There ain't no 60K trucks in driveways out here except for in the bigger cities. Once you get out of the ring suburbs? Poverty and meth, crumbling roads, old farmers trying to hang on and schools that exist because they are cheaper than prisons. The barber I go to was not able to make it into work last weekend because he had to drive into the big city to ask for a handout from the state to fix the 75 year old historical building he is in due to not enough business to make enough money to fix it himself. He makes enough to pay the taxes and buy food while his wife works somewhere nearby. That was a lovely conversation to have as I was getting a shave with a straight razor on my neck.

And all they do is watch Fox News, owned by a foreigner (but don't tell them that) who see Trump as the only one who gives a damn about their plight. And all the problems are the liberal commie minorities in the big city, so vote republican to keep them under control.

Every time I go out into the sticks, I get a little more concerned that something very awful is about to go down. Then I get back into the liberal bubble of the city and think everything is going to be fine. The only major candidate, IMO, that cared about the plight of whole swaths of the county that are in deep, deep trouble was Sanders. We all know how that went down. The people who grow our food are getting older, the kids worth investing in are getting the fuck out as fast as possible, and huge swaths of rural fly over country are in deep, deep trouble. Rural people on the coasts at least have the tax base of the bigger cities to suckle on and eek out the next decade or two while this all shakes itself out and leaves something completely different in its wake. Kentucky? Indiana? Arkansas? West Virginia? They do not have the luxury of a Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, NYC etc as a buffer to buy time. There is no money for infrastructure that is not shoveled into corruption, the schools all suck (and I say that as someone that does outreach... thank science for the internet), they can't build new roads when the population is declining and with it losing the justifications for adding to what they got. The only thing going for a lot of the smaller rural areas is that housing is cheap as the old people die and nobody is moving into the now vacant housing. (2000 square foot house next to my friends, 10 blocks from "downtown" is 40K). But buying a house out here is an anchor, and there are a lot of people who are waiting for that big chance to get the hell out of here and go... well elsewhere, out there, where the jobs are, to school, anywhere but here. Young people work their asses off, get a wad of cash and leave instead of buying homes and land and so on. All the farm equipment I see on the way out to the sticks is old, I cannot think about the last time I saw new equipment working on a field.

I get the same vibe of how the urban ghettos of the 70's acted. Nobody had any hope, nobody could buy houses, cash and employment was transitory so they all bought fancy clothes and Cadillacs when they had cash to spend instead of investing in housing education etc. If you manage to get lucky and have 20K in your hand, you buy something for the now because looking around? Fuck tomorrow.

I say all this as a guy who makes twice median income, has a shit ton of savings and plans on retiring at 55.

I have a thought here, somewhere, but it is late and I need to get to bed. Maybe in the AM will expand on this.