9 ms·

Digging in the Trash

189 points by samsolomon 9y ago

iplaw 9y ago
Good read, and relatable as I had an uncle and two cousins who lived in a trailer in a trailer park. It was fun to visit for a day, but a relief to go home to my safe residential neighborhood a few hours later. It is easy to see how the trailer park environment affected the kids who had to grow up there. Child abuse of all varieties was common. This, in turn, fostered violent and irrational outbursts from the males and promiscuity in the females. I remember that there were mattresses strewn about in the woods surrounding the trailer park, and an informal scheduling process for semi-private use. You, of course, can't apply the generalization of my anecdotal experience to every trailer park or to every family living in a specific trailer park. That said, I think that the article is a little too idyllic. There seems to be a much higher concentration of social problems - domestic disputes, child abuse, substance abuse - in trailer parks than in the surrounding areas.
- joatmon-snoo 9y ago
  I wouldn't say the piece is striving to be idyllic - rather, trying to reclaim dignity for those segments of our society that have been left behind and derided by the rest of us in our ivory towers.
  - drvdevd 9y ago
    I loved the part at the end where he talked about the "Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich". I'd read the same article a month or so ago, and his intution on the subject seemed spot on. I think the mindset speaks to exactly the sort hubris that could most directly threaten our species.
chiph 9y ago
I knew people like that growing up. I can't say we were friends, mainly because of the societal gulf between us. But if you're broken down by the side of the road, or your car gets stuck in the ditch, they're some of the first people who'll stop and help you out.
- Isamu 9y ago
  True. In the days before cell phones I was literally broken down by the side of the road and started to walk the several miles to some destination where I could get help. I was picked up by a wonderful family in a falling-apart station wagon, the little kids looked at me with big eyes and the mom was very kind but seemed to be hiding her bad teeth. I thanked them for the help and the dad said it was fine, he knew that nobody wants to stop to help out. It was true - all the nice cars just drove by.
- aswanson 9y ago
  Some of the nicest, most helpful people I've met lived in trailers for a time. I wouldn't even call an animal trash. Those who use that term to describe any person, let alone those people, need to check their sociopathy.
  - ElectronCharge 9y ago
    +1000
- tomcam 9y ago
  Yep. If you're out on a trip when a hurricane hits and you get back home a couple days later, they'll have cut the fallen trees in your driveway and boarded up the windows without even bothering to call you.
  - ghamrick 9y ago
    if they know you. I recently visited the town my dad grew up in, deep in the bowels of WV. Every single person there, at the stores, restaurants and gas stations said to me "You're not from around here, are you?" When I told them my name there was some modicum of welcome. If I had just been a regular tourist I would have just left because of the rudeness
ElatedOwl 9y ago
I was born in raised in a suburban midwest area, my wife is from WV. In some ways the area seems so backwards; a guy with the legal name "Stingray", trashy houses and trailers all over. The closest mall is an hour drive. The only local entertainment is heading to walmart or the single screen movie theater. Yet there's an intangible charm to the area. A beautiful landscape, an absolute kindness and compassion to even unknown strangers. >I get the same kind of questions about addiction. People don’t understand what would push someone to drugs like methamphetamine or heroin. [...] That’s what every single addict I’ve ever known really wanted: just a second to breathe. So real.
- a3n 9y ago
  > In some ways the area seems so backwards; [short list of lack of facilities and features] > Yet there's an intangible charm to the area. A beautiful landscape, an absolute kindness and compassion to even unknown strangers. Perhaps when all you have is each other, not only are you "forced" to realize that you rely on each other, it allows you to rely on others and be relied on. Modern suburbs and cities with their abundance of impersonal support allow us, maybe even force us, to be recluses in a crowd.
  - gumby 9y ago
    > Modern suburbs and cities with their abundance of impersonal support allow us, maybe even force us, to be recluses in a crowd. Being a major driver for people moving to cities, of course: you can't get what you want out in the sticks. Sometimes it's access to something concrete like a specific job or such, but other times it's because you don't "fit in" (e.g. you're gay in an intolerant area, or aren't interested in the local religion monopoly). Hopefully those who stick around find it to their liking.
- jmspring 9y ago
  The issue of addiction - especially meth and heroin - happens in rural / backwater areas as well as in urban / expensive. Santa Cruz and other parts of the Bay Area have huge meth and heroin problems. I've recently started spending a lot of time in a more rural part of California. I drive through areas that have "trashy houses" and "trailers", but as you mention there is also some very beautiful landscapes. I've also found the people to be generally much nicer / kind to those they may not know than all my years in the Bay Area. But, the area does have it's warts as well.
VLM 9y ago
