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Hello All, and welcome to the Rural Poverty Thread. I'm Toph, and I live in the poorest county in my state. We rank lowest in education, have an effective 25% illiteracy rate (11% according to the census, 25% according to our local county literacy program. Guess which one I believe), is 93% white, and ~45% of the population are 45 or older. I work in a public library, take Paxil for obsessive compulsive disorder, work a lot with various charities to keep this dying show on the road, and drink. A lot. So, let's talk about a subject this forum loves to hate, rural poverty. Before we begin, a few caveats: I can only address the USA, but rural poverty is a worldwide phenomenon. I am also located in New England, so the culture and systems up here are different from the Ozarks, the Mississippi Delta, the Dakotas, the Rio Grande Valley, the Cotton Belt... You’ll also notice that I take a kind of wry tone throughout. This is intentional and for effect. This is also just a starting point, not an exhaustive list. I invite and encourage other posters to chime in and contribute. I’ll be adding to and editing the OP as we go along. What's it like?  Earlier today, I was at my Rotary Club's weekly luncheon, eating with a few of the local factory owners, the police chief, and the pastor from one of the local churches. It's weird enough that a librarian gets to enter into such a club, but in this town, I count as part of the "upper crust" of village society, because I make more than $35k a year and have a master's degree. During the committee reports, our weekly food handouts attracted about 7,000 people. There are only 15,000 in the town/village (the village is inside the town), and perhaps 45,000 if you counted the other towns in the vicinity. There's one hospital in the county, luckily located in my town, and anything very serious needs to be sent two hours to a more major city. We just had a drop in clinic open this year. It’s the only one in the entire county. I live in a gigantic house that costs, monthly, less than the rent on my 700 sq ft. apartment did in Texas. There are a lot of people who treat the town as their bedroom, and commute an hour each way into the surrounding cities (one county over) for work. They live here, but don’t really contribute to the economics of the village. The village took a nosedive about 50 years ago when the two major factories closed down, and limps by with the remaining three smaller ones plus a small satellite of a community college. We're relatively prosperous compared to the surrounding area. The army closed its recruiting office here due to a lack of applicants. There are homeless everywhere, but there isn't a single homeless shelter in the entire county. Most people are convinced that that's a problem only cities have, despite the churches doing their best to provide. Because I'm up north, what few Black and Hispanic kids we do have play with the white kids and no one bats an eye. The adults sometimes get a little ornery at one another, and back when I was working in the lumber business, I was regularly treated to racist rants, but the kids are much more interested in Pokemon and Minecraft than what color someone's skin is.The Black and Hispanic populations are ~3%. I see them everyday due to the nature of my work, but they're just aren't a lot living out here. No doubt this is different elsewhere in the States. http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/18526/why-the-left-isnt-talking-about-rural-american-poverty posted:Lisa Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California at Davis, studies the intersection of law and rural livelihoods. She also runs a site called the Legal Ruralism Blog, where she writes about the problem of rural American poverty. Pruitt grew up in a working-class rural Newton County in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas. She tells Rural America In These Times that one important misconception about rural poverty is that it is an exclusively white problem. While the majority of rural Americans struggling with poverty are white, Pruitt says, the racial makeup of the rural poor is far more diverse than the image most Americans realize.  What Happened? Basically, no one gives a poo poo about the countryside except Republicans, and even there, it was only for strategic reasons. The natural tendency, for obvious reasons, is to deploy resources where people are, and so if NYC or Chicago have more population than your entire state, why bother spending any time or effort on those people? The dream of agrarian enclaves that Jefferson imagined was just that, an idle fantasy. But, thanks to the power of patriotic imagery, the Constitution, and some trickery, the Repubs were able to gently caress the country right good, and make the rural areas think it wasn't their fault. In the wake of LBJ’s transformation into a civil rights icon, there was plenty of nascent anger just waiting to be tapped into. So long as you could blame The Other, those uppity jerks from the university who think they’re better than you, those scheming foreigners who are out to steal your job and rape your women (be they Japanese, Chinese, Mexican... it doesn’t really matter), The Blacks who want it better than you because of something or another that happened a hundred years ago... As you probably know, the House gives out seats based on population, and the Senate gives 2 no matter what. This gives the Senate an immense rural bias, because Wyoming or North Dakota have as many Senators as California or Texas. A little gerrymandering when the time is right to concentrate the cities