
Digging in the Trash - samsolomon
http://bittersoutherner.com/digging-in-the-trash-david-joy
======
ElatedOwl
I was born in raised in a suburban midwest area, my wife is from WV.

In some ways the area seems so backwards; a guy with the legal name
"Stingray", trashy houses and trailers all over. The closest mall is an hour
drive. The only local entertainment is heading to walmart or the single screen
movie theater.

Yet there's an intangible charm to the area. A beautiful landscape, an
absolute kindness and compassion to even unknown strangers.

>I get the same kind of questions about addiction. People don’t understand
what would push someone to drugs like methamphetamine or heroin. [...] That’s
what every single addict I’ve ever known really wanted: just a second to
breathe.

So real.

~~~
a3n
> In some ways the area seems so backwards; [short list of lack of facilities
> and features]

> Yet there's an intangible charm to the area. A beautiful landscape, an
> absolute kindness and compassion to even unknown strangers.

Perhaps when all you have is each other, not only are you "forced" to realize
that you rely on each other, it _allows_ you to rely on others and be relied
on.

Modern suburbs and cities with their abundance of impersonal support allow us,
maybe even force us, to be recluses in a crowd.

~~~
gumby
> Modern suburbs and cities with their abundance of impersonal support allow
> us, maybe even force us, to be recluses in a crowd.

Being a major driver for people moving to cities, of course: you can't get
what you want out in the sticks. Sometimes it's access to something concrete
like a specific job or such, but other times it's because you don't "fit in"
(e.g. you're gay in an intolerant area, or aren't interested in the local
religion monopoly).

Hopefully those who stick around find it to their liking.

------
ergothus
Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I found the article and many of the comments
here annoying.

Yes - rural people can be nice, helpful, friendly, wise, experienced, and
unpretentious.

Rural people can also be short-sighted, rude, intolerant, gleefully embrace
ignorance, and every bit as pretentious as a city-slicker.

This is because whether it's city, suburban, or rural, we're all still people.
And here's the kicker: All things being equal, people are people, and some are
jerks and others saints. But things AREN'T equal. I've lived in trailers, and
I've owned a house - I can't tell you about your neighbors in those
situations, but I can tell you about the areas.

I won't speculate the reasons here, but rural areas (more in the American
South than other places I've been, but still in general) have more than their
share of bitter, racist, sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, self-righteous
people. This is demonstrable in a variety of statistical ways by look at
different states/counties.

When reviewing the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked "Is it the
government's submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than
the citizens in the North?". I've been there. It totally is. And the more
rural, often the more racist (etc).

When you look at states where they are removing actual science from the
textbooks, where are they? When you find the populations of people that want
to "go with their gut" in the face of any evidence, where are they
concentrated?

Of course, you can't paint with broad strokes - for me to condemn everyone in
a low-population density area is just as wrong as calling them all saintly.
There are many people, many towns, many areas, where what I'm talking about is
less common than in many cities.

But my experience says the embrace of ignorance to be more likely there. I
don't look down on someone for coming from or being in a rural area. I don't
admire someone for coming to or being in a city. But the sort of "noble
savage" picture that I'm seeing painted here utterly disregards the very real
problems and social ills that many of these areas have.

Tell me your in/from a rural area and I don't care. Tell me you're poor, it
doesn't impact my impression of your worth as a person. But don't be an asshat
and surround yourself with other asshats and then complain about the
reputation you're getting.

~~~
Pica_soO
You know the illusion of open mindedness in a city - its more persistent yes.
But they are not more open-minded there- they are just two-faced and can turn
around on a needles pin.

Maybe you should read upon the Weimar republic- it seemed so open minded and
avantgardist in the citys. But when the mood turned, the very avant-garde
turned out to be the best turn-coats of them all, abandoning all they hold
tear (except of there love for new tech) and leaving the other, the weak and
the feeble hanging out to dry. If that situation would be mapped to valley
today- the failing designer sitting in the office nearby- could be the next
great chieftain, the marketing guy at the water cooler the next Goebbels. In a
city, everyone is by default more separate and lonely, thus allowing for any
-ism to grow rapidly once formed- into not only a disgusting ideology, but
also a add-hoc family/community replacement, which is hysterically defended
against any attempt to dissolve it with reason.

~~~
ergothus
> But they are not more open-minded there- they are just two-faced and can
> turn around on a needles pin.

