6 ms·

There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes. Americans are very often blind to the poverty in t

There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes. Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards. There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes. I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom. No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons. Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.) Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz. Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements. I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby. These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dmd 1y ago
Is this the photo? https://navajotimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/dq-no-wifi-for-school16.jpg https://navajotimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/dq-no-wif...
- reaperducer 1y ago
  Not the exact photo, but it looks like it's another angle from the same photo shoot. Thanks for finding that.
- mlmonkey 1y ago
  The other crime in that photo is the lack of cell service, despite billions of dollars that the USG has given ATT/Verizon/T-Mo over the years. But these phone companies just give unfettered access to their networks to the various TLAs and everybody ignores the fact that they are not providing the cell service they are contractually obligated to.
  - jandrewrogers 1y ago
    Why would you expect there to be cell service there? Large parts of that area of the Mountain West are virtually uninhabited and have no telecom infrastructure to connect the cellular service to. There is literally nothing out in much of it except the occasional building every 10-20 miles which isn't enough to sustain a cellular network. These days satellite would be cheaper in any case.
sgarland 1y ago
There are Americans who have open sewage in their yards [0], because their counties are predominantly Black or Latino, and their state deprioritizes any infrastructure work. It’s structural racism. Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.” 0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-belt_n_5a33baf5e4b040881be99da5 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-... 1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-justice-alabama-dei-1a47e990d804300229206feb01e44e27 https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-...
- cowpig 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - sgarland 1y ago
    I do not care.
  - rfrey 1y ago
    One half-hour later the post is unflagged and not greyed at all. There are many unflagged, un-downvoted posts on this forum that criticize Trump, my own included.
    - cowpig 1y ago
      well it looks grey on my screen
- vorpalhex 1y ago
  What the Trump administration canceled didn't right that wrong. What the Trump administration canceled was an agreement for the local county to stop issuing fines, which had already been in effect for over two years. And within those two years, the local county built zero sewers, zero hookups. They literally built nothing in two years. The original agreement under the Biden admin, which to be clear, the President doesn't personally oversee these kinds of agreements, this is sort of all within the DOJ, but the original agreement doesn't even require them to build the sewers. It literally just requires them to run a public health campaign and not issue fines.
lucianbr 1y ago
Why is cellular signal required for lessons? I went through 12 years of school in Eastern Europe without anyone in the entire country having cellular signal, or cellular phones. (Well mostly, towards the end they appeared, but had no effect in school). Granted, perhaps the lessons were less than perfect, but they were way better than nothing.
- maxerickson 1y ago
  It was during the pandemic, the family did not have good phone service at their home... https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom-for-a-fish-point-family/ https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom...
- reaperducer 1y ago
  Why is cellular signal required for lessons? Look at the photo (linked to elsewhere in this thread). If it's anything like some of the parts of the big rez I've been to, the nearest school is probably three hours away over sand/dirt roads. The teacher teaches remotely to children spread over a thousand square miles.
- dotnet00 1y ago
  It's to have something better than just the bare minimum. I remember seeing similar reports about higher education in remote villages in India, with cellular networks and internet access allowing people to learn without being able to move to somewhere close to sufficiently qualified teachers.
baq 1y ago
> Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards. it doesn't help that it's in practice illegal to be in such poverty.
- breakingrules3 1y ago
  [dead]
- potato3732842 1y ago
  Legality only matters insofar as people use it as a mental shortcut to turn off their brains. Which TBH I think is way less than it used to be, but feels like it's more because so much more stuff involves law and government than it did 50yr ago.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  If anyone is wondering why solving homelessness and poverty is so hard, this sibling reply is dead but I think people need to see that this opinion exists, and we need to contemplate the richest and most powerful people in this country share this sentiment: "we're not blind to it, half of us are sick of paying for it for multiple generations, accruing interest. we're paying for poor people from 20 years ago still. let them sink, let them go away. its a test, they failed it." Here, "go away" is a euphemism for "die from exposure". 20 years ago we had a worldwide financial crises caused by the capricious whims of the richest people in this country, they caused massive amounts of damage, destroyed people's lives and livelihoods, kicked them out on the street, and it's framed as "paying for poor people".
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    It's nobody's fault for becoming poor. But if you're staying poor (dirt poor) for decades, then there is something you're doing wrong. The other commenter puts it in a rude way, but there's something to it. If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
    - 1y ago
kyleblarson 1y ago
I grew up in Kentucky and spent a lot of time in the areas around the Red River Gorge in the southeastern part of the state. Some of the poverty there is shocking. The movie Winters Bone actually seemed to do a decent job of showcasing similar areas.
diet_mtn_dew 1y ago
>There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity I cannot find a citation for a number that large of people who do not have access to electricity in the USA, would you happen to have one?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
zarl 1y ago
> There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes. This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them. You are disconnected from reality. I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both. I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
  - tredre3 1y ago
    > I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago. > I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both. But can you provide us with a source other than your own eyes for the "millions of people" you claim to be living in such conditions?
  - zarl 1y ago
    No one in this thread has any evidence of these "hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people" and just falls back to "well I met a guy". The claim is not that literally 100% of Americans have electricity/running water. It's that there are not "millions" of Americans without them.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  And when it is a problem, it's usually a problem with the system denying people access rather than literal inability to afford. Municipality would rather some house be vacated (perhaps based on a "poor people drain services, kick-em out" policy posture) so when a storm takes out your utility pole guess who isn't getting a new meter drop until they bring their shit up to current code at a non-starter price... and oh look here it's illegal to live in a house without electricity. I guess that means someone's getting evicted, what a shame...
jibe 1y ago
This is what Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation actually looks like. https://cds.bie.edu/ https://cds.bie.edu/ Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.
- Den_VR 1y ago
  I can’t imagine why anyone would be deliberately misled to believe Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation is not very nice. Oh wait
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    Not American born so there is some obvious thing here that’s not so obvious to me. What’s the ref? Is it a race thing
    - pkkim 1y ago
      Not sure exactly how obvious it is to most Americans, but the Navajo reservation is extremely poor by American standards. When I went there, the local roads were all dirt and the houses seemed to have no electricity.
    - UncleEntity 1y ago
      I used to have Hopi and Navajo friends and I have no idea what they are referring to. One thing I can tell you that the whole situation up there is contentious and complicated between the tribes, the states and the feds where one could support any argument as there isn't some standard "Rez Life" one can point at. I mean, I used to have this one friend who grew up (and still had family) on a part of the reservation which was completely surrounded by the other tribe and her and my other friends (from the other tribe, don't quite remember which was which here) would get into some serious arguments at the bar over the issue where we'd have to separate them before it came to fisticuffs.
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    I can’t imagine why anyone would be deliberately misled to believe Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation is not very nice. Oh wait The real world isn't TV. Not everything is a grand conspiracy.
mrguyorama 1y ago
The US desperately needs another version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Other_Half_Lives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Other_Half_Lives to become virally popular. I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income. There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died. My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well. It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline". Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry) There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices. These people are gross.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dmd 1y ago