strategically, and the rural areas can become much more powerful than they ought to. Pander to them by waving the flag in their faces, talking about “Real America”, and getting them upset about those horrible people in the cities, and they’ll forget all about how badly they’re getting hosed by taxes, a lack of social services, access to medical care, and other things that the civilized world should entail. The latest nail in the coffin came in the 1970s with the Southern Strategy. Focused racism swept Nixon, Ford, and Reagan into office, and allowed for massive deregulation of trade, and let all those major companies move their production lines to China, Sri Lanka, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and other places with no labor protection, no minimum wage, and no safety standards. Factory towns closed up. That trickled down as all the secondary businesses started to shutter as well. No need for restaurants to feed the factory workers, stores to clothe them, realtors to sell them houses, dealerships to sell them cars, salons to cut their hair... Clearly, this was the fault of The Foreigners, not the American companies who lobbied for the bills, or the politicians who were well paid to support it. By providing a scapegoat, and continuing to give the rural whites someone to vent their anger on, they avoided taking the blame themselves. It was the fault of the liberal unions who made it unprofitable to build things in the US (because things like health and safety standards, scaling wages that let you make $60+/hr for factory work, eliminate being paid in company scrip only redeemable at the company store... gently caress those, right?), the fault of those big city fat cats who just pry on the working man (because there are no factories located inside the city limits, no reason to stand in solidarity with your brothers and sisters, no reason to ally with like-minded professions like the Teamsters and Stevedores...), the fault of those scheming Chinese communists (who are working with American companies, funny how that works, right?). Basically, the blame gets assigned anywhere but “our team”, because if the guys “we” voted into office are at fault, then the mindset of “gently caress you, I worked hard and got mine” becomes “I worked hard, got hosed, and he got his”, which is simply unacceptable in a just world. At the same time as this was happening, industrial progress was still chugging along, and automated farming became easier and easier. An industry that once employed 41% of the population (circa 1900) now employs less than 2%. From that same report: “Since 1900, the number of farms has fallen by 63 percent, while the average farm size has risen 67 percent. Farm operations have become increasingly specialized as well—from an average of about five commodities per farm in 1900 to about one per farm in 2000—reflecting the production and marketing efficiencies gained by concentration on fewer commodities, as well as the effects of farm price and income policies that have reduced the risk of depending on returns from only one or a few crops. All of this has taken place with almost no variation in the amount of land being farmed.” Farms basically became specialized, automated factories that didn’t need as many workers anymore. What few workers they did need could be imported cheaply from Mexico, paid cents on the dollar because they were terrified of being reported to the police for even minor infractions (whether they were legal migrants or not), and anyways, no one else was going to do that work. Even what few permanent jobs there were are just barely clinging on. You work at the local Burger King so that the guy who worked at the gas station could eat lunch so you could buy gas to go work at Burger King. A little is syphoned off the top each transaction to go to the corporate headquarters. It's roughly the same problem that many cities in the rust belt experienced, only without the surrounding infrastructure to keep things running.  So why don't they just move? A lot of reasons. The snarky answer is to ask yourself "Why don't the Native Americans just get off the reservation and go to the city?" (If that sounds offensive, it's because it is. But seriously, the reservations count as rural, they are poor as gently caress, and supervised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which doesn’t know its rear end from a tea kettle when it comes to providing social services for what are sometimes completely isolated populations and impoverished who already have very good reason not to trust anything the government says. They had to have their internet privileges taken away because they couldn’t keep passwords secure.) The serious answers: --Many of these people have lived here for all their lives. This is their home. Their parents, their grandparents, they lived here too. Their church is here, their bar, their friends. They have a culture, they have traditions, they have things they like that they wouldn't find in "the city". --The city wouldn't be any better. You'd trade a crumbling house with a big backyard for a roach-filled apartment and the streets. Still no entry level jobs. Still the same liberals looking down on you for decisions you didn't know you were making 20-30 years ago. Still the same conservatives who think of you as voting capital and/or garbage to be crammed into a booth once every 4 years. Only now you're cramped, and you get to listen to your upstairs neighbor bang on the floor with pots and pans all night, rather than the wolves howling. --They can't afford it. Moving costs money, and if you already can barely get by, how are you going to manage to get buy in a place where things are even more expensive, more competitive, more unforgiving? Why should I care? You probably shouldn’t. There are many groups that have it just as bad, and are more deserving. We should especially let the poor racist white people should slowly die off. They lie in the bed they, their parents, and grandparents made for them, and should be doomed to die undereducated, illiterate, drug addicted, and isolated. We should make no effort to change them and debride one of the biggest rots on the underbelly of the US. If they don’t live in the city, they aren’t human beings. Or we could be human beings, care about more than one thing at a time, look at the whole picture, and not resort to lazy stereotyping. (The above was written after an argument with some folks who just can’t see how I can live “out in the middle of nowhere”, and they can’t do an impression of countryfolk to save their lives. If you’re going to mock, at least do the accent right! My apologies if I’ve offended anyone) Also, because these folks exert an above average effect on national politics, this is a demographic that needs to be dealt with and understood. It’d dying off, but it’s not dead yet. Why do you think Donald Trump is a current presidential candidate?  Tell me again about the lesbian farmers, Rush Issues Minority Rights -- This is a big one right here. The unspoken problem is that, despite all the crowing and hollering about immigration, the US doesn't let barely anyone in. US Farming was built on the backs of slaves and migrant labor. Some And, of course, there are a shitton of non-whites who live in the country too. Almost every Indian Reservation is on rural land. Black people are finally getting some traction when it comes to literally decades of discrimination from USDA officials. Infrastructure -- poo poo costs money, and the reason why cities have more is because it makes more sense to build something where people will use it. A mall isn't going to go up where customers have to drive two hours to get to it. A hospital isn't going to be built where patients can't reach it. The only reason the countryside has electricity is because the Federal government passed a law mandating that every house be hooked up to the power grid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gombnuYhdQo Education -- This is getting better in some places, worse in others. Basically, you’ve got a whole generation of people who were proud of being ignorant, and now that you can’t get by without knowing things, it’s slowly turning into a cult of ignorant engineers. You’ll perhaps have folks who learn just enough practical science and trade mechanics to get by while still insisting that the world works in ways that it simply doesn’t. This is exacerbated by understaffed classrooms, a lack of access to Honors and IB programs, food and shelter insecurity, and an ever larger motivational/emotional problem -- when you grow up with nothing, nowhere, and you're seen as the scum of the earth, it's hard to think that you're going to do anything but what your parents did; you never see anyone or anything different the way you do in the city, and those transformative moments where you meet someone cool or see something that clicks and makes you want to pursue a particular career are plain hard to come by when life is just school/home/church/Walmart, with maybe a special trip to Burger King on the weekends. And if you have a disability or special needs, well... Best of luck. Drug use -- Holy poo poo are drugs prevalent. Up north, heroin. Down south, meth. There’s something about the combination of a lack of opportunity, a stagnant culture, and existential ennui that makes a $20 injection much more preferable to a $5 bottle of vodka. Not that there aren’t a huge share of alcoholics as well, but if you need something that really fucks you up and makes everything go away, well, that’s the appeal. It's also one of the few ways to make money that "anyone" can get into. Things to read and groups to follow: http://www.ers.usda.gov/ -- The USDA does great work researching basically everything to do with anything outside the city limits. Historically, they were terrible with minorities, but this has gotten better in the past few years. They were involved in a big class action lawsuit a few years back for discrimination against women and Latino farmers, which is still in the process of being resolved, though the deadline for submitting claims has passed. Their demographical research is very good. http://www.nationalblackfarmersassociation.org/ - The National Black Farmers Association does a ton of advocacy and lobbying on behalf of, well, black farmers. http://www.nlfrta.org/ - The National Latino Farmers and Ranchers Trade Association is the primary advocacy and lobbying group for Latino farmers. http://www.ncai.org/ -- The National Congress of American Indians is the oldest and largest lobbying group for, you guessed it... http://legalruralism.blogspot.com/ -- Lisa Pruitt, who I quoted above, is a UC Davis Law Professor, and a great writer about the intersection of the law and rural poverty. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 16:36
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Thanks for the write up. Would you agree that education (and the corresponding reaction of anti-intellectualism) is one of the biggest hurdles in helping improve the lot of rural livelihoods? And if so, are you aware of any programs that have helped to ameliorate that vicious circle (education is bad so rural interests grow more anti-intellectual, such that their voting makes their education systems to get worse)?
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Aug 26, 2016 17:41
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Great thread idea. I'd like to point out that there are government services aimed at the rural poor, but there's so little knowledge of it I'm not sure everyone is taking advantage of it. Meet the USDA Rural Development program. A program aimed at rural communities that aims to help out with pretty much everything under the sun. Might be a good idea to add to the OP. http://www.rd.usda.gov/ http://www.rd.usda.gov/about-rd/initiatives USDA Website posted:
I suspect a lot of folks in rural areas have no ideas these programs exist, which is a shame because I think they could all really help out the rural poor.
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Aug 26, 2016 19:12
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ComradeCosmobot posted:Thanks for the write up. Would you agree that education (and the corresponding reaction of anti-intellectualism) is one of the biggest hurdles in helping improve the lot of rural livelihoods? Better education would help with anti-intellectual mindsets but I don't see how that improves the economic situation of a town who's only job creation mechanism was moved overseas. It certainly won't make them vote Democrat if that's what you're thinking.
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Aug 26, 2016 19:43
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readingatwork posted:Better education would help with anti-intellectual mindsets but I don't see how that improves the economic situation of a town who's only job creation mechanism was moved overseas. It certainly won't make them vote Democrat if that's what you're thinking. What about remote/telework? If you have an educated workforce in rural America, companies could hire them at cheaper rates and have them be basically work-from-home resources that don't need to be paid as much as someone living in NYC/LA/etc.
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Aug 26, 2016 19:51
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Education is not the silver bullet to ending poverty, either in the inner-city or the country.
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Aug 26, 2016 19:55
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"More education" isn't going to accomplish much if there isn't a demand for educated workers. If anything it just encourages some of your best and brightest people to leave the community and start lives elsewhere. I think people mostly bring it up because it plays into this just-world ideology that struggling rural communities are full of bad people who deserve to suffer.
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Aug 26, 2016 19:55
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ComradeCosmobot posted:Thanks for the write up. Would you agree that education (and the corresponding reaction of anti-intellectualism) is one of the biggest hurdles in helping improve the lot of rural livelihoods? My personal feeling is that, while improved education would obviously be a good thing for a variety of reasons, it wouldn't do much to fix their economic situation*. More skilled jobs wouldn't just create themselves (to a significant extent, at least) because more people started getting a better education. Our society will continue to need the same number of retail/food service/etc workers regardless of whether more people start going to college. The solution should be to ensure any job provides a reasonable standard of living, not to try and increase the number of people competing for a limited number of skilled jobs. So basically I think the core problem is one of simply giving a decent standard of living to the poor, and everything else can come after that (or at the same time I guess, but the point is that it should be lower priority). Stuff like direct wealth transfers or increasing the minimum wage are the most simple and probably effective ways to do this. Giving money to poor people, especially those in rural areas, can do a lot to stimulate their economies. It creates a feedback loop of sorts where more money -> more spending at local businesses -> local businesses hire more people -> people get more money ->(repeat). Legislation that creates an incentive for corporations to hire people in the these areas (or, even better, just punishes them for investing outside of the country) is also a good idea. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not sure if there's a single wealthy country that didn't become that way through at least somewhat protectionist trade policy. Obviously it's good to trade with other countries, but I'm pretty sure the cons of exporting labor (people having and spending less money) outweigh the pros (cheaper goods). I think the reason why wealthy/powerful people support such policy is that they enjoy the benefits (cheaper goods) without suffering from the downsides (decrease in well-paying jobs and harm to more rural communities), which mostly just affect the poor. * Regarding this whole point, the general focus on equal opportunity and education is a BIG problem I have with American liberal ideology. It's a viewpoint that tries to avoid the obvious solution of "just give these people money" because, ultimately, liberals are at least partially victim to the same "just world" ideology as conservatives. The only difference is they think that things would work out fine as long as everyone was educated and enlightened. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 19:57
