Quote:
Originally Posted by Byue
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Hell, I still fight for red necks rights
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Thanks for the level response. I understand your side--I'm fundamentally of a liberal mindset as well--now put yourself in the place of someone living where I live. Are you fighting for them as much as you think? Folks here have had about enough of the government "helping." I've spent my entire life watching the results of such "help." I live in rural Ohio. If you draw a box on a map between a few of the most run-down rust-belt cities out there (Akron, Mansfield, Cleveland, etc) that's basically the region I live in.
--How helpful was it to ship manufacturing jobs overseas and replace them with nothing? Our economy is a smoldering ruin of what it once was. It has not recovered. The government has resorted to "cooking the books" and altering some of its definitions in an effort to make things look better than they are, so folks from elsewhere might not realize it, but it's all too evident in the street.
--How helpful was it to mandate cross-city bussing in the big cities, driving white flight and leading to the destruction of the urban centers? My folks didn't move out of Cleveland because they had any problem with blacks, they moved out because they didn't want their kids riding the bus an hour and a half-plus each way every day.
--How helpful is it to keep denigrating rural whites as a bunch of "rednecks?" My neck isn't red and I don't think I'm stupid.
--How helpful is it to permit unchecked immigration which drives down an already-depressed job market? Folks don't hate immigrants because they have a tan, they hate them because they'll work for peanuts thanks to favorable exchange rates. Some entire industries which used to be decent careers, like construction, have become practically closed off to Americans who actually need to make a living in this country. Again--replaced with nothing.
This stuff isn't helping. All that has happened was a once-thriving region has been left to decay and decline. Over the course of my life I've watched the government keep promising it's here to help while the local region's cities have become run-down ghettos full of abandoned mills and empty lots. Cleveland has barely a third of the population it once had. I've watched drug and alcohol addiction skyrocket while Uncle Sam complains about the symptom while doing nothing to address the cause (economic hardship). I've watched other regions apparently do okay while this region is ignored or degraded. Of course it drives resentment!
No, "move away" isn't an option, either. That's condescending. If everyone moved away it'd just create a glut of labor wherever they moved to and the problem remains. A national government shouldn't simply write off entire regions of the nation. Folks in regions like this aren't angry for the fun of it, they're angry because they've spent decades watching their communities and livelihoods erode with nothing to replace it. Progress is nice, but not when progress means effectively kicking entire regions to the curb. That lack of replacement is what differs this "new economy" from the switch from agriculture to manufacturing a century-plus ago. Those old jobs were replaced with better jobs. Today jobs are simply evaporating with no replacement. The dirty little secret of the nation is that there are more workers than jobs, now, and that problem will only worsen with time. Most of the U.S.'s history was defined by a near-constant shortage of labor, but that's no longer the case and likely never will be again. Sooner or later something will have to give.
Danth