Anyone watching the Diane Sawyer ABC piece on Appalachia?

[Bozita]

She goes to the kids for the truth. The adults are largely irresponsible addicts of one or more substances.

This is flat out sad.

[Drunken Irishman]

1. You mean Palin Country?

:eyes:

[Tulum_Moon]

6. You must be real drunk Irishman

Palin grew up in Alaska. Remember, close to Russia? So close she could see it?
I do hope you know where the Appalachia's are? As most of my people are from there. They are not all drunks and hill billy's. Most are hard working folks who have had hard lives. Some of the saddest are the black lung victims of the coal mines. Times have changed and the mines are still here. I am how ever not here. Please don't make fun of my people. The only ones I know are hard working American's to the bone. We would do anything for any kind of people. Go ahead and call me a hill billy! I'll just be proud! Oh, and the hill billy's started out as outcast Irish! You did know that? The Appalachia's are just like the Irish and Scottish hills. Thats why the Hill Billy's were so "clannish". So what are you drinking Irishman? Ever clear? White Lightning. Better not be White liqueur! You ask for that up in those hills and you may just get shot! For some reason they do NOT like the word Liqueur. Who knows why?
Anyway, get a good nights sleep!

Moon shadows!

[Drunken Irishman]

7. Yes I'm drunk and yes you failed to see my point.

Are they hard working? I don't doubt that. But they're Republican, conservative and Palin's base.

Look at this map, which compares the shift from Republican to Democrat and Democrat to Republican from 2004 to 2008:



Most counties saw a shift to the Democrats (including every county in Utah). Except in the deep south and around Appalachia. A funny thing, wouldn't you say? It's almost an exact line down the back of Appalachia where Obama got less votes than Kerry did in 2004. How can you explain that? How can Kerry, who ideologically isn't any different than Obama, garner MORE support in this region? It's not easy to explain away, is it?

So there you go. I stand by my comment. That was Palin Country. That was the part of America that believed every little bullshit lie about Obama. You know, that he was a Muslim, a terrorist and God knows what else.

[JI7]

14. i would like to see Obama visit these parts

and just talk to the people there.

[Drunken Irishman]

20. I agree.

I don't think they're lost and maybe with Jim Webb's help, he can bring these voters back to the Democratic Party. I mean, even Dukakis managed to carry West Virginia!

[JVS]

36. Hell no. I want him to stay away from there.

Way too many heavily armed lunatics among their ranks.

[cherish44]

26. Southern Lousiana being so red perplexes me...

They got their asses kicked by Katrina, Bush basically gave these people the finger. I realize a lot of them have relocated but still, the ones that remain are still living in a mess. Are Cajuns usually Repub? I've been there, they seem like very hard working, down to earth, happy people...SO not your typical GOP. (Maybe it's because they're very devout Catholics?)

[AnnieBW]

45. They moved out all of the poor people

that voted Democratic. Only the more well-off stayed. That's why Jindal won as Governor. Mission accomplished.

[doc03]

2. I've been watching it, red state bible belt

country.

[Bozita]

3. Miners interviewed in the presence of mine officials.

Miners don't want to talk about lung problems.

OK

[Hannah Bell]

12. yeah, & they're all a bunch of druggies anyway.

f--k diane.

[rvablue]

31. Huh? I thought she was very fair and compassionate in her interviewing/voice overs? n/t

[Hannah Bell]

34. her phony compassion is part of the perverse framing of the entire "problem".

she sucks the big one.

[flvegan]

4. I am.

The dental part was uplifting on the part of the dentist, but depressing on the part of the kids.

[SharonAnn]

5. Yes. The level of drug and alcohol abuse and the related codependency of the family

is heartbreaking. The kids love their parents, but they get all enmeshed in this addictive behavior and many never come out of it. They just continue in the same cycle.

It's very discouraging when you work with children here.

And, culturally, education is not valued. Making something of yourself is not valued, it is scorned because "you think you're better than we are". Working towards making things better, especially as a community, is not valued. The land of rugged individualism. Except, of course, for the broken families, the welfare checks, the disability checks, the food stamps, the religion, the religion, the religion.

It's really, really sad.

[Hannah Bell]

11. Wonder if it has anything to do with 200 years of being owned by mining corps.

& run as a private fiefdom.

[Cleita]

15. It has a lot to do with it.

The company takes care of you, so the brainwashing goes, so you never question the company.

[JI7]

16. if they had other options they wouldn't feel hostage to the mining

companies. it seems like that's the only job available in the area that pays good money. although when you consider the risks and everything else they should be getting much more than they are.

[Hannah Bell]

18. They don't have other options because they live in a big company town.

But so do we all, more or less.

[Hannah Bell]

17. There's been plenty of questioning, as I read the history. Mostly ending in murder & more theft.

It has a way of demoralizing people, murder & theft.