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I think the time for small towns in the middle of nowhere has come to an end. We need to talk about whether or not these towns should exist. If there's a way to buy out everyone in a town and just bulldoze/let nature take its course and start clumping people into ever-larger towns until there are swaths of gorgeous countryside and parks between commercial/industrial hubs of cities, that would solve many problems, such as people in need of urgent care being far from hospitals. You could even do it voluntarily, by (at the state or county level) no longer providing services/road repair/water&sewage. People can like their ancestral homes and their birthplace, but that doesn't give those places a right to exist.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:12
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axeil posted:What about remote/telework? If you have an educated workforce in rural America, companies could hire them at cheaper rates and have them be basically work-from-home resources that don't need to be paid as much as someone living in NYC/LA/etc. Technology - Last mile internet is incredibly expensive and despite the government passing laws and dumping money on the ISPs to fix this problem, most of rural america has dial-up, satellite, or nothing. Money - who's paying for that internet and the computer to use it with, not to mention the electricity itself? Plus the smartphone wealthy city-based employers will assume every worker has. Education - Who pays for it? How does someone poor and remote get to it? Who covers child/elder care while it's happening, and makes up for the lost wages and/or provides a job that can work around school hours? What's the mechanism for providing remedial education in computer use, study skills, or even basic literacy? Health - Hard to see the screen if you can't afford glasses, hard to maintain even a work from home schedule if you've got untreated chronic illnesses or a drug addiction. Efficacy - Pretty much everything that can be useful as remote work already is. Domestically a lot of that's poo poo jobs like medical transcription and call center stuff. Money, even desperately needed money, only makes up for so much when the quality of the job is bad. More complicated or creative work is moving away from telecommuting because it adds so many frustrations - time zone differences, phone tag, etc. Competition - A recently re-trained rural worker is competing on the same footing as young college grads from higher social classes. Who's an employer going to pick, the twenty-year old down the block with a few internships under their belt and no kids to feed, or a 55-year-old coming from a completely different place culturally and geographically who has a lot of obligations in their life besides work?
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Aug 26, 2016 20:19
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I think the time for small towns in the middle of nowhere has come to an end. We need to talk about whether or not these towns should exist. If there's a way to buy out everyone in a town and just bulldoze/let nature take its course and start clumping people into ever-larger towns until there are swaths of gorgeous countryside and parks between commercial/industrial hubs of cities, that would solve many problems, such as people in need of urgent care being far from hospitals. This is exactly the kind of creepy totalitarian thought process that motivated High Modernist architects and urban planners like Le Courbusier and it resulted in some of the most horrific planning disasters of the 20th century.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:22
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I think the time for small towns in the middle of nowhere has come to an end. We need to talk about whether or not these towns should exist. If there's a way to buy out everyone in a town and just bulldoze/let nature take its course and start clumping people into ever-larger towns until there are swaths of gorgeous countryside and parks between commercial/industrial hubs of cities, that would solve many problems, such as people in need of urgent care being far from hospitals. That's the world I daydream about too, but I'm a lifelong city-dweller and I bet you are too. There are plenty of people in the world who actively hate city life, even suburban life. They want to live in the wilderness, or own and work a piece of land. That's their culture. People don't just like their homes, they love them, as deeply as they love their families. They do have a right to exist.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:23
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ITT goons who probably have a single relative they only see at Christmas discuss how many more additional tons of cheetos the economy could produce annually if we maximized efficiency by warehousing the entire population into MegaCity One.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:25
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:That's the world I daydream about too, but I'm a lifelong city-dweller and I bet you are too. There are plenty of people in the world who actively hate city life, even suburban life. They want to live in the wilderness, or own and work a piece of land. That's their culture. People don't just like their homes, they love them, as deeply as they love their families. They do have a right to exist. I think that Obama was more prescient and honest than anyone knew in 2008 with his quote about bitter old white people clinging to guns and religion, because all these little towns are dying. They have no real future, and they will either suffer brain drain as their children leave for a chance at a real life, or their progeny will enter a spiral of drug addiction as hillbilly heroin and bathtub meth are the only escape from a dreary weekend of shootin' over on Jeffy's farm and maybe goin' to the diner.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:29
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Technology - Last mile internet is incredibly expensive and despite the government passing laws and dumping money on the ISPs to fix this problem, most of rural america has dial-up, satellite, or nothing. These are fine points, but where you would begin if you were in charge?
