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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why this is an article. This is just normal life in many parts of rural America from Pennsylvania to Washington to Arizona.

When I lived in West Virginia, I did note that the Washington Post had a weird fascination with the place. Whenever things got slow, you could expect some big exposé about what a bunch of uneducated, dirty bumpkins we were.

WaPo even once held a contest to come up with a new slogan for West Virginia when it didn't like seeing "Almost Heaven" on the license plates. The winner was "Almost Haiti."

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I'm guessing it's an article because a lot of WaPo readers aren't aware that this is normal life in many parts of rural America. * edit: removed comma

> Not sure why this is an article. This is just normal life in many parts of rural America from Pennsylvania to Washington to Arizona.

Plenty of people have no idea that there are people living like this in America.

This is true. Whenever I see people on TV or the internet or wherever raising money for clean water and basic sanitation or basic electricity in other parts of the world, I think about the THOUSANDS of homes I've seen in West Virginia, Tennessee, and especially Texas that lack water, toilets, and electricity.

Somehow America's dirt poor aren't as exciting or trendy as the exotic overseas dirt poor.

> Somehow America's dirt poor aren't as exciting or trendy as the exotic overseas dirt poor.

It's not that poverty is exciting. It's that abject poverty in the richest country on Earth is shocking and goes against assumptions people had as correct since ever.

> THOUSANDS of homes I've seen in West Virginia, Tennessee, and especially Texas that lack water, toilets, and electricity.

What the hell? How can this be? I'm trying to think of something constructive to say here but the situation is so outrageous that I don't know where to start.

And plenty of people in these areas have not idea what life is like outside of their rural areas. My brother recently told me a story of talking to two 20 somethings in rural Pennsylvania (not Amish). They had never traveled anywhere outside of their town and had no concept of what it was like to live anywhere else.

I currently live in rural upstate New York. When a longtime friend of mine found out that I would soon be leaving to live in a big city in the south he yelled at me, called me an idiot, and said I would get raped and murdered there.

This is a guy in his mid-30's who has only ever visited a place with more than 10,000 people once, so his entire perception of what it's like in urban America is based off of the salacious news stories he reads online.

As someone who recently moved to this city, he's not entirely wrong...in 2 years and without ever going to the "bad" parts of mine, I've been mugged in broad daylight, my roommate was assaulted randomly for no reason after his car broke down, I've had a guy threaten to kill me and follow me around when he sees me, and I get a postcard in the mail every other week or so telling me about another one of the homeless guys within a couple blocks of me's sex crimes, which almost always includes multiple offenses and at least one rape. One of my neighbors had two guys come run up at her, grab her dog, and run away with it. I've had 0 encounters with anything like this in the suburbs.

Well I've been living in Chicago for almost 20 years now and I've only been murdered a couple times. Happens to millions of people in this city every day don't you know?

Hm.

http://heyjackass.com/

Certainly not millions, but that's not something I'd be proud of.

Nowhere in New Hampshire do people say "don't worry, its just certain parts that have all the violence."

I agree it's terrible and Chicago could do better but my point is if you really look at the number this stuff is blown way out of proportion. That's no comfort for those who are affected by it, but the odds of it happening to you even in a place like Chicago if you just take a few minor precautions are vanishingly small.

If they could do better, why aren't they?

What makes you think they aren't trying?

I don’t think they aren’t trying, I think they can’t really do much better than they are.

I mean, yes, murder is bad - but are the 58 people dead during September random strangers who got shot? Or is this the result of mostly gang/organized crime violence?

You're not likely to die in a car crash if you don't drive a car.

Minor nit at this point but NHTSA just released their 2016 data.

37,641 die on US roads in 2016, including 5,987 pedestrians, 840 cyclists, for 18% of deaths.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLejbNAWsAMmDOO.jpg

> You're not likely to die in a car crash if you don't drive a car.

Unless you're collateral damage.

What kind of psychopath-filled nightmare land do you live in?

Columbus, OH lol I suppose I'm probably just unlucky, but you can't deny that the odds of this stuff happening goes way up in an urban area.

Apparently forcible rape is _less_ common in big cities:

  http://victimsofcrime.org/docs/default-source/ncvrw2015/2015ncvrw_stats_urbanrural.pdf?sfvrsn=2

But the arrest rate of perpetrators is much greater in the city. Unless I'm reading it wrong. Per the note, the two graphs aren't directly comparable.

EDIT: Seems that Alaskans are incredibly rapey:

http://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/Publications_NSVRC_...

I'm sorry that you've experienced that kind of thing, but hopefully you also realize that not every urban area is like this, and maybe your neighborhood is or is becoming less "good" than you originally believed when you moved there.

But this isn't unique to country bumpkins. I could rattle off dozens of people I know personally in Los Angeles county that think that LA is what life looks like elsewhere.

edit/ My point is simply that being sheltered isn't a unique experience based on where you live or the population center you're living in.