[Cleita]

21. I grew up in an American mining company in South America.

My uncle was a miner in a mining town in Arizona so I know how the group think goes. It's almost like Stockholm's syndrome. You are part of the fief as you so aptly put it or you are eliminated in one way or the other. My dad worked for 44 years for the Company and he got a gold watch and a pension for it. The pension didn't keep up with inflation and died when he died leaving my mother without an income.

[SharonAnn]

27. Thank you. Yes, that's what I see. The "battered spouse" syndrome.

"Been down so long it looks like up to me."

And yet, there's a determination to avoid change.

It's so sad. Many of these children have no chance.

[JI7]

8. just started here, going to watch and see how it is

[KitchenWitch]

9. The addiction problems are likely a symptom of the soul crushing poverty

and hopelessness there.

It is our very own third world, right here in the USA.

[QC]

29. Shhhh! You're not supposed to talk about that!

It's easier just to dismiss them as a bunch of deadbeats and genetic catastrophes--that doesn't inspire anyone to question the system, you know.

[JI7]

10. too much religion

[Hannah Bell]

13. too much feudalism.

[Delphinus]

30. I'm glad someone else thinks so too.

I know that when you're poor and hopeless you tend to turn to whatever brings you comfort. So much of religion isn't about fixing the problems of the now, it's about the reward in the afterlife.

[JI7]

32. yeah, my criticism wasn't just that they have some belief

but at how big a thing it plays in their lives.

when you look at places where people are much better off you see religion is not that big a factor. even those who believe in God don't turn to religion or whatever other faith as much as these people do if something is not working right. instead they turn to politics, or anything else where you try to get real change.

they all seem to have similar beliefs about things like coal mining company where they know they are kind of stuck to it . but rather than getting together and demanding politicians and the company change they just pray to god.

[QC]

37. It's a chicken or the egg question.

Don't you think it possible that people who live hard, hard lives, and who have had their own land stolen out from under them, might take refuge in their religion?

If you haven't, you should study sometime what happened to Appalachia once the coal and timber companies set their eyes on it. It's is a very ugly story, and in it you will find the roots of today's troubles in that part of America.

[JI7]

38. i know a bit but don't know exactly how it happened

i would like to read up on it though. is it possible to get change there ? another problem is they don't trust too many people from the outside.

[QC]

40. Here's a great Times editorial from a few years ago

that gives a quick version of the story: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807EFD7143FF933A25756C0A9659C8B63

There's a lot out there. It really is a vile chapter in our history, and one hardly anyone has ever heard of.

[QC]

42. Another good article here,

with a more recent focus on the closing of the mines in the past thirty years or so:

http://www.boston.com/news/specials/lives_lost/appalachia/

[Elwood P Dowd]

19. I was drafted in 1970 at the age of 23. There were 18-year-old kids in my basic training unit

who joined the Army for a better life. They were from West Virginia or the hills of Eastern Kentucky. Being treated like shit in the Army for $115.00 a month with three meals a day and free health care was better than living in those hills. There was also the GI Bill and VA benefits after they left the service. I could not understand why anyone in their right mind would join the Army during Vietnam until I heard the stories from some of these guys.

[kentuck]

22. I know these people.

They have been in a Depression for several years. There are few jobs and drugs have been the underground economy for quite some time. Full strength oxycontin can sell for as high as $100 per capsule on the streets. Lorcets and similar medication can go for $8 to $10 dollars a capsule. Some folks get up to 90 Lorcets a month from their doctors and most of them find their way to the streets.
It's a very serious problem in Appalachia.

[Tsiyu]

23. yeah

we're all just dumb ass druggies up here. We don't do a thing all day but lay around the shanty eating Vienner sausages, drinking Miller Lite and snorting Hydros.

All the Obama stickers on cars are a figment of my moonshine-addled brain.

There are no drugs in the suburbs or cities of America, no addictions troubling middle class parents in America. No hopelessness among the youth in the rest of the nation. No school shootings, murder/suicides, child abuse.

Only in Appalachia....


:sarcasm: (just in case)

[TWiley]

24. I have worked all through there for the railroad

when I was younger. Lots of Republicans down there that I found. Lots of racism too. A railroad friend took me to a community picnic where there was an evangelical preacher speaking, and a table set up for the Klan. Three men were sitting there (without costume) and a stack of literature was on the table.

One day, a young girl showed up with a picnic basket to feed the guys at lunch. She was married, divorced, had 3 children, and she was 16.

Snake handlers, pot growers, (we found a huge field alongside the tracks),and little shacks along the railroad tracks. It is an interesting part of the US

[riverdeep]

25. I recorded it and watched it. Quite a tragic show.

What was strange was that they were trying to say that the stereotypes about the people weren't true, and then showing people that had bad/missing teeth, were addicted to drugs, had junk all over the yard, were committing incest, were uneducated and didn't want to be, and had teenagers with multiple kids on welfare.