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Aug 26, 2016 20:30
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I disagree, but I'm open to debate and discussion. Both of those things have already happened and neither justifies the forcible removal of people from their homes. Let's not forget that a huge chunk of the rural poor are native americans living on reservations. We corralled them there at gunpoint and now we're going to say gently caress you, move to a city? How well do you think that's going to go over?
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Aug 26, 2016 20:31
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Both of those things have already happened and neither justifies the forcible removal of people from their homes. Let's not forget that a huge chunk of the rural poor are native americans living on reservations. We corralled them there at gunpoint and now we're going to say gently caress you, move to a city? How well do you think that's going to go over? We even know how it's going to go over.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:36
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Both of those things have already happened and neither justifies the forcible removal of people from their homes. Let's not forget that a huge chunk of the rural poor are native americans living on reservations. We corralled them there at gunpoint and now we're going to say gently caress you, move to a city? How well do you think that's going to go over? Basically, you're asking me to have empathy for people who basically resent that I exist, actively work to make the nation worse by (predominantly) being regressive, racist shitheads and a net drain on our country's limited resources due to all the factors you mentioned earlier, all because maw and paw used to whack at the dirt around their falling-apart mobile home trying to farm and eking out a subsistence-level lifestyle? poo poo, I'm being nice by offering to Eminent Domain their homes and relocate them to at least the suburbs. Honestly I'm perfectly happy watching the rural areas shrivel and die, but I feel bad for the kids.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:38
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Helsing posted:This is exactly the kind of creepy totalitarian thought process that motivated High Modernist architects and urban planners like Le Courbusier and it resulted in some of the most horrific planning disasters of the 20th century. Not to mention that people who say "let nature take its course" ignore the fact that human existence is a part of nature and modern conservation efforts have ceased to eject people from the land they live on simply to create more nature reserves. The Atlantic ran an article that touched on the subject of this thread. White Trash is worth checking out. Also the article disagrees with the OP's assertion that these people are Trump voters: quote:They are also unsatisfying as explanations for what is happening out there. Williamson, for one, mischaracterizes the typical Trump voter. As exit polls show, the candidate’s base is not the truly bereft white underclass Williamson derides. Those Americans are, by and large, not voting at all, as I’m often reminded when reporting in places like Appalachia, where turnout rates are the lowest in the country. People voting for Trump are mostly a notch higher on the economic ladder—in a position to feel exactly the resentment that Williamson himself feels toward the shiftless needy. As for liberals’ diagnosis that a major public-health crisis is rooted in racial envy, it fails to square with, among other things, the fact that blacks and Hispanics have hardly been flourishing themselves. Yes, there’s an African American president, but by many metrics the Great Recession was even worse for minorities than for whites. I'm not sure if this correct, though, I'm sure Trump support varies in different parts of the country, but it seems like the truly poor that get blamed for propping up the regressive policies that work against their interest aren't directly engaged in the American political process at all. Dreylad fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 20:39
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I think the time for small towns in the middle of nowhere has come to an end. We need to talk about whether or not these towns should exist. If there's a way to buy out everyone in a town and just bulldoze/let nature take its course and start clumping people into ever-larger towns until there are swaths of gorgeous countryside and parks between commercial/industrial hubs of cities, that would solve many problems, such as people in need of urgent care being far from hospitals. Welcome to City 17! You have selected or been selected to join us here in... Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:How about we remove all the white people to cities and give the rest of the country back to indigenous peoples? This is a really monstrous thing to say and you're no better than the people you claim hate you. axeil fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 20:39
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The poor and uneducated it's still socially acceptable to openly hate. My best friend grew up in one of these towns. She escaped to college and clawed her way up into grad school. Now she listens to her suburban and urban classmates and professors talk poo poo about these "toothless racist white trash" all day. And she can't really disagree. She had a horrible time growing up in that environment and is glad to have gotten out of there alive.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:41
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Edit: On second thought, this was a good OP, and I'd like to keep the conversation realistic. As much as I may personally disagree.
Drunk Theory fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 20:41
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Behold the future!
