This is one of those slices of life that you don't really see unless it's staring you in the face. I saw a blurb in The Week which was sourced from US News which leads back to this heartbreaking rough ride which takes you back to questionable sources like this but then you follow the links and you end up staring this in the face:
- n Eastern Kentucky, authorities say two key factors have combined to exacerbate the problem: a rapidly declining coal industry and drug addiction.
Schools in Harlan County had Kentucky's highest percentage of homeless students in the 2013-14 school year, with 26 percent classified as homeless.
T. Michael Howard, the superintendent of Harlan County Schools, said he thinks the number — 1,255 students — is accurate.
"We have so many students who move around, and they are no longer living with their parents but with family members," Howard said. "This is a poor, poor part of the state. We have kids who are living in campers, and that meets the definition of homeless."
And when the Democrats say they'll try to help (while also saying "We Are Going To Put A Lot Of Coal Miners & Coal Companies Out Of Business") but Trump says he'll "Make America Great Again" it makes sense to vote for certainty, even if you know it's a lie, and maybe you don't, because one in four of your fucking high schoolers is trying to get a diploma without a permanent address.
- Of 3,142 counties in the United States in 2013, Harlan County ranked 3,139 in the longevity of both male and female residents. Males in Harlan County lived an average of 66.5 years and females lived an average of 73.1 years compared to the national average for longevity of 76.5 for males and 81.2 for females. Moreover, the average longevity in Harlan County declined by 0.6 years for males and 2.6 years for females between 1985 and 2013 compared to a national average for the same period of an increased life span of 5.5 years for men and 3.1 years for women. High rates of smoking and obesity and a low level of physical activity appear to be contributing factors to the lowered longevity for both sexes.
- Mining employment in Harlan County rose to 13,619 in 1950. The number of employed miners had declined to 764 by June 2016. During the same period, the population of Harlan County declined from 71,000 to less than 28,000. Unemployment has been as high as 20 percent (September 1995) and has consistently been higher than the U.S national average. Unemployment in December 2016 was 9.5 percent, compared to 4.8 percent in the nation as a whole. Harlan County ranked in the highest 10 percent of all United States counties in the prevalence of poverty among its residents.
I'm reminded of the auto plant Toyota built in Ontario rather than Mississippi because the schools were better, the medical was better, the welfare was better and Toyota would save millions per year by not having to provide all the stuff that would make someone move to Mississippi. If we were to provide a better baseline standard of living for everyone there'd be less of a delta between North Carolina and Alabama. That delta is walling off the poor and leaving them to rot. Especially when the only thing of value most people own is their house, we have (I believe) a moral obligation to make their homeland either economically viable or abandonable without penalty.
Yeah. Republicans have aligned with social conservatism, which makes the poor and under-educated vote against their own financial best interests. Democrats, meanwhile, have aligned with exactly fuckall which has made them the party of "sweet jesus is this really the only thing between the American Taliban and the abyss? Fucking fine, Hillary Clinton I guess."
Not just financial best interest, their lives. There are people who exist who voted for Drumpf who will die because they will lose their Obamacare. I cannot wrap my head around that. I don't know how to help them. Edit* It's like the morbidly obese person who has fused with their couch. Yes, they need to lose weight, but they are physically incapable of lifting themselves from sitting, and even attempting to do so is painful. What is there to be done for such a person? I've tried to approach this from different base assumptions and they all fell flat. You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason their way into.
