I should not have said "everyone" or "always", and I agree with your first sentence - I do not wish for my statement to be seen as a declaration of superiority.

I should not have said "everyone" or "always", and I agree with your first sentence - I do not wish for my statement to be seen as a declaration of superiority. What I do wish to convey is my personal ideals, as a native of the region. I work for a rural ISP, and while there are some homes I enter that seem to validate these values, there are plenty that embody the statistics that you have linked. Whenever I see these broken places, with all the evidence of obesity, addiction, smoking, drinking, etc that you have mentioned, I am bothered at how this came to be. Some of these people clearly do not care about anything more than having their working internet and Netflix (as well as the aforementioned vices) - trash all over the yards, cockroaches all around their networking gear, an abundance of unfinished projects, abandoned community gardens. Scatterbrained. I want there to be order and community where it seems to be dissolving. This article caught my attention because I want to dissolve the crusade of victimhood that is growing like a tumor.