re: #22 Targetpractice

Trust me, my mother comes from a small rural town in SE KY and I know that small town mentality all too well. It’s mutated some as the slow march of progress has come barreling in with the extension of the highway and all the businesses that have grown up around it. And I see all the sorts of things you mention in my relatives, which is probably part of the reason I haven’t been back to visit in-person in years. It’s not ignorance born of lack of education or being cut off from the rest of the world, it’s a willful ignorance that says “My whole world is encompassed in a few hundred square miles, why can’t the things that work here work everywhere else?”

And what “works” there? These are communities in deep poverty, dependent on disability checks and food stamps, with crumbling schools, high levels of drug addiction, and nostalgia for a coal industry which is gone forever.