Maybe the urban poor are completely invisible. It was a collection of stories about poor people that we're told are rural but like bad soft sci fi the setting didn't matter a bit. I grew up with/near rural people, and will probably retire to the country, and I'll tell you four anecdotes that are genuinely specifically rural, although not necessarily poor: 1) Rural folk understand balance sheet vs income statement like urbanites don't. There are a lot of people who suffer from being land poor, where they own the land but struggle to finance day to day operations on and for that land. Life can be complicated when your septic tank breaks and all you have for income is SS and it would take 15 years of SS payments to pay someone else for a new septic system even if you had no other expenses for those 15 years ... also consider prop tax for example. If you own the land there is no building superintendent and the closest urban contractor is a 2 hour truck charge drive away, so you make do as best you and your neighbors can. There's a lot of rural paper millionaires who can't afford to fix their rusty truck. 2) Rural folk, unless they live in the upper midwest and therefore speak newscaster English accent, are generally not terribly interested in your opinion of their accent or the stereotype you think it implies. You think you're holier than thou because you're not from rural Louisiana, how nice, but sorry we don't care at all. Sort of like the stereotype of poorly socialized rural folk trying to save your soul, that's how we look at poorly socialized urbanites trying to "save us" from the wilderness that is our home. How cute, you came here to tell us we're doing it wrong, that's so funny, come back when you grow up. 3) Some rural folk are very lonely because you have to spend a significant amount of money on gas to drive a couple dozen miles to do anything. The phone is nice, but as you know a fraction of the population has an uncontrollable urge for physical presence. Those folks, especially the old ones, have a rough time, especially when their local peers die off and they literally can't afford to visit whoever is left. There is a filtration effect such that the survivors are the type who can be alone without being lonely, but as its a spectrum there will be lonely people, although not as many as if urbanites were air dropped into the wilderness. Almost stereotypical for a new teen driver, who's parents can afford it, to be assigned to drive old uncle whatshisname all over the place. Unlike urbanites this leads to rural youth learning much younger that old people have wisdom, or at least respectably interesting stories. 4) Rural areas are beautiful. Urbanites don't understand because they live without beauty, somehow. No one ever daydreamed about seeing the grease trap at McDonalds back by the overflowing dumpster on a crisp winter morning. Or watching the daily migration of the homeless as the wind blows trash past them down the street. Or inhaling diesel bus fumes on a hot summer afternoon. Living in beauty is in itself an addiction that is hard to shake, hard as a chemical addiction, leaving urbanites very confused about why ruralites don't want to move into town and live in a nice gray soviet style apartment building where they can't even see the sun and the closest green plant is miles away. Sorta like asking, "so... why not just stop shooting heroin" its not quite that simple to break an addiction... If you live essentially in a national park your whole life its very difficult to get people like that to leave.
SwellJoe 9y ago
I grew up in the deep south, and my folks were the first generation in my family to move out of the trailer park (technically, their parents lived in mill villages, which was a similar indicator of poverty, but the first several years of their marriage was spent in a trailer). They made it out before I was born, so I had a lower middle class upbringing most of my life. Many of my friends were in the same situation; their folks bought houses and moved out of trailers during their childhood. There was a general trend upward, out of the trailer park and into middle class lifestyles. What's alarming, to me, is that many of those same friends are back in trailer parks, or slumlord-run apartments, today. The trend today is pushing people down and out of the middle class and back into poverty. Poor folks could scrabble their way out of poverty through the 70s to early 90s, even though we don't regard all of that time as a "good economy", my recollection was that the average family was coming up, rather than falling down. That doesn't seem to be working anymore. The numbers seem to agree with this: the American middle class is shrinking. Some are climbing up into the upper class, but I suspect that's mostly people who never knew poverty. I think past poverty has a gravity that pulls folks back down, if anything goes awry. Health problems have been a leading indicator among my old friends. When people get sick in America, it can be an economic disaster. Less so with ACA, but it's still too much if you're barely hanging onto your house, your car, etc. I live in RV parks quite a bit these days, as I live in an RV and travel kinda full-time (in a leisurely manner, after many years of constant travel), and I meet a lot of people who are "choosing" to live a more minimal lifestyle in an RV. But, the reality is, they often don't have the option to live in a house; at least not one they own. The Tiny House movement seems to be a lot of the same: people who can't afford a traditional suburban home, but still have dreams of home ownership. I see the Tiny House "movement" being criticized a lot as "fetishizing poverty", but I think that misses the point that a lot of the people choosing to live in Tiny Houses aren't fetishizing being poor...they're just poor. They come from middle class backgrounds, so people just don't recognize it as poverty. I worry that the economic divide in the US is a disaster waiting to happen for the country as a whole, but it's already causing significant pain among the people who come from a poor background and don't have family safety net to help lift them back up, when things go wrong. They just keep falling, and trailer parks, RV parks, slumlord-run apartments, etc., is where they end up. And, getting back out again is harder than it's been in a long time.
thatwebdude 9y ago
I always love the connotations trailer parks draw to outsiders. I spent my first 5 years of life there. Never knew anything was wrong with it until people who've never been to one told me. Ah, to be a child...
- sokoloff 9y ago
  As a child, I always wanted to go visit and stay with one of my aunts. My Mom eventually figured out that I liked that she had neat blue water in her toilet in her trailer. As a five year old, that was cool.
  - thatwebdude 9y ago
    Not gonna lie, that was kinda cool even after 5...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
therpe1 9y ago
Who cares...? Really, you've got to wonder why, for such "hardscrabble," "salt of the earth" people we keep getting thousands of words and photographs that blame all their problems on the "urban folk." The entire setup is a fantasy and it's a very stupid fantasy at that. We never hear about why these towns are so poor. We never hear about the decades of malinvestment (see the relentless drive to increase the military budget and rollback health access) or the pervasive racism that makes any kind of social welfare impossible. Not one word about the decades of shitty, under-funded schools or the culture that actively denigrates intellectualism. It's like magic -- these people just rose out of the earth, poor and bitter, through no fault of their own or anybody else's. And then we get the noble command, "Just listen" -- as if these people have anything worthwhile to say except vile hate and bitter recriminations (see comments above). It's so laughable. A bunch of shitty writing about a shitty place that manages to say absolutely nothing worthwhile, nothing interesting, nothing verifiable, nothing actionable and nothing real. Again, it's a bad fantasy.
ergothus 9y ago
Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I found the article and many of the comments here annoying. Yes - rural people can be nice, helpful, friendly, wise, experienced, and unpretentious. Rural people can also be short-sighted, rude, intolerant, gleefully embrace ignorance, and every bit as pretentious as a city-slicker. This is because whether it's city, suburban, or rural, we're all still people. And here's the kicker: All things being equal, people are people, and some are jerks and others saints. But things AREN'T equal. I've lived in trailers, and I've owned a house - I can't tell you about your neighbors in those situations, but I can tell you about the areas. I won't speculate the reasons here, but rural areas (more in the American South than other places I've been, but still in general) have more than their share of bitter, racist, sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, self-righteous people. This is demonstrable in a variety of statistical ways by look at different states/counties. When reviewing the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked "Is it the government's submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than the citizens in the North?". I've been there. It totally is. And the more rural, often the more racist (etc). When you look at states where they are removing actual science from the textbooks, where are they? When you find the populations of people that want to "go with their gut" in the face of any evidence, where are they concentrated? Of course, you can't paint with broad strokes - for me to condemn everyone in a low-population density area is just as wrong as calling them all saintly. There are many people, many towns, many areas, where what I'm talking about is less common than in many cities. But my experience says the embrace of ignorance to be more likely there. I don't look down on someone for coming from or being in a rural area. I don't admire someone for coming to or being in a city. But the sort of "noble savage" picture that I'm seeing painted here utterly disregards the very real problems and social ills that many of these areas have. Tell me your in/from a rural area and I don't care. Tell me you're poor, it doesn't impact my impression of your worth as a person. But don't be an asshat and surround yourself with other asshats and then complain about the reputation you're getting.
- bykovich 9y ago
  Bizarre that you'd speculate about what populations "go with their gut" based entirely on gut feeling.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Posting this here is an exercise in futility. It will go right over the heads of the people who need to be exposed to these sorts of opinions.
- ElectronCharge 9y ago
  Not always, and that is exactly the point.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
I never knew much about that subculture. Is it bad that those people look rich to me? They have cars, and a place of shelter that they own. They have family. I scrape by paying rent and put food on the plate, and ride a bicycle to work every day. I still can't afford to learn to drive. Parents won't support me, although I spend 3 months of savings to buy a plane ticket to see them each year, using the 8 days of holiday I'm offered. Most of my friends and colleagues earn half of what I do. The idea that someone could earn 30,000 USD in Alaska in only a few months sounds unbelievable to me. The trailer lifestyle would be an upgrade from working for a tech company in Asia.
- durge 9y ago
  Imo it is relative poverty within communities that is most damaging. This causes learned helplessness and deprivation of self respect. That is part of the reason the world is getting more unstable-- because it's shrinking and so people are comparing their lots to an unprecedented degree.

