David Wong does a good job of explaining exactly why rural America is desperate enough to opt for the “burn it all down” option this election year.
If you don’t live in one of these small towns, you can’t understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called “Cost of Living.” Let’s say you’re a smart kid making $8 an hour at Walgreen’s and aspire to greater things. Fine, get ready to move yourself and your new baby into a 700-square-foot apartment for $1,200 a month, and to then pay double what you’re paying now for utilities, groceries, and babysitters. Unless, of course, you’re planning to move to one of “those” neighborhoods (hope you like being set on fire!).
That is, if they don’t replace the only room you can afford with a $3,300-per-month high-rise.
In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town — aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The “downtown” is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart’s blast crater, the “suburbs” are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.
I’m telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive.
And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out [his] iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege.
Read the whole thing.
Trump supporters are not wrong about the coastal urban elites. They just are betting on fake solution which will never work.
JKB
“They just are betting on fake solution which will never work.”
On the other hand, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
This cycle like the Tea Party, like the attacks on Romney and McCain/Palin, is more fouling the pressure vents. That never ends well.
“The citizen must not be so narrowly circumscribed in his activities that, if he thinks differently from those in power, his only choice is either to perish or to destroy the machinery of state.”
Mises, Ludwig von (1927). Liberalism (p. 59).
GoneWithTheWind
Fixing all/most of America’s problems is really quite simple. It won’t happen no matter what the election results are. It will continue to get worse until it can no longer be propped up and then it will collapse and we will institute changes under the worst possible economic and social conditions. Such is the history of man and such it will continue to be.
Seattle Sam
History would say that this same sort of phenomenon drove Bryan and his “Free Silver” movement. Bryan took over the Democrat party. but of course, had no chance to be elected.
Old Salt
No solution will work until it is all burned down.
Please Leave a Comment!