If you're saying they CAN be that way, then I agree, as I said in my post.
Humans that suck are everywhere, and all of us have flaws. My point is that
it's often (not always) WORSE in the rural areas.

OTOH, you didn't qualify your statement at all - you said they "are just two-
faced [etc]" \- and that sounds like someone ignoring all nuance to the issue.

~~~
Pica_soO
Im not declaring all humans in citys to be that way. I presume its the same
percentage of racism and baseless hatred on other beings (for whatever
imagined injustice) everywhere.

In the countryside, people just dont switch there roles constantly on a hourly
basis. You are who you are, with near no authority to punish you for saying
what you think. On your farm, you dont have to worry about your boss, your
church, your neighbors, the street, the block and that shows. So people say
what they think, and everyone knows what it is and is not. You can actually,
quite lively debate, racism with a racist (Recommend reading Jared Diamond and
lots of history books ahead).

I know some people living in citys, and you can bet all you got that these,
while today singing liberal Songs, when they would hear the mob yell for a
stake, would look at all the others, and if they sees a majority, put all
there former friends on a serving wagon. In your face racism and hypocrisy
much preferred thank you. That way it can be addressed.

One of the things i also noticed is, that some countryside personal - in
particular truckers, turn into deep thinkers, philosophers even. Routine
either dumbs you down or sends the mind for a walk.

Finally, to put some perspective to the first statement- in some city's
(Berlin e.g.), the neighborhoods begin to form what is basically small
villages again, with the towns drunk, the village schizo and everyone looking
out for one another. Such things are awesome- and very rural.

------
iplaw
Good read, and relatable as I had an uncle and two cousins who lived in a
trailer in a trailer park.

It was fun to visit for a day, but a relief to go home to my safe residential
neighborhood a few hours later.

It is easy to see how the trailer park environment affected the kids who had
to grow up there. Child abuse of all varieties was common. This, in turn,
fostered violent and irrational outbursts from the males and promiscuity in
the females. I remember that there were mattresses strewn about in the woods
surrounding the trailer park, and an informal scheduling process for semi-
private use.

You, of course, can't apply the generalization of my anecdotal experience to
every trailer park or to every family living in a specific trailer park. That
said, I think that the article is a little too idyllic. There seems to be a
much higher concentration of social problems - domestic disputes, child abuse,
substance abuse - in trailer parks than in the surrounding areas.

~~~
joatmon-snoo
I wouldn't say the piece is striving to be idyllic - rather, trying to reclaim
dignity for those segments of our society that have been left behind and
derided by the rest of us in our ivory towers.

~~~
drvdevd
I loved the part at the end where he talked about the "Doomsday Prep for the
Super Rich". I'd read the same article a month or so ago, and his intution on
the subject seemed spot on.

I think the mindset speaks to exactly the sort hubris that could most directly
threaten our species.

------
chiph
I knew people like that growing up. I can't say we were friends, mainly
because of the societal gulf between us.

But if you're broken down by the side of the road, or your car gets stuck in
the ditch, they're some of the first people who'll stop and help you out.

~~~
aswanson
Some of the nicest, most helpful people I've met lived in trailers for a time.
I wouldn't even call an animal trash. Those who use that term to describe any
person, let alone those people, need to check their sociopathy.

~~~
ElectronCharge
+1000

------
thatwebdude
I always love the connotations trailer parks draw to outsiders.

I spent my first 5 years of life there.

Never knew anything was wrong with it until people who've never been to one
told me.

Ah, to be a child...

~~~
sokoloff
As a child, I always wanted to go visit and stay with one of my aunts. My Mom
eventually figured out that I liked that she had neat blue water in her toilet
in her trailer.

As a five year old, that was cool.

~~~
thatwebdude
Not gonna lie, that was kinda cool even after 5...

------
peterburkimsher
I never knew much about that subculture. Is it bad that those people look rich
to me?

They have cars, and a place of shelter that they own. They have family. I
scrape by paying rent and put food on the plate, and ride a bicycle to work
every day. I still can't afford to learn to drive. Parents won't support me,
although I spend 3 months of savings to buy a plane ticket to see them each
year, using the 8 days of holiday I'm offered. Most of my friends and
colleagues earn half of what I do. The idea that someone could earn 30,000 USD
in Alaska in only a few months sounds unbelievable to me. The trailer
lifestyle would be an upgrade from working for a tech company in Asia.

~~~
durge
Imo it is relative poverty within communities that is most damaging. This
causes learned helplessness and deprivation of self respect. That is part of
the reason the world is getting more unstable-- because it's shrinking and so
people are comparing their lots to an unprecedented degree.