189 points by samsolomon 9y ago

Good read, and relatable as I had an uncle and two cousins who lived in a trailer in a trailer park. It was fun to visit for a day, but a relief to go home to my safe residential neighborhood a few hours later. It is easy to see how the trailer park environment affected the kids who had to grow up there. Child abuse of all varieties was common. This, in turn, fostered violent and irrational outbursts from the males and promiscuity in the females. I remember that there were mattresses strewn about in the woods surrounding the trailer park, and an informal scheduling process for semi-private use. You, of course, can't apply the generalization of my anecdotal experience to every trailer park or to every family living in a specific trailer park. That said, I think that the article is a little too idyllic. There seems to be a much higher concentration of social problems - domestic disputes, child abuse, substance abuse - in trailer parks than in the surrounding areas.

joatmon-snoo 9y ago
I wouldn't say the piece is striving to be idyllic - rather, trying to reclaim dignity for those segments of our society that have been left behind and derided by the rest of us in our ivory towers.
- drvdevd 9y ago
  I loved the part at the end where he talked about the "Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich". I'd read the same article a month or so ago, and his intution on the subject seemed spot on. I think the mindset speaks to exactly the sort hubris that could most directly threaten our species.

chiph 9y ago

I knew people like that growing up. I can't say we were friends, mainly because of the societal gulf between us. But if you're broken down by the side of the road, or your car gets stuck in the ditch, they're some of the first people who'll stop and help you out.

