Return to Innocence: Enigma

The Last Gasp of the American Taliban?

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The other day I was on Facebook and it's getting scary when it comes to America. I didn't expect to be living under a religious right resurgence at this late age. Some of us fear Christian fundamentalists turning militant. My status as an ex-Christian may make things even more sticky for me. It's funny in all my IFB churches, they talked about the persecution of Christians, now I fear persecution from another angle.

I had this Republican friend dissing Native American Heritage Month and Black History month. He is married to another friend. His mostly conservative friends all cheered this. What could I say? I asked them "How come celebration of different cultures is bad to you folks?" They got angry. One lady who looked and acted just like Betty Bowers got strident. I wrote, "So celebrating other cultures is evil now?" and she wrote to me, "Political correctness must die!" and "It's a waste of time to argue with your ilk!" 

 I wrote an article, I regret now on this blog: Putting Down One Group Won't Elevate Another.

While I retained some liberal views during my sojourn into fundamentalist Christianity, their viewpoints affected me too. I was seeped into the alt-right world and fundamentalist churches. How can I even explain how right wing news and even alt-right conspiracy crap affects people's minds? The constant fear-mongering is extreme. They do train people to be afraid of everything including other races. It puts out this world view that is really pretty sickening. Even if I rejected the Republican party and some of it's extremes, it affected me even as I fought with myself inside. By the way because I was in the bible prophecy, fundie Christian world, I believe I have lost some of my old Christian and conservative readership even here since the deconversion. Many have left since I left the faith.   I have to go where life and my own mind has taken me. Watching Trumpsters shout against cultural celebrations tells me the racism is alive and well and Trump has given it permission to come out in full force.

Breaking away from fundamentalist religion has cleared my head a lot. Other people who deconvert from Christianity often deconvert from it's poisonous politics. I am one of them. What is weird is as all these Republican people on Facebook dissed Native American Heritage month, is that people have asked me if I am part Indian or Native American. I don't know what I am until I get the 23 and me or Ancestry.com money together. I don't want to claim I am an ethnic group I am not, but it makes me wonder. If people are going to reject even the celebration of a culture so important to America, with it's dances, art, pow-wows and more, what am I to think? They are just mean. They want life to to be this narrow world. I have noticed that most people with these views are all self-avowed Christians especially of the evangelical and fundamentalist variety.

The racism is definitely coming out.

 My views have since changed I wrote the "Why Do Some Liberals Think All White People are Rich? .  While I still understand that neo-liberalism in the Democratic party has made it more akin to the center-right in other nations and there is elitist support of the oligarchy. I didn't understand what exactly the term "white privilege" meant in both articles. I still worry about division between races being made worse , but it is obvious since Trump has brought out racism that laid dormant that those who warn about "white privilege" definitely have good points to make and I started listening. If anything all the racism pushed by the right, will serve to keep everyone economically oppressed. It's all intertwined, the racism, the prison system of mass incarceration, that gives almost free labor to endless corporations, the sexism and the endless authoritarianism.

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 One thing that woke me up, is on Facebook, while I held these attitudes, I was openly protesting police brutality against black suspects on Facebook. One case that really got to me is when they strangled a man with asthma whose only crime was selling cigarettes without tax stamps. The cruelty was astounding. His name was Eric Garner. What frightened me as I filled my then wall protesting deaths of black suspects via police brutality, is I noticed only my liberal friends seemed to care. The Christian friends weren't answering. Some even posted things in defense of police, and memes that seemed to infer that the people who died "deserved" what they got. This growing cruelty really upset me. It is one of those many puzzle pieces that built up to my deconversion. Conscience took me out. I couldn't follow a cruel god of a cruel religion anymore.

And it still goes on today, this line between people with no empathy. The American Taliban is inherently racist.  I wrote about the growing meanness in my old small rural town. Why is there so much contempt for the poor in a community full of poor people? One reason I did not move back there, is I feared going back no longer being working class but more poor. It looks like my instincts were correct.

Sometimes I feel like some conservative, fundamentalist, right wing/Tea Party Baby Boomers [yes there are liberal Baby-Boomers too], want to burn this place down as they shuffle off this mortal coil. I have hope in young people who may finally stand up. I hope they do. Generation X has been too silent in the face of too much nonsense. Maybe our hope will be in millennials or Generation Y. They are far less religious. I hope they realize a better world is possible instead of giving up for the dystopian world so many of the Christians seem to picture that is based in fear and control.

Have you ever wondered about that? When I was young, one still imagined the future as having flying cars, and cured diseases and hope. Today especially in right wing circles, it's like all darkness. Like