I don't know if you listen to much country music. The joke is true - play it backwards and you get your dog, your wife and your truck. It is a music genre based on loss and alienation. Hillbilly/Southern/Whatever culture is all like that - "we don't have much but we do our best." It is now, has always been and shall always be about the struggle. Wrestling with our roots, Trying to turn off Mama’s tears, and feel up Daddy’s boots Shutting off our pride, fixing bridges we burned, learning how to live and learn Keeping our demons down and our trucks up and running Loving them angels sitting pretty in the middle of ‘em Fighting with the man in the mirror til we gone Yeah, that’s what all us good ol’ boys gonna go out workin’ on Gonna go out workin’ on Unfortunately, it's also not a genre of government intervention and boons from benevolent Yankees. So you're left with a culture that recognizes despair but also values self-sufficiency above all else. Also, Jesus. And as it's become more insular and forgotten, it's looking more and more like the Panjshir. Workin’ on coming to Jesus, kicking the bottle,
For many, many people, social mobility under Obama was the same as it was under Bush II and Clinton. That's to say it was very slow, stagnant, or even possibly a backwards slide. When you had a Presidential candidate that offered a lot of "Hope and Change" and then because the world is what it is and that never transpired, and things actually got worse for many people, all of the sudden the false promises from either candidate is really what catches your ear. It's what you've been hurting for for years and years and years. Not just social mobility, but really, a strong sense of stability. I remember all three presidential debates, I made threads for all of them here on Hubski. I remember being very distrusting of both Trump and Clinton for various reasons. I remember Trump actually talking about bringing jobs back, with conviction, and thinking to myself if that was Bush or McCain or Romney up there, they would have gotten my vote. Must have been one hell of a dog whistle he used, because I have a deeply engrained love/hate relationship with corporate America and even I, if only for a brief moment, liked Trump. Also, Loretta Lynn is an angel.
Behold the Long Boom. It's more accurate to say that social mobility was the same under Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter and Ford. It's just that when that mobility is slightly negative, it may take a while before you are really and truly in the shit. But when your myths are built in the '50s, and when your breadwinners are still riding that pensioned gravy train, things don't start looking shitty until Grampaw is in his grave. By 1969 we'd been to the moon, had a Mach 2 passenger jet and were enjoying an eight year decline in the unemployment rate. By 1974 we'd impeached a president, effectively abandoned the moon, gave up on our own SST and started enjoying an oil embargo. Thing is, you have to have been paying attention for longer than many voters have been alive for context on this shit. I mean, FFS. My hometown company town was in the megadeath industry. SDI? that was our bread'n'butter. And in the amount of time it took for me to get from preschool to high school, we'd closed three of seven elementary schools and one of the two Jr. Highs. The march of history does not favor small towns and as agriculture and manufacturing become information and service, the people without a bridge are left on a sinking shore. The problem is that on a historical spectrum, the Clintons are Republicans. They aren't even moderate Republicans. Take away Barry Goldwater's staunch disinterest in black people, and he's effectively Bill Clinton. Sanders? Sanders is a bomb-throwing crazy-eyed socialist that happens to be slightly to the right of Kennedy.
Party A goes out of their way to help you reaffirm everything you believe in and that even though the world is a scary place as long as you vote for them you stand a chance at being better off. Party B goes out of their way to tell you that everything you believe is wrong and that your misbeliefs are the cause for a lot of strife in the world and the sooner you come to grips with that, the sooner you can be a part of rectifying things and help the world be a smoother place to be, but first you have to stop being so stubbornly wrong. Meanwhile, you see instances where they do get their way and things are still screwed up so how right could the actually be? For Republicans, Democrats are Party B. For Democrats, Republicans are Party B. For Independents? Everybody is a bunch of jackasses and maybe things would actually get better if everyone stopped acting like a bunch of teenagers who think participating in team sports is the be all and end all of highschool.
I dunno, wait for goobster and his cronies to save the day or something.
I think Trae Crowder actually is making far more headway than I am.
Look at it like this, in four years, Trump will likely get fewer votes for no reason other than a portion of his constituency will have died off because of his policies. I wonder if there is a correlation between voting Republican and type 2 diabetes?
The survey says...The data suggest that the ill may have been particularly susceptible to Mr Trump’s message. According to our model, if diabetes were just 7% less prevalent in Michigan, Mr Trump would have gained 0.3 fewer percentage points there, enough to swing the state back to the Democrats. Similarly, if an additional 8% of people in Pennsylvania engaged in regular physical activity, and heavy drinking in Wisconsin were 5% lower, Mrs Clinton would be set to enter the White House. But such counter-factual predictions are always impossible to test. There is no way to rerun the election with healthier voters and compare the results.