------
VLM
Maybe the urban poor are completely invisible. It was a collection of stories
about poor people that we're told are rural but like bad soft sci fi the
setting didn't matter a bit.

I grew up with/near rural people, and will probably retire to the country, and
I'll tell you four anecdotes that are genuinely specifically rural, although
not necessarily poor:

1) Rural folk understand balance sheet vs income statement like urbanites
don't. There are a lot of people who suffer from being land poor, where they
own the land but struggle to finance day to day operations on and for that
land. Life can be complicated when your septic tank breaks and all you have
for income is SS and it would take 15 years of SS payments to pay someone else
for a new septic system even if you had no other expenses for those 15 years
... also consider prop tax for example. If you own the land there is no
building superintendent and the closest urban contractor is a 2 hour truck
charge drive away, so you make do as best you and your neighbors can. There's
a lot of rural paper millionaires who can't afford to fix their rusty truck.

2) Rural folk, unless they live in the upper midwest and therefore speak
newscaster English accent, are generally not terribly interested in your
opinion of their accent or the stereotype you think it implies. You think
you're holier than thou because you're not from rural Louisiana, how nice, but
sorry we don't care at all. Sort of like the stereotype of poorly socialized
rural folk trying to save your soul, that's how we look at poorly socialized
urbanites trying to "save us" from the wilderness that is our home. How cute,
you came here to tell us we're doing it wrong, that's so funny, come back when
you grow up.

3) Some rural folk are very lonely because you have to spend a significant
amount of money on gas to drive a couple dozen miles to do anything. The phone
is nice, but as you know a fraction of the population has an uncontrollable
urge for physical presence. Those folks, especially the old ones, have a rough
time, especially when their local peers die off and they literally can't
afford to visit whoever is left. There is a filtration effect such that the
survivors are the type who can be alone without being lonely, but as its a
spectrum there will be lonely people, although not as many as if urbanites
were air dropped into the wilderness. Almost stereotypical for a new teen
driver, who's parents can afford it, to be assigned to drive old uncle
whatshisname all over the place. Unlike urbanites this leads to rural youth
learning much younger that old people have wisdom, or at least respectably
interesting stories.

4) Rural areas are beautiful. Urbanites don't understand because they live
without beauty, somehow. No one ever daydreamed about seeing the grease trap
at McDonalds back by the overflowing dumpster on a crisp winter morning. Or
watching the daily migration of the homeless as the wind blows trash past them
down the street. Or inhaling diesel bus fumes on a hot summer afternoon.
Living in beauty is in itself an addiction that is hard to shake, hard as a
chemical addiction, leaving urbanites very confused about why ruralites don't
want to move into town and live in a nice gray soviet style apartment building
where they can't even see the sun and the closest green plant is miles away.
Sorta like asking, "so... why not just stop shooting heroin" its not quite
that simple to break an addiction... If you live essentially in a national
park your whole life its very difficult to get people like that to leave.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Your last bit really spoke to me.

I live on a small farm, on a hilltop with an amazing view. After 10+ years, I
barely ever notice the view unless it's something spectacular like sundogs on
a clear, -10F morning, or the sun rising above a blanket of early summer fog.
I only think about the location when the howling winter wind keeps us awake
for hours or the hail batters the roof and windows during a summer
thunderstorm.

But vistors see it differently. The first comment after walking in the front
door and facing the big window is "your view is beautiful."

Even though I rarely notice it, I know I'm so addicted to the casual natural
beauty around me that I could never leave. It's kind of a scary thought that I
can probably never be happy living in a city again.

~~~
douche
It took me a long time to get used to not seeing mountains all around when I
moved down out of the boonies to the seacoast. My parents' house looks out
south across a wooded valley at this ridiculously picturesque ridge of
rolling, almost perfectly rounded hills. When I head home, it isn't until I
hit those first foothills at the edge of the Appalachians that I really feel
like I'm where I belong.

The other thing that I miss dearly is being able to see the stars. You can't
get away from the ever-present orange street light haze around here, and it
never actually gets _dark_. There's nothing like those cold, cold, clear still
nights in the middle of the winter, with the moonlight on the snow and a Milky
Way that you can actually see.

~~~
marktangotango
Same here, Ozark Mtns will always be home to me.

