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An Honest Assessment of Rural White Resentment Is Long Overdue
(newrepublic.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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I spend dozens of hours a year driving through the rural South. So many towns as you describe. And I have no idea how they're alive at all.
A weird thing I've seen: Most small Alabama towns are quite charming and well kept. How does that work when there's no obvious economic driver?!
Cross the border into Mississippi and it's a different story. You could teleport me to a random highway or town and I could tell you whether I was in AL or MS.
The wealth gap is on full display everywhere. You'll see a stunning property and home, rambling across several acres, and then a couple of trailers so beat down the county would condemn them if they cared to look.
How do those small towns still work? Cars. Sit and talk to people living in those forgotten towns, and they generally have very veeeery long commutes to work, or one of the few poorly paying jobs in town. +90 minutes commute is not uncommon to get to the next closest printing press/slaughterhouse/steel mill/etc that hasn’t moved overseas or closed down.
I dated a girl from one of those small towns. Pretty much everyone either worked at the school, the county hospital, or the Hormel factory.