachian-derived family, and in a couple documentaries following a family for a couple years in a Ky mountain town. In both families, the son/cousin/relative who went to the big city and established a normal working-class/middle-class life was seen as a traitor/deserter by the relatives who remained in the hometown. (Gettin’ above ther raisin’) It’s a cultural mindset that is foreign to people from the East and the Midwest, where most of my relatives came from. They are the antithesis of pioneers, and are very susceptible to drug addiction and depression, two conditions extremely common in Appalachia. Have NO idea what the solution would be, other than to break the hundreds-year-old cultural traditions by sending the young to boarding schools in more normal towns. Vouchers anyone?
This was a stellar series of posts, NCSteve, and you’ve got a history of great posts. These were head and shoulders even above those. Thank you.
This is a stellar series of posts from a regularly stellar poster. Thanks, ncsteve.
Seems like you might have read Hillbilly Elegy, or perhaps not bothered. I read it, and was left with a lot of questions. Pervading the book is an attitude he describes early: his grandfather’s hatred of the union and love of his employer. This was when they were prosperous, after they had moved to Ohio. So basically, they love the man, hate those that could help them.
It’s clear JD has the same attitude. He wrote for Frum, and without a single shred of evidence in the entire book, as far as I can tell, asserts that liberal solutions do more harm then good.
Where does this attitude originate? I’m a western girl, have no real idea, but it seems to my ignorant eyes a lot like the civil war, where poor whites died to save rich whites’ slaves. Why love the owner, who hopes to screw you, and hate the union that fought for your pension and benefits that allowed you to support your grandchildren in some semblance of stability?
Okay, so your answer is stamping out cultural traditions you deem counterproductive, implementing policies to break up blood ties and traditions that are essential parts of people’s sense of self and of place, and the implementation of policies encouraging relocation (as if the existing incentives weren’t sufficiently powerful) and assimilation into cultural templates you deem more “successful” and “functional.”
Tell me, would you say the same thing about Native Americans on reservations or Inuit villages in Alaska?
If not, please explain. Because they have much the same problems for much the same reasons.