I did not write this but I felt it was worth preserving and sharing.
The problem, fundamentally, in this country boils down to two main things:
1. We don't tax billionaires enough. We should not have billionaires. We should have millionaires, and that's it. As AOC said, you don't get to be a billionaire by making money, you get to be a billionaire by taking money.
As a result, billionaires spend money to influence elections, an ass-ton of money. They finance media, they finance websites, they finance what are essentially their own brown shirts. The Koch Brothers, the Adelsons, Freiss, Uhlein, the Mercers: they fund these think tanks, websites, and the like. Almost all of right wing media: Fox, OAN, Sinclair, Breitbart, WND, Newsmax, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce, ALEC, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, the Federalist, RealClearPolitics: these are all funded directly or indirectly by fascist billioniares.
2. This country has never dealt with its past (or present) in a conscious, rational, and sane fashion. Too much propaganda has been spewed, much of it by the above billionaires, against Black people, against gay people, against "sluts", against cities, etc.
And part of the reason why billionaires are so effective in their messaging is because rural America is so isolated and insular to begin with.
These rural elegies penned by urban do-gooders at NPR and the New York Times are part of the problem. We like to think of the country life as unspoiled, as intellectually aspiring, as something real as opposed to living in cities or suburbia. Well, the idyllic country life never existed then and it doesn't know. Small towns and country life are rife with racism, homophobia, and misogyny and they always have been. Everyone goes to church, and everyone knows everyone else. Good luck on being gay as a teenager when everyone's mom knows everyone else's mom, and conformity and intellectual vacancy are held to be the highest ideals imaginable. Everyone wants the same life their parents had: go to work in the mills/mines/farms and pop out as many rugrats as possible as early as possible. Anyone who doesn't fit into this rigid, rural mentality is shunned, run out of town, or otherwise forced to conform.
The people who stay in these small towns are not praiseworthy, they may very well be decent, fine, upstanding folks, but they are, generally speaking, incurious, ignorant, and distrusting of anything they don't understand. It's not their fault; it's how they have been brainwashed since they were toddlers. Rural small towns are much, much closer to the dystopia of conformity shown in The Prisoner and The Truman Show, where any act of independence or individuality is ruthlessly suppressed than anyone is likely to admit.
I'm sick and tired of catering to these people. They want my tax dollars to prop them up because they have been told for 145 years how goddamn precious and moral and pure they are, and how useless, lazy, and filthy the cities are. They don't want to learn, they don't want to go to college, they don't want retraining, they don't want to move. They want welfare but don't want anyone else to have it. They feel they deserve the welfare because they are "real" Americans. Now, ultimately, this might come down to race, ultimately, but at some point the average high school dropout schlub working at his father's hardware store in Ames, Iowa really does look down his nose at people working in cities, getting an education, contributing something of value to society, tolerating immigrants, and making ten times his salary. They have been taught since birth that their way of life is the best way of life, that anything or anyone that doesn't conform to that way of life is sinful, degredated, criminal, or immoral.
The sad part here and the reason that this is all coming to a head now is because:
1. America elected a "divisive" Black President, which triggered their racism.
2. America made gay marriage legal, which further triggered them.
3. Factory automation made all those jobs at the factory and mills go away.
4. Increasing competition and better technology made all those agricultural and mining jobs go away.
See, rural America actually FUNCTIONED ECONOMICALLY up until about 1990. These rural folk really could drop out of high school, get their girlfriend pregnant, drink a six pack every night, and go to work at the factory, and they could afford a home, a few rifles, a boat, and so forth.
This has all broken down and since these people have no other way of thinking, well, here we are.
1. We don't tax billionaires enough. We should not have billionaires. We should have millionaires, and that's it. As AOC said, you don't get to be a billionaire by making money, you get to be a billionaire by taking money.
As a result, billionaires spend money to influence elections, an ass-ton of money. They finance media, they finance websites, they finance what are essentially their own brown shirts. The Koch Brothers, the Adelsons, Freiss, Uhlein, the Mercers: they fund these think tanks, websites, and the like. Almost all of right wing media: Fox, OAN, Sinclair, Breitbart, WND, Newsmax, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce, ALEC, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, the Federalist, RealClearPolitics: these are all funded directly or indirectly by fascist billioniares.
2. This country has never dealt with its past (or present) in a conscious, rational, and sane fashion. Too much propaganda has been spewed, much of it by the above billionaires, against Black people, against gay people, against "sluts", against cities, etc.
And part of the reason why billionaires are so effective in their messaging is because rural America is so isolated and insular to begin with.
These rural elegies penned by urban do-gooders at NPR and the New York Times are part of the problem. We like to think of the country life as unspoiled, as intellectually aspiring, as something real as opposed to living in cities or suburbia. Well, the idyllic country life never existed then and it doesn't know. Small towns and country life are rife with racism, homophobia, and misogyny and they always have been. Everyone goes to church, and everyone knows everyone else. Good luck on being gay as a teenager when everyone's mom knows everyone else's mom, and conformity and intellectual vacancy are held to be the highest ideals imaginable. Everyone wants the same life their parents had: go to work in the mills/mines/farms and pop out as many rugrats as possible as early as possible. Anyone who doesn't fit into this rigid, rural mentality is shunned, run out of town, or otherwise forced to conform.
The people who stay in these small towns are not praiseworthy, they may very well be decent, fine, upstanding folks, but they are, generally speaking, incurious, ignorant, and distrusting of anything they don't understand. It's not their fault; it's how they have been brainwashed since they were toddlers. Rural small towns are much, much closer to the dystopia of conformity shown in The Prisoner and The Truman Show, where any act of independence or individuality is ruthlessly suppressed than anyone is likely to admit.
I'm sick and tired of catering to these people. They want my tax dollars to prop them up because they have been told for 145 years how goddamn precious and moral and pure they are, and how useless, lazy, and filthy the cities are. They don't want to learn, they don't want to go to college, they don't want retraining, they don't want to move. They want welfare but don't want anyone else to have it. They feel they deserve the welfare because they are "real" Americans. Now, ultimately, this might come down to race, ultimately, but at some point the average high school dropout schlub working at his father's hardware store in Ames, Iowa really does look down his nose at people working in cities, getting an education, contributing something of value to society, tolerating immigrants, and making ten times his salary. They have been taught since birth that their way of life is the best way of life, that anything or anyone that doesn't conform to that way of life is sinful, degredated, criminal, or immoral.
The sad part here and the reason that this is all coming to a head now is because:
1. America elected a "divisive" Black President, which triggered their racism.
2. America made gay marriage legal, which further triggered them.
3. Factory automation made all those jobs at the factory and mills go away.
4. Increasing competition and better technology made all those agricultural and mining jobs go away.
See, rural America actually FUNCTIONED ECONOMICALLY up until about 1990. These rural folk really could drop out of high school, get their girlfriend pregnant, drink a six pack every night, and go to work at the factory, and they could afford a home, a few rifles, a boat, and so forth.
This has all broken down and since these people have no other way of thinking, well, here we are.