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elleng

(130,861 posts)
Mon Nov 21, 2016, 05:56 PM Nov 2016

We Are All Deplorables.

'My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common. Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy. They also nourish the magical thinking peddled by the con artists in the Christian right, the state lotteries that fleece the poor, and an entertainment industry that night after night shows visions of an America and a lifestyle on television screens—“The Apprentice” typified this—that foster unattainable dreams of wealth and celebrity.

Those who are cast aside as human refuse often have a psychological need for illusions and scapegoats. They desperately seek the promise of divine intervention. They unplug from a reality that is too hard to bear. They see in others, especially those who are different, the obstacles to their advancement and success. We must recognize and understand the profound despair that leads to these reactions. To understand these reactions is not to condone them

The suffering of the white underclass is real. Its members struggle with humiliation and a crippling loss of self-worth and dignity. The last thing they need, or deserve, is politically correct thought police telling them what to say and think and condemning them as mutations of human beings.'>>>

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_are_all_deplorables_20161120#.WDLodeoX0dc.facebook

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We Are All Deplorables. (Original Post) elleng Nov 2016 OP
Then it makes all the sense in n the world to vote for the party against raising minimum world wide wally Nov 2016 #1
I have some relatives in far Northern Maine. guillaumeb Nov 2016 #2
"The scam of Obamacare" Truthdig as a source ismnotwasm Nov 2016 #3

world wide wally

(21,740 posts)
1. Then it makes all the sense in n the world to vote for the party against raising minimum
Mon Nov 21, 2016, 06:37 PM
Nov 2016

wage, providing them with Medicaid, social security or a Consumer Protection Bureau or regulating insurance companies.

guillaumeb

(42,641 posts)
2. I have some relatives in far Northern Maine.
Mon Nov 21, 2016, 06:59 PM
Nov 2016

There have always been very few living wage jobs in that area. There are paper mills and saw mills, and in early spring there are sugar mills, but many families in that area supplement shopping by hunting.

Like the Appalachia region of the South, there are natural resources that are exploited by the mill owners, but few good jobs that do not depend on resource extraction and the commodity price of those resources.

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