Is this the photo? https://navajotimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/dq-no-wifi-for-school16.jpg https://navajotimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/dq-no-wif...

reaperducer 1y ago
Not the exact photo, but it looks like it's another angle from the same photo shoot. Thanks for finding that.
mlmonkey 1y ago
The other crime in that photo is the lack of cell service, despite billions of dollars that the USG has given ATT/Verizon/T-Mo over the years. But these phone companies just give unfettered access to their networks to the various TLAs and everybody ignores the fact that they are not providing the cell service they are contractually obligated to.
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  Why would you expect there to be cell service there? Large parts of that area of the Mountain West are virtually uninhabited and have no telecom infrastructure to connect the cellular service to. There is literally nothing out in much of it except the occasional building every 10-20 miles which isn't enough to sustain a cellular network. These days satellite would be cheaper in any case.

sgarland 1y ago

There are Americans who have open sewage in their yards [0], because their counties are predominantly Black or Latino, and their state deprioritizes any infrastructure work. It’s structural racism. Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.” 0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-belt_n_5a33baf5e4b040881be99da5 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-... 1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-justice-alabama-dei-1a47e990d804300229206feb01e44e27 https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-...

cowpig 1y ago
[flagged]
- sgarland 1y ago
  I do not care.
- rfrey 1y ago
  One half-hour later the post is unflagged and not greyed at all. There are many unflagged, un-downvoted posts on this forum that criticize Trump, my own included.
  - cowpig 1y ago
    well it looks grey on my screen
vorpalhex 1y ago
What the Trump administration canceled didn't right that wrong. What the Trump administration canceled was an agreement for the local county to stop issuing fines, which had already been in effect for over two years. And within those two years, the local county built zero sewers, zero hookups. They literally built nothing in two years. The original agreement under the Biden admin, which to be clear, the President doesn't personally oversee these kinds of agreements, this is sort of all within the DOJ, but the original agreement doesn't even require them to build the sewers. It literally just requires them to run a public health campaign and not issue fines.

lucianbr 1y ago

Why is cellular signal required for lessons? I went through 12 years of school in Eastern Europe without anyone in the entire country having cellular signal, or cellular phones. (Well mostly, towards the end they appeared, but had no effect in school). Granted, perhaps the lessons were less than perfect, but they were way better than nothing.