Isamu 9y ago
True. In the days before cell phones I was literally broken down by the side of the road and started to walk the several miles to some destination where I could get help. I was picked up by a wonderful family in a falling-apart station wagon, the little kids looked at me with big eyes and the mom was very kind but seemed to be hiding her bad teeth. I thanked them for the help and the dad said it was fine, he knew that nobody wants to stop to help out. It was true - all the nice cars just drove by.
aswanson 9y ago
Some of the nicest, most helpful people I've met lived in trailers for a time. I wouldn't even call an animal trash. Those who use that term to describe any person, let alone those people, need to check their sociopathy.
- ElectronCharge 9y ago
  +1000
tomcam 9y ago
Yep. If you're out on a trip when a hurricane hits and you get back home a couple days later, they'll have cut the fallen trees in your driveway and boarded up the windows without even bothering to call you.
- ghamrick 9y ago
  if they know you. I recently visited the town my dad grew up in, deep in the bowels of WV. Every single person there, at the stores, restaurants and gas stations said to me "You're not from around here, are you?" When I told them my name there was some modicum of welcome. If I had just been a regular tourist I would have just left because of the rudeness

ElatedOwl 9y ago

I was born in raised in a suburban midwest area, my wife is from WV. In some ways the area seems so backwards; a guy with the legal name "Stingray", trashy houses and trailers all over. The closest mall is an hour drive. The only local entertainment is heading to walmart or the single screen movie theater. Yet there's an intangible charm to the area. A beautiful landscape, an absolute kindness and compassion to even unknown strangers. >I get the same kind of questions about addiction. People don’t understand what would push someone to drugs like methamphetamine or heroin. [...] That’s what every single addict I’ve ever known really wanted: just a second to breathe. So real.

a3n 9y ago
> In some ways the area seems so backwards; [short list of lack of facilities and features] > Yet there's an intangible charm to the area. A beautiful landscape, an absolute kindness and compassion to even unknown strangers. Perhaps when all you have is each other, not only are you "forced" to realize that you rely on each other, it allows you to rely on others and be relied on. Modern suburbs and cities with their abundance of impersonal support allow us, maybe even force us, to be recluses in a crowd.
- gumby 9y ago
  > Modern suburbs and cities with their abundance of impersonal support allow us, maybe even force us, to be recluses in a crowd. Being a major driver for people moving to cities, of course: you can't get what you want out in the sticks. Sometimes it's access to something concrete like a specific job or such, but other times it's because you don't "fit in" (e.g. you're gay in an intolerant area, or aren't interested in the local religion monopoly). Hopefully those who stick around find it to their liking.
jmspring 9y ago
The issue of addiction - especially meth and heroin - happens in rural / backwater areas as well as in urban / expensive. Santa Cruz and other parts of the Bay Area have huge meth and heroin problems. I've recently started spending a lot of time in a more rural part of California. I drive through areas that have "trashy houses" and "trailers", but as you mention there is also some very beautiful landscapes. I've also found the people to be generally much nicer / kind to those they may not know than all my years in the Bay Area. But, the area does have it's warts as well.

