Christy Ratliff is sitting in a folding chair in a public school gym in Grundy, Virginia, waiting for her number to be called. She arrived at 4 a.m. on this October Saturday to secure her position in line to have eight teeth pulled. Genetic gum disease, she explains, has left most of them rotten or broken. She hooks a finger to pull down her lip and show me gruesome damage—the kind most dentists see only in textbooks.
Ratliff is 29 years old.
Grundy, the seat of Buchanan County, sits deep in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia. This weekend, it’s hosting a free clinic courtesy of Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders, but for places in the United States where the health outcomes are as grim as those in many developing countries. RAM founder Stan Brock once suggested that because Grundy is so inaccessible, his volunteers should literally parachute into town, as he once did while working in rural Africa.
Despite all the faith these locals have put in Trump, his second term is threatening their precarious existence. Few places in America are as reliant on the federal government. According to a recent study, 45 percent of the personal income of Buchanan County residents comes from Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and government disability programs. Federal dollars also account for about 15 percent of the county budget, subsidizing nearly every aspect of local life—education, economic development, disaster recovery, housing, sewer infrastructure. And Trump has succeeded in jeopardizing or eliminating nearly all of it.
“We live in a remote part of the world,” the driver says, declining to give his name. He’s here for denture work because Bradshaw has no dentist. He grew up in a holler, and like generations of his people, worked in the coal industry, including once for a company owned by Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.)—until his paychecks bounced, a chronic problem at Justice’s mines. Now he works in logging. He has no health insurance, he says. Like 80 percent of McDowell County’s voters, he cast his ballot for Trump: “He’s kicking ass and taking names. He’s cleaning up the gangs. He’s doing awesome with the immigrants, too.”
This is why we can't have sympathy nor empathy for MAGAts, and having any for them is both weakness and morally objectionable.
These people prove time and time again they are beyond redemption and operate solely on hatred for minorities and women.
Its fucking infuriating to see so many leftists still blind themselves with this undeniable bullshit that MAGAts can still be reached, or that their ignorance is not also malice.
These people are a hostile enemy, plain and simple.
I hear ya, and I so get it. But look, these people aren’t trying to be evil or whatever. They’re getting crushed out of existence and grasping for anything familiar. Stupidly, poorly, but some of it’s understandable.
It’s a shame all the way around. Places like these are home to racist bullies, jesus freaks, gravy seals and crooked good ol’ boys, but they’re also home to people just literally trying to feed their family and be a good person as best as they know how.
If you want to condemn everyone, you have to wrong some innocents. I think we all know that Fox News and the republican party have created this self-defeating dystopia, but it’s not all bad and it can definitely be good.
The article is long but there’s lots of examples.
If someone is trying to kill me, I am going to defend myself and I am not going to feel bad if in that defense they meet their demise.
These people, for whatever the reason may be, are trying to kill me and people I care about. And it may be different where you are, but the ones around where I live hate, genuinely hate anyone that disagrees with their way of life and they chant for their death.
So, fuck these people, fuck all of them even the ones that are being duped or are being taken advantage of - because as long as they exist they will continue to contribute to the problem.
I feel bad if some chickens have to be culled due to disease. I love animals. But I recognize they still need to be culled.
So do these people.
Oh you’re too good to compare them to rats, eh. How very.