maxerickson 1y ago
It was during the pandemic, the family did not have good phone service at their home... https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom-for-a-fish-point-family/ https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom...
reaperducer 1y ago
Why is cellular signal required for lessons? Look at the photo (linked to elsewhere in this thread). If it's anything like some of the parts of the big rez I've been to, the nearest school is probably three hours away over sand/dirt roads. The teacher teaches remotely to children spread over a thousand square miles.
dotnet00 1y ago
It's to have something better than just the bare minimum. I remember seeing similar reports about higher education in remote villages in India, with cellular networks and internet access allowing people to learn without being able to move to somewhere close to sufficiently qualified teachers.

baq 1y ago

> Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards. it doesn't help that it's in practice illegal to be in such poverty.

breakingrules3 1y ago
[dead]
potato3732842 1y ago
Legality only matters insofar as people use it as a mental shortcut to turn off their brains. Which TBH I think is way less than it used to be, but feels like it's more because so much more stuff involves law and government than it did 50yr ago.
ModernMech 1y ago
If anyone is wondering why solving homelessness and poverty is so hard, this sibling reply is dead but I think people need to see that this opinion exists, and we need to contemplate the richest and most powerful people in this country share this sentiment: "we're not blind to it, half of us are sick of paying for it for multiple generations, accruing interest. we're paying for poor people from 20 years ago still. let them sink, let them go away. its a test, they failed it." Here, "go away" is a euphemism for "die from exposure". 20 years ago we had a worldwide financial crises caused by the capricious whims of the richest people in this country, they caused massive amounts of damage, destroyed people's lives and livelihoods, kicked them out on the street, and it's framed as "paying for poor people".
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  It's nobody's fault for becoming poor. But if you're staying poor (dirt poor) for decades, then there is something you're doing wrong. The other commenter puts it in a rude way, but there's something to it. If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
  - 1y ago

kyleblarson 1y ago

I grew up in Kentucky and spent a lot of time in the areas around the Red River Gorge in the southeastern part of the state. Some of the poverty there is shocking. The movie Winters Bone actually seemed to do a decent job of showcasing similar areas.

diet_mtn_dew 1y ago

>There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity I cannot find a citation for a number that large of people who do not have access to electricity in the USA, would you happen to have one?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

zarl 1y ago

> There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes. This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.

reaperducer 1y ago
This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them. You are disconnected from reality. I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both. I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
- tredre3 1y ago
  > I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago. > I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both. But can you provide us with a source other than your own eyes for the "millions of people" you claim to be living in such conditions?
- zarl 1y ago
  No one in this thread has any evidence of these "hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people" and just falls back to "well I met a guy". The claim is not that literally 100% of Americans have electricity/running water. It's that there are not "millions" of Americans without them.
potato3732842 1y ago
And when it is a problem, it's usually a problem with the system denying people access rather than literal inability to afford. Municipality would rather some house be vacated (perhaps based on a "poor people drain services, kick-em out" policy posture) so when a storm takes out your utility pole guess who isn't getting a new meter drop until they bring their shit up to current code at a non-starter price... and oh look here it's illegal to live in a house without electricity. I guess that means someone's getting evicted, what a shame...

jibe 1y ago

This is what Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation actually looks like. https://cds.bie.edu/ https://cds.bie.edu/ Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.

Den_VR 1y ago
I can’t imagine why anyone would be deliberately misled to believe Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation is not very nice. Oh wait
- renewiltord 1y ago
  Not American born so there is some obvious thing here that’s not so obvious to me. What’s the ref? Is it a race thing
  - pkkim 1y ago
    Not sure exactly how obvious it is to most Americans, but the Navajo reservation is extremely poor by American standards. When I went there, the local roads were all dirt and the houses seemed to have no electricity.
  - UncleEntity 1y ago
    I used to have Hopi and Navajo friends and I have no idea what they are referring to. One thing I can tell you that the whole situation up there is contentious and complicated between the tribes, the states and the feds where one could support any argument as there isn't some standard "Rez Life" one can point at. I mean, I used to have this one friend who grew up (and still had family) on a part of the reservation which was completely surrounded by the other tribe and her and my other friends (from the other tribe, don't quite remember which was which here) would get into some serious arguments at the bar over the issue where we'd have to separate them before it came to fisticuffs.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  I can’t imagine why anyone would be deliberately misled to believe Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation is not very nice. Oh wait The real world isn't TV. Not everything is a grand conspiracy.

mrguyorama 1y ago

The US desperately needs another version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Other_Half_Lives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Other_Half_Lives to become virally popular. I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income. There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died. My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well. It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline". Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry) There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices. These people are gross.