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Aug 26, 2016 20:43
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Joking aside though this is an interesting thread topic with a good op so maybe the crazy person's revenge fantasy about ethnically cleansing most of the continent shouldn't be the starting point for discussion.Dreylad posted:Not to mention that people who say "let nature take its course" ignore the fact that human existence is a part of nature and modern conservation efforts have ceased to eject people from the land they live on simply to create more nature reserves. Well let's be real, that post is an infantile power fantasy, not a serious comment on conservation policy. quote:Also the article disagrees with the OP's assertion that these people are Trump voters: It's reminiscent of how the Rob Ford saga in Toronto gave a lot of people a free license to spew hatred on the low-income people living in the inner suburbs. Helsing fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 20:44
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axeil posted:This is a really monstrous thing to say and you're no better than the people you claim hate you. It's not that I hate the poor and uneducated. I hate the good-ol-boys who are proud to be poor and uneducated, and are holding us back.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:45
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:It's not that I hate the poor and uneducated. I hate the good-ol-boys who are proud to be poor and uneducated, and are holding us back. I don't hate black people, I just hate welfare queens.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:48
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computer parts posted:I don't hate black people, I just hate welfare queens. Also, white rural poors are the real welfare queens. Like, I get it's politically unfeasible to actually solve the problem of the death spiral of rural living in America. But the existing solutions are no better, and the one I've offered actually helps these people return to society instead of existing in a closed system that just lets them stew on things until a strongman thug tells them that "the other" (who they've never met in their town of 1,400) is responsible.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:51
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:People can like their ancestral homes and their birthplace, but that doesn't give those places a right to exist. Holy poo poo.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:52
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:Also, white rural poors are the real welfare queens. So you're saying that conservative rhetoric is accurate, it just has the wrong target.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:53
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Solkanar512 posted:These are fine points, but where you would begin if you were in charge? Mincome, full public health coverage including vision, dental, and family planning. A revamp of public education to include a holistic, household-focused emphasis on poverty reduction modeled on the recent success in a St. Louis-area school district that did things like provide bags of groceries to parents coming in for parent-teacher conferences. A rural-electrification-style push for high speed internet. Community organizing focused around local schools, churches, nursing homes, and community centers to combat social isolation and provide much-needed entertainment and happiness. Moving expense grants for people who voluntarily want to move away, buyouts for the elderly who will have no one to sell their home to when the time comes. Edit: Not moving the elderly out of their homes, just a deal where the homeowners get some retirement cash and the government has the right to sell/bulldoze/repurpose their home after they vacate or die. Job creation through public works projects to repair neglected infrastructure and maintain natural resources. Harness the unparalleled propagandizing power of television to depict rural families with dignity and accurately reflect their diversity, both ethnically and politically. Expanded public transportation, which may be more like an on-call ride van service than traditional bus/train options, so the poor and elderly aren't stranded in their homes. Funding for small and mid-sized businesses with an intentional aim to create local/regional economic activity. Judgment-free drug-addiction treatment, including decriminalization and sites for safe, monitored use for people who aren't likely to be cured. More baseball fields. I like baseball. Tiny Brontosaurus fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 20:53
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I think the time for small towns in the middle of nowhere has come to an end. We need to talk about whether or not these towns should exist. If there's a way to buy out everyone in a town and just bulldoze/let nature take its course and start clumping people into ever-larger towns until there are swaths of gorgeous countryside and parks between commercial/industrial hubs of cities, that would solve many problems, such as people in need of urgent care being far from hospitals. How do you propose we pay for this forced removal of 1/3 of the country? Once bought out where do you propose they go? Do we build a house for each of them and say "You live here now."?