It was a really sad show with no typical happy ending. The girl whose mom was an alcoholic still had a mom that was an alcoholic, the football star dropped out of college and moved right back in to that toxic environment. Even the woman who found a house and got her GED, her best future is probably going to be Wal-mart, if she's lucky. When you see how the kids grow up, most of these people never had a chance.

All in all a good show, but too short. It didn't really get into a lot of reasons why it's like that for generation after generation.

[Hannah Bell]

35. Well, if they're *saying* "the stereotypes aren't true, but *showing*

"people that had bad/missing teeth, were addicted to drugs, had junk all over the yard, were committing incest, were uneducated and didn't want to be, and had teenagers with multiple kids on welfare"

what's the real message they're selling, eh?

It's that the stereotypes *are* true.

and if they offer no other explanation for why it continues generation after generation, the message is: it continues because these folks are fucked-up stupid druggie losers.

That's the take-home message to anyone who has no other background info.

Despite DS's oh-so "compassionate" voice-overs.

[QC]

41. Very true. America's elites have been portraying the rural poor as genetic catastrophes

for centuries, because it's a great way to keep anyone from caring about them or, worse yet, asking why they are so poor and degraded.

That might make people question the system, and we can't have that!

Better to say that they are just stupid and irresponsible and drunken, not that Big Money Inc. took everything they had and America turned its back on them.

[Hannah Bell]

43. kalikaks & jukes, anyone?

You can't know the history of this stuff & still buy into the modern version: same bullshit, 2009 packaging.

http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/docs/759.htm

"Dugdale studied 709 persons, 540 being of Juke blood and 169 of "X" blood who had married into the Juke family.... 180 had either been in the poorhouse or received outdoor relief to the extent of 800 years. There had been 140 criminals and offenders, 60 habitual thieves, 7 lives sacrificed by murder, 50 common prostitutes, 40 women venereally diseased contaminating 440 persons, and 30 prosecutions in bastardy. The total cost to the State of New York of this one group of mental and social degenerates was estimated, for a period of 75 years beginning in 1800, at $1,308,000."

OMG! These criminal losers are bankrupting us a-a-allllllllll!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_studies_in_eugenics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallikaks

"The paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould advanced the view that Goddard — or someone working with him — had retouched the photographs used in his book in order to make the "bad" Kallikaks appear more menacing. In older editions of the books, Gould said, it has become clearly evident that someone has drawn in darker, crazier looking eyes and menacing faces on the children and adults in the pictures."




http://www.wehaitians.com/bad%20seed%20or%20bad%20science.html

Bad Seed or Bad Science: The Story of the Notorious Jukes Family
Family: On Reflection, a Family Long Seen as Congenital Misfits Were Victims of Skewed Data

BINNEWATER, N.Y. — For more than a century, the Jukes clan has been presented as America's most despised family. Social science researchers long believed they were a case study of dysfunction, a bunch of genetically linked paupers, criminals, harlots, epileptics and mental defectives, whose care had placed a huge financial burden on taxpayers. The family's pedigree was used for decades as a textbook example of how heredity shaped human behavior and helped lead to calls for compulsory sterilization, segregation, lobotomies and even euthanasia against the "unfit."


And who funds this kind of "science," aimed at labeling, controling, institutionalizing & sterilizing the poor?

Why, the rich, of course: Including Bush/walker pal EH Harriman's wife:

The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York was a center for eugenics and human heredity research in the first half of the twentieth century. Both its founder, Charles Benedict Davenport, and its director, Harry H. Laughlin were major contributors to the field of eugenics in the United States (and in many ways, Germany).

Founded in 1910, the ERO was financed primarily by Mary Harriman (widow of railroad baron E. H. Harriman) and then the Carnegie Institution until 1939.

The ERO advocated for laws that led to the forced sterilization of many Americans deemed "feebleminded".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_Record_Office

[QC]

44. My dissertation dealt with the political uses of the "white trash" stereotype,

so I know very well how it has been used to justify abandoning the rural poor.

Unfortunately, very few people, even genuine progressives, know about it, so all too many of them eagerly buy into that stereotype.

[the andromeda stain]

28. I felt for the adults...I think some of them are heroes...

Even the addicts are not scum, simply because of their issues. It touched me. I have to admit, being from an urban/suburban environment all my life, that I had my own preconceived notions of these types of people. Now I see the beauty of their culture.

And it just goes to show us that nowadays it's income over race! Plenty of White invisible people in America and all because of $$$$$$$!!!!

[Sheltiemama]

33. I hope someone helps that kid who had to leave college.

I hope some wealthy benefactor watched this show and decides to fund his education.

My mother's side of the family is from Kentucky. My grandfather stopped working in the coal mines the day his best friend was killed in one. My grandparents eventually moved to Tennessee and opened a corner grocery store in 1933.

My heart ached for the children in that show. And I was so happy when that woman got her GED.

[BlooInBloo]

39. Nope. Lived there.