------
SwellJoe
I grew up in the deep south, and my folks were the first generation in my
family to move out of the trailer park (technically, their parents lived in
mill villages, which was a similar indicator of poverty, but the first several
years of their marriage was spent in a trailer). They made it out before I was
born, so I had a lower middle class upbringing most of my life. Many of my
friends were in the same situation; their folks bought houses and moved out of
trailers during their childhood. There was a general trend upward, out of the
trailer park and into middle class lifestyles.

What's alarming, to me, is that _many_ of those same friends are back in
trailer parks, or slumlord-run apartments, today. The trend today is pushing
people down and out of the middle class and back into poverty. Poor folks
could scrabble their way out of poverty through the 70s to early 90s, even
though we don't regard all of that time as a "good economy", my recollection
was that the average family was coming up, rather than falling down. That
doesn't seem to be working anymore.

The numbers seem to agree with this: the American middle class is shrinking.
Some are climbing up into the upper class, but I suspect that's mostly people
who never knew poverty. I think past poverty has a gravity that pulls folks
back down, if anything goes awry.

Health problems have been a leading indicator among my old friends. When
people get sick in America, it can be an economic disaster. Less so with ACA,
but it's still too much if you're barely hanging onto your house, your car,
etc.

I live in RV parks quite a bit these days, as I live in an RV and travel kinda
full-time (in a leisurely manner, after many years of constant travel), and I
meet a lot of people who are "choosing" to live a more minimal lifestyle in an
RV. But, the reality is, they often don't have the option to live in a house;
at least not one they own. The Tiny House movement seems to be a lot of the
same: people who can't afford a traditional suburban home, but still have
dreams of home ownership. I see the Tiny House "movement" being criticized a
lot as "fetishizing poverty", but I think that misses the point that a lot of
the people choosing to live in Tiny Houses aren't fetishizing being
poor...they're just poor. They come from middle class backgrounds, so people
just don't recognize it as poverty.

I worry that the economic divide in the US is a disaster waiting to happen for
the country as a whole, but it's already causing significant pain among the
people who come from a poor background and don't have family safety net to
help lift them back up, when things go wrong. They just keep falling, and
trailer parks, RV parks, slumlord-run apartments, etc., is where they end up.
And, getting back out again is harder than it's been in a long time.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
Seems like back in the 60s-70s the thing to do was to get some land not too
far (1-1.5hrs driving) from a reasonably sized town where there were jobs, get
a trailer and then gradually build a house next to it and move there once it's
ready. Or,save some money and buy a "proper" manufactured home. I know ppl
whose parents did something along these lines.

One other thing I'd add is for a lot of these ppl the "expenses breakdown" is
different from the typical suburban population. They don't place too much
emphasis on the actual house being up to par with their "class" \- but if
you'd add up all the "toys" they own and spend significant sums of cash on -
GUNS, ATVs, tractors, snowmobiles, boats, bikes, GUNS, hunting and fishing
gear, GUNS etc - if you add all this up we're talking being able to afford a
much better house.

~~~
douche
> GUNS, ATVs, tractors, snowmobiles, boats, bikes, GUNS, hunting and fishing
> gear, GUNS

I'm curious why the emphasis on guns... Have you looked at the relative prices
of these "toys"? You can buy a helluva an arsenal for the price of one ATV or
tractor or snowmobile or boat or motorcycle. Shooting shit is actually one of
the cheaper recreational pastimes in rural areas, especially now that the run
on .22 LR ammunition is pretty much over.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
Yes plinking is cheap these days, no doubt. I emphasized guns because they are
typically the #1 thing that takes precedence over anything house-related
unless we're talking some major malfunction that needs to be addressed.

And they do add up - an "average" household from the likes I'm talking about
would typically have 2-3 diff caliber hunting rifles, maybe a bow, a 12 and a
20 shotgun, a 22 (typically one per member of the household - rugers for the
kids, henrys for the grown ups :) ), not always but almost always an AR or
Mini14 or an AK.

Then there are the handguns - there would be at least one but most of the time
there would be an assortment - a 9mil, something more high powered like a 40
cal glock or a .357 revolver, maybe a Kimber 1911 but that one is optional :)

All of that adds up, especially with ammo. Which, after the shortages few
years back ppl are still stocking up. Not like they used to, but more like -
go buy a fishing lure and if the price is right pick up $100+ worth of ammo.

------
dsfyu404ed
Posting this here is an exercise in futility. It will go right over the heads
of the people who need to be exposed to these sorts of opinions.

~~~
ElectronCharge
Not always, and that is exactly the point.