This is why this is an article:

"And when that happens, they come to buyers such as Vance who dry and resell the roots to processors, which pulverize and resell them to natural-supplement manufacturers, which resell them as herbal products to retailers, which market them to health-conscious consumers."

To me, this is what the article was leading up to. The poorest Americans, the most vulnerable Americans, are breaking their backs (literally) and risking their lives (literally) with no benefits, while rich American are buying up the result for health products that may or may not have any real effect for them.

The real story here is that a significant portion of Americans have enough to money to essentially light it on fire on a regular basis while another significant portion is trying to stop from getting kicked off of SSDI.

I'm always kind of amazed that stories about how much it sucks to be poor are "news" and not common knowledge.

I remember when Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed came out and it got all this press. I was dumbfounded. People needed a book to let them know that it is hard to survive on a minimum wage job?

I forget the name of the book, but after reading Ehrenreich's book, I read one by a college-aged kid who went from literally having no money to having some sort of relatively good job.

It wasn't particularly well written, but it got a fair amount of press - because it reaffirmed people's "gumption and bootstraps" American philosophy, where hard work is the solution to everything, regardless of context or circumstance.

Of course a white 20 year old can get hired. Of course he has the time to walk an hour to his job and work there for 12 hours since he has no children or elderly relatives to take care of. Of course he can move furniture, since he's young and healthy. Of course he can get a job without a criminal record.

>Of course a white 20 year old can get hired. Of course he has the time to walk an hour to his job and work there for 12 hours since he has no children or elderly relatives to take care of. Of course he can move furniture, since he's young and healthy. Of course he can get a job without a criminal record.

Is it unreasonable to expect this level of effort out of any 20yo who's options are "be poor" or do this?

Not being white and having a criminal record aren't going to stop you from making ends meet. They just make it harder to proceed upward after that point.

The starting point is not a collage degree. The starting point is 14 when many people drop out of school, get sick, get pregnant, etc. If you make it to 20 without anything bad happening including a clean record and good credit then sure the next 12 months is not hard.

> Is it unreasonable to expect this level of effort out of any 20yo who's options are "be poor" or do this?

It's totally not, but the book presented him as a ambitious go-getter who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. I wish I remembered the damn book's name.

Income mobility in the United States is not that high. Most people stay in the income class that they are born into, so most people who are not impoverished do not know what poverty is like.

Also, the level of poverty covered in the article is pretty extreme. I grew up in a low income area but it was not difficult to find some way to make 15-20k a year. My neighbors were no where near as poor as the woman highlighted in the article.

For some stats to back this up, the Brookings Institute report shows that mobility is much higher in Canada and the Scandinavian social democracies than it is in the U.S. or the U.K.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...

Many other reports corroborate these findings.

One of the narratives of the last election was that the "elites" and our newspapers were oblivious to conditions facing working folks in the interior states. It was probably a false accusation, but it helped fuel a wave of self loathing that persists today. (A friend of mine blasted the NY Times for ignoring the Midwest on the same day that they published a lengthy story about Flint MI).

Yet, when someone does write an article, it's seen as offensive.

Is there a right way to report on what's going on?

It might help if they hired local journalists or republished stories from local media sources.

It's pretty ridiculous reading articles from coastal media that covers other parts of America as though it were a strange, foreign land, full of unfamiliar customs.

Or maybe that really is how the NY/DC/SF/LA ruling class feels?

> It's pretty ridiculous reading articles from coastal media that covers other parts of America as though it were a strange, foreign land, full of unfamiliar customs.

To people outside the region covered, it is a strange, in many ways foreign, land, full of unfamiliar customs.

So is, say, California to outsiders; including New Yorkers, the idea of a culturally homogenous bicoastal society is a myth made up to sell a boogeyman to Middle America.

To be fair, attitudes of many on the coasts are doing a good enough job of that already.

In case anyone is interested, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1994/12/04/... is the article in the Washington Post from December 4, 1994.

While it is a popular slogan, West Virginia has never had "Almost heaven" on its license plates. The slogans on license plates have been "Mountain State" (in all caps) and "Wild, Wonderful".

Because it's going to be an interesting counterpoint to next month when the Republicans in Congress start telling us all how badly we need tax cuts for rich people. And then talk about how we should pay for it by cutting the meager benefits we give out to people who are hard up, like those in this article.

I'm not a socialist, but the contrast between this and gold-plated Trump Tower is almost enough to make that sound appealing.

The other entries can be seen at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1994/12/04/...

West Virginia border is 106 miles from Washington DC. One of the poorest areas of the country is next door to the Nations Capital, that makes good press.

> Not sure why this is an article.

WashingtonPost has to generate content to make money.

What part of WV?

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