VLM 9y ago

Maybe the urban poor are completely invisible. It was a collection of stories about poor people that we're told are rural but like bad soft sci fi the setting didn't matter a bit. I grew up with/near rural people, and will probably retire to the country, and I'll tell you four anecdotes that are genuinely specifically rural, although not necessarily poor: 1) Rural folk understand balance sheet vs income statement like urbanites don't. There are a lot of people who suffer from being land poor, where they own the land but struggle to finance day to day operations on and for that land. Life can be complicated when your septic tank breaks and all you have for income is SS and it would take 15 years of SS payments to pay someone else for a new septic system even if you had no other expenses for those 15 years ... also consider prop tax for example. If you own the land there is no building superintendent and the closest urban contractor is a 2 hour truck charge drive away, so you make do as best you and your neighbors can. There's a lot of rural paper millionaires who can't afford to fix their rusty truck. 2) Rural folk, unless they live in the upper midwest and therefore speak newscaster English accent, are generally not terribly interested in your opinion of their accent or the stereotype you think it implies. You think you're holier than thou because you're not from rural Louisiana, how nice, but sorry we don't care at all. Sort of like the stereotype of poorly socialized rural folk trying to save your soul, that's how we look at poorly socialized urbanites trying to "save us" from the wilderness that is our home. How cute, you came here to tell us we're doing it wrong, that's so funny, come back when you grow up. 3) Some rural folk are very lonely because you have to spend a significant amount of money on gas to drive a couple dozen miles to do anything. The phone is nice, but as you know a fraction of the population has an uncontrollable urge for physical presence. Those folks, especially the old ones, have a rough time, especially when their local peers die off and they literally can't afford to visit whoever is left. There is a filtration effect such that the survivors are the type who can be alone without being lonely, but as its a spectrum there will be lonely people, although not as many as if urbanites were air dropped into the wilderness. Almost stereotypical for a new teen driver, who's parents can afford it, to be assigned to drive old uncle whatshisname all over the place. Unlike urbanites this leads to rural youth learning much younger that old people have wisdom, or at least respectably interesting stories. 4) Rural areas are beautiful. Urbanites don't understand because they live without beauty, somehow. No one ever daydreamed about seeing the grease trap at McDonalds back by the overflowing dumpster on a crisp winter morning. Or watching the daily migration of the homeless as the wind blows trash past them down the street. Or inhaling diesel bus fumes on a hot summer afternoon. Living in beauty is in itself an addiction that is hard to shake, hard as a chemical addiction, leaving urbanites very confused about why ruralites don't want to move into town and live in a nice gray soviet style apartment building where they can't even see the sun and the closest green plant is miles away. Sorta like asking, "so... why not just stop shooting heroin" its not quite that simple to break an addiction... If you live essentially in a national park your whole life its very difficult to get people like that to leave.

SwellJoe 9y ago

I grew up in the deep south, and my folks were the first generation in my family to move out of the trailer park (technically, their parents lived in mill villages, which was a similar indicator of poverty, but the first several years of their marriage was spent in a trailer). They made it out before I was born, so I had a lower middle class upbringing most of my life. Many of my friends were in the same situation; their folks bought houses and moved out of trailers during their childhood. There was a general trend upward, out of the trailer park and into middle class lifestyles. What's alarming, to me, is that many of those same friends are back in trailer parks, or slumlord-run apartments, today. The trend today is pushing people down and out of the middle class and back into poverty. Poor folks could scrabble their way out of poverty through the 70s to early 90s, even though we don't regard all of that time as a "good economy", my recollection was that the average family was coming up, rather than falling down. That doesn't seem to be working anymore. The numbers seem to agree with this: the American middle class is shrinking. Some are climbing up into the upper class, but I suspect that's mostly people who never knew poverty. I think past poverty has a gravity that pulls folks back down, if anything goes awry. Health problems have been a leading indicator among my old friends. When people get sick in America, it can be an economic disaster. Less so with ACA, but it's still too much if you're barely hanging onto your house, your car, etc. I live in RV parks quite a bit these days, as I live in an RV and travel kinda full-time (in a leisurely manner, after many years of constant travel), and I meet a lot of people who are "choosing" to live a more minimal lifestyle in an RV. But, the reality is, they often don't have the option to live in a house; at least not one they own. The Tiny House movement seems to be a lot of the same: people who can't afford a traditional suburban home, but still have dreams of home ownership. I see the Tiny House "movement" being criticized a lot as "fetishizing poverty", but I think that misses the point that a lot of the people choosing to live in Tiny Houses aren't fetishizing being poor...they're just poor. They come from middle class backgrounds, so people just don't recognize it as poverty. I worry that the economic divide in the US is a disaster waiting to happen for the country as a whole, but it's already causing significant pain among the people who come from a poor background and don't have family safety net to help lift them back up, when things go wrong. They just keep falling, and trailer parks, RV parks, slumlord-run apartments, etc., is where they end up. And, getting back out again is harder than it's been in a long time.

thatwebdude 9y ago

I always love the connotations trailer parks draw to outsiders. I spent my first 5 years of life there. Never knew anything was wrong with it until people who've never been to one told me. Ah, to be a child...

