this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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I read an article once about a guy who grew up in a poor rural area in the US that changed my opinion a bit. He talked about how progressive and left leaning people want to help the poor and uneducated, but typically only in major city centers.
Poor people in major cities are seen as victims of society. Socioeconomic forces beyond their control have caused them to fall behind and they need help! Rap music is the voice of the oppressed! Poor people in rural towns are seen as hillbillies who should have paid more attention in science class instead of playing football and taking their cousin to prom. Country music is for hicks! Combine this with the stats that inner city poverty is mostly minorities and rural poverty is mostly white people and you get a sense as to how rural people can see progressive programs as "racist". It certainly doesn't help that this idea is beamed into their heads by billionaire funded propaganda like Fox News.
A tech company lays off 1,000 employees and there's rage, but a coal mine shuts down putting 1,000 people out of work and there's cheers. Biden telling rural Americans facing the loss of their livelihood "learn to program" is pretty rich coming from a wealthy successful man who likely doesn't know how to work a computer, let alone know how to program one. Republican politicians at least pretend to care about run down rural towns. And if they don't do that, at least they pledge to knock those smug city slickers down a few pegs! Send the Marines into LA!
Hopefully the US can fix its urban-rural divide. I have no idea how that would happen, but it seems to be a major hindrance to class consciousness.
The thing is that democrats are hardly leftist and their approach to economics is still pretty dogshit. When people say to shut down the coal mines anyone who gives a shit will also say that governments should help retrain people to do other jobs. Like, a shut down oil rig should be a great opportunity to retrain the workers there to do maitenance on a solar power farm.
The other problem I have with it all is that they’re fighting to have personal money and would rather keep something like a coal mine running and polluting than retrain. Instead of asking why they’re constantly being threatened by corporations and the lack of a safety net they’re actively defending the people who are hurting them. That takes a lot of my sympathy away.
And then there’s their fucking “towns” that are just super spread-out nightmares which they refuse to fix. They want their lives to be cheaper but they demand heavily car-centric infrastructure and attack anything that would actually make their lives easier and cheaper. And oh my god do they moan about the concept of having a neighbour within 100ft.
I’ve lived in a more rural place and I’ve lived in cities. People in cities generally want things that will legitimately make their lives better(but oh my god are there some people…), and they don’t often fight the people who are trying to help them. Rural North Americans are so fucking stupid and they get aggressive when they get scared, which is all the time because they’re huge fucking babies.
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As for the tech company thing, a big reason is because the layoff are all to pad quarterly earnings. A coal mine shuts down because it’s an environmental disaster but Microsoft will layoff 10,000 people via video call from a private island Sting concert just so the executives can make more money. These things are not equivalent.
And this retraining goal then gets you in trouble for offering training for jobs that don’t exist.
It has to be combined with:
And time. It’s not going to be fast. There is no silver bullet. No one will do it for you: you need to take advantage of the support to improve your life. Yes it’s harder than listening to some bombastic idiot spout gibberish and make promises forgotten as quickly as he rattles them off, but it can help at least some
Precisely. It’s a good thing the left pushes UBI, free schooling, and new, positive infrastructure projects really hard, especially in rural places where private business fails to service because it’s not profitable!
Well, all except for the people willing to change but considering the right is full of people who keep saying “life’s not fair” and “that’s too bad you gotta do what you gotta do” I’m sure they can suck it up, right?
Certainly life is messy and unfair, but my state has an excellent education system including free college (depending on income). I do realize we spend a lot more on it than many states could afford but the only way to address that is the Department of Education. Did those states vote to expand the Department of Education to improve all our kids’ education? No, pretty much the opposite. You can’t help someone who won’t help themselves. You can’t give money to someone who won’t take it