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Aug 26, 2016 20:55
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readingatwork posted:How do you propose we pay for this forced removal of 1/3 of the country? Once bought out where do you propose they go? Do we build a house for each of them and say "You live here now."? I think its a final solution that will temporarily concentrate them in camps and have jobs supplied to them. At least going by the jist of Dr. Angela Ziegler up there. Work will set them free, and pay for their new homes.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:57
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readingatwork posted:How do you propose we pay for this forced removal of 1/3 of the country? Once bought out where do you propose they go? Do we build a house for each of them and say "You live here now."? C'mon, I admit I started it but let's not engage with the totalitarian rear end in a top hat. There's interesting stuff to discuss.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:58
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Mega-City 1 isn't the answer to rural poverty. Mega-City 1 isn't the answer to anything.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:58
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Not even one page in and we are just barely before the point of: Toph Bei Fong posted:We should especially let the poor racist white people should slowly die off. They lie in the bed they, their parents, and grandparents made for them, and should be doomed to die undereducated, illiterate, drug addicted, and isolated. We should make no effort to change them and debride one of the biggest rots on the underbelly of the US. If they don’t live in the city, they aren’t human beings. I never had any illusions that it wouldn't get to this point, but it's still disappointing to see it happen so fast.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:58
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readingatwork posted:How do you propose we pay for this forced removal of 1/3 of the country? Once bought out where do you propose they go? Do we build a house for each of them and say "You live here now."? Perhaps we could build some kind of structure to keep everyone out from these rural areas. Some kind of barrier. Maybe a wall. Is it clear yet how insane this "deport the rurals!" thing is? People can live wherever the hell they want. Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Mincome, full public health coverage including vision, dental, and family planning. So basically a New Deal-type program aimed at rural areas? This is all probably good stuff. I think the question is how much $$$ would it cost. As for your point on cash for the elderly, we already have that program. It's called a reverse mortgage: http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/housing/sfh/hecm/hecmabou axeil fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 21:00
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axeil posted:So basically a New Deal-type program aimed at rural areas? This is all probably good stuff. I think the question is how much $$$ would it cost. As for your point on cash for the elderly, we already have that program. It's called a reverse mortgage: Yeah that thing! Most of the programs I mentioned already existed. I just think they're good and should be available to more people. Expanding these programs would cost a lot, but in many cases we're just shifting the cost from one line in the ledger book to another. Free preventative medicine reduces emergency room visits, for instance.
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Aug 26, 2016 21:10
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real talk, a New, New, Deal would be nice. A Neo-Deal as it were that invests in public rail, bus, and basically creates a united states that doesn't have to use an automobile to get around. Also fiber optic internet infrastructure given the same mandate as electricity or phone access with a government thumb on the price scale that keeps all cost of living amenities far, far, within the minincome. Paid for by actually reclaiming the country's wealth and the tax base from behind multi-national corporate holdings that functionally don't contribute and largely own anything that isn't clearly "small business". Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I think the time for small towns in the middle of nowhere has come to an end. We need to talk about whether or not these towns should exist. If there's a way to buy out everyone in a town and just bulldoze/let nature take its course and start clumping people into ever-larger towns until there are swaths of gorgeous countryside and parks between commercial/industrial hubs of cities, that would solve many problems, such as people in need of urgent care being far from hospitals. ok nvm madmax and bandits outside the city wall sound waaaaay cooler. Let's get Valhalla DRO going and make the rural areas great again.
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Aug 26, 2016 21:10
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Helsing posted:This is exactly the kind of creepy totalitarian thought process that motivated High Modernist architects and urban planners like Le Courbusier and it resulted in some of the most horrific planning disasters of the 20th century. not really. what Dr. Angela Ziegler is trying to get it (but being kind of creepy about) is the concept of economic geography. what you're associating that with by calling out ville contemporaine is just the european style of midcentury modern urbanism - the american version would be wright's broadacre city, which is suburban as gently caress. the idea is basically concentrating buildings to maximize greenspace. you're using these concepts as scare quotes around something completely different, and missing the point the point being, if there's no farming activity going on because of automation, and no primary resource extraction going on for lack of salable resources, and no manufacturing going on turning either of the prior categories into goods, then... what is going on? america has largely shifted to a service economy, from high end services like white collar business consulting or technology design which naturally cluster in cities, all the way down to basic services like plumbers and haircutters - all of this economic activity is clustered in cities nowadays. this is because it's become far cheaper to transport goods, and many orders of magnitude cheaper to transport information, than it was when many of america's small towns had a reason to be 50-100 years ago. small towns existed as local depots for goods, services, shopping, mass employment - if those things are gone, then what replaces them? you can't really create a reason for a town to exist. and if you don't create them, why do these towns exist aside from sheer economic and cultural inertia? don't even think about a solution for right now - what kind of problems could arise when a town has no economic wellspring, nothing actually generating wealth within the community?
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Aug 26, 2016 21:12
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also in this goon's opinion this thread is going to be super dumb and go nowhere if you all keep arguing about laying waste to rural america because that's just pointless opinion jousting and also it's already happening, right now, except via free market methods such as diabetes and overdosing
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Aug 26, 2016 21:15
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