sokoloff 9y ago
As a child, I always wanted to go visit and stay with one of my aunts. My Mom eventually figured out that I liked that she had neat blue water in her toilet in her trailer. As a five year old, that was cool.
- thatwebdude 9y ago
  Not gonna lie, that was kinda cool even after 5...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

therpe1 9y ago

Who cares...? Really, you've got to wonder why, for such "hardscrabble," "salt of the earth" people we keep getting thousands of words and photographs that blame all their problems on the "urban folk." The entire setup is a fantasy and it's a very stupid fantasy at that. We never hear about why these towns are so poor. We never hear about the decades of malinvestment (see the relentless drive to increase the military budget and rollback health access) or the pervasive racism that makes any kind of social welfare impossible. Not one word about the decades of shitty, under-funded schools or the culture that actively denigrates intellectualism. It's like magic -- these people just rose out of the earth, poor and bitter, through no fault of their own or anybody else's. And then we get the noble command, "Just listen" -- as if these people have anything worthwhile to say except vile hate and bitter recriminations (see comments above). It's so laughable. A bunch of shitty writing about a shitty place that manages to say absolutely nothing worthwhile, nothing interesting, nothing verifiable, nothing actionable and nothing real. Again, it's a bad fantasy.

ergothus 9y ago

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I found the article and many of the comments here annoying. Yes - rural people can be nice, helpful, friendly, wise, experienced, and unpretentious. Rural people can also be short-sighted, rude, intolerant, gleefully embrace ignorance, and every bit as pretentious as a city-slicker. This is because whether it's city, suburban, or rural, we're all still people. And here's the kicker: All things being equal, people are people, and some are jerks and others saints. But things AREN'T equal. I've lived in trailers, and I've owned a house - I can't tell you about your neighbors in those situations, but I can tell you about the areas. I won't speculate the reasons here, but rural areas (more in the American South than other places I've been, but still in general) have more than their share of bitter, racist, sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, self-righteous people. This is demonstrable in a variety of statistical ways by look at different states/counties. When reviewing the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked "Is it the government's submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than the citizens in the North?". I've been there. It totally is. And the more rural, often the more racist (etc). When you look at states where they are removing actual science from the textbooks, where are they? When you find the populations of people that want to "go with their gut" in the face of any evidence, where are they concentrated? Of course, you can't paint with broad strokes - for me to condemn everyone in a low-population density area is just as wrong as calling them all saintly. There are many people, many towns, many areas, where what I'm talking about is less common than in many cities. But my experience says the embrace of ignorance to be more likely there. I don't look down on someone for coming from or being in a rural area. I don't admire someone for coming to or being in a city. But the sort of "noble savage" picture that I'm seeing painted here utterly disregards the very real problems and social ills that many of these areas have. Tell me your in/from a rural area and I don't care. Tell me you're poor, it doesn't impact my impression of your worth as a person. But don't be an asshat and surround yourself with other asshats and then complain about the reputation you're getting.

bykovich 9y ago
Bizarre that you'd speculate about what populations "go with their gut" based entirely on gut feeling.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

Posting this here is an exercise in futility. It will go right over the heads of the people who need to be exposed to these sorts of opinions.

ElectronCharge 9y ago
Not always, and that is exactly the point.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

I never knew much about that subculture. Is it bad that those people look rich to me? They have cars, and a place of shelter that they own. They have family. I scrape by paying rent and put food on the plate, and ride a bicycle to work every day. I still can't afford to learn to drive. Parents won't support me, although I spend 3 months of savings to buy a plane ticket to see them each year, using the 8 days of holiday I'm offered. Most of my friends and colleagues earn half of what I do. The idea that someone could earn 30,000 USD in Alaska in only a few months sounds unbelievable to me. The trailer lifestyle would be an upgrade from working for a tech company in Asia.

durge 9y ago
Imo it is relative poverty within communities that is most damaging. This causes learned helplessness and deprivation of self respect. That is part of the reason the world is getting more unstable-- because it's shrinking and so people are comparing their lots to an unprecedented degree.