'The White Ghetto'



Several years ago, our niece, a girl who grew up in the lap of luxury took a trip to Appalachia as a student helper and returned dumbfounded. In my liberal head I was trying to make sense of how people come to live this way. She marveled over how the students worked while the locals sat and smoked. I think she missed the part that after she left life would be the same. Not everyone can be Honey Boo Boo with a TV show and a family that seems somewhat glued together as a social unit. As a back-road traveler and cyclist I often find the poor people of America the most friendly, but the lives they lead are odd to those of us who operate in the so called rat race even when we pretend it's not a race.

When people look at the inner city ghettos they forget, or is that neglect, the more remote, scenic ghettos. See book noted below.

'In Appalachia the country is beautiful and the society is broken.'

By Kevin D. Williamson

"Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings on the hill, piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, and death."


Article here.

I'm not sure Kurt has grasped the entire issue. "Human beings will be happier, not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie, but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia." Kurt Vonnegut

Read all about here: Deer Hunting with Jesus' by Joe Bageant. 'After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a “dirt-poor” childhood, Joe Bageant moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, where he realized that his family....

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