How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

tielan:

beatrice-otter:

EVERYBODY ABSOLUTELY NEEDS TO READ THIS.  Because like 95% of the people on this website have absolutely no clue whatsoever about what drives rural poor areas.  This is ABUNDANTLY clear every time anything having to do with rural issues gets mentioned, or any time a “redneck” perspective gets brought up.  I’m a card-carrying Democrat with a strong social-justice focus.  I’m a progressive.  But there are so many times I read things and go “well, I agree with the theory behind this and that it’s best for the country and the world, but it also has no clue about or provision for anything outside the big cities.”  And if the post or article talks about conservative areas?  I live deep in a red area of a red state, and usually such posts and articles are only about as accurate as a funhouse mirror.  If that.  This article, on the other hand, is SPOT ON.  Some choice bits:

They’re getting the shit kicked out of them. I know, I was there. Step
outside of the city, and the suicide rate among young people fucking doubles. The recession pounded rural communities, but all the recovery went to the cities. The rate of new businesses opening in rural areas has utterly collapsed.

I live in a town of 700 people.  We’re a lot more prosperous than most small towns in our area; but that is on shaky ground and could change in an instant.  (Remember, “a lot more prosperous” means that 2/3 of the commercial buildings in town stand vacant, boarded up.  In some of them, you can see daylight through the gaps in the boards, because the roof is caved in.  And in a town of 700 people, 40 separate households needed help from the food pantry last year–that’s about 20% of the population.  We’re still doing better than a lot of the surrounding towns.)  We have a small school–pre-K through high school–and it graduates between ten and twenty kids a year.  In the last decade, there have been three teen suicides in town.

We as liberals tend to have a lot of sympathy for urban poor living in
those kinds of conditions.  We’ll defend them at the drop of a hat–and
we’re right to do so.  But that sympathy disappears when it comes to the
rural poor.  It doesn’t even register that they face most of the same
problems you get in the ghetto, with even fewer services and programs to
help.  We’ll talk about rural racism and homophobia and sexism all
day–and all of that exists–but we don’t talk about the very real
poverty and hopelessness and other problems that they face.

You know what that does to a community?  You know the kind of grinding hopelessness that causes it in the first place?  When everything’s going to shit and the larger world doesn’t care, only mentions you if you’re the butt of the joke or they can proclaim their moral superiority?  
If you were drowning in that every day, and somebody said they’d save
you (and kick all the assholes who laugh about you in the teeth while he
did it), wouldn’t you want to support him even if he was an asshole you
despised?

Now, you know and I know that Trump isn’t going to actually save them–he’d have to be able to come up with a coherent policy, for one, which, hah, ain’t going to happen. And also you and I know and I know that even if he did save all the coal mine and power plant my town depends on it would be disastrous for the whole world in the long run.  But Hillary doesn’t really have any plans that might help rural areas like mine, either, and some of her plans would hasten our destruction.  Most of them are, in the long run, better for America and the world.  (Sure, the rural areas will continue their slow, grinding, painful death, while being mocked for their poverty and backwardness, but America as a whole will be better.)  Try telling that to people watching their communities die and their kids and friends kill themselves or drown in bottles.

It really does feel like the worst of both worlds: all the ravages of
poverty, but none of the sympathy. “Blacks burn police cars, and those
liberal elites say it’s not their fault because they’re poor. My son
gets jailed and fired over a baggie of meth, and those same elites make
jokes about his missing teeth!” You’re everyone’s punching bag, one of
society’s last remaining safe comedy targets.

“The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really
mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they
hate it. But I’m telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying.
It’s not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as
being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well,
except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.”

And yes, there’s parts of that way of life–the racism, the sexism, the homophobia, to name just a few–that should die.  But there’s good parts, too.  There’s beauty, and love, and strength, and kindness, and generations of families working together to build community and a future.  There’s traditions that have nourished and supported generations of people through meaningful lives–even if you might not recognize anything in those lives as important.  And all of that is crumbling.

Neither Clinton nor Trump (nor any national politician of the last decade or anywhere on the horizon) can change that.  You’d have to somehow dramatically alter the economy to bring jobs back to rural areas, and even if you could find a viable way to do it, more populated areas would probably scream bloody murder at the resources being diverted.  But Trump, the vicious, narcissistic, bigoted, homophobic, ableist, misogynistic, jingoistic, fascist turd that he is, at least pretends that he can, that he can bring back the way things were when all those empty buildings downtown were filled and the kids weren’t killing themselves and rural areas at least sometimes saw themselves in popular culture as something other than the butt of a joke.  It’s a lie, and a dangerous one, but I don’t blame my neighbors for wanting to believe it.

Particularly worth reading for @beatrice-otter’s addition.

I know that many people here on Tumblr don’t want to sympathise with conservatives, and most particularly not people who support Trump; but everyone has reasons, and those reasons do amount to more than just “sexist, racist, and homophobic”.

The thing to remember is that even if Trump loses, you will still be living with your fellow Americans. You may not have to pay attention to them outside of the election cycles, but believe me, now that they’ve had someone tell them ‘I’m on your side, I can turn the world back to when your communities thrived’, they’re going to be a lot noisier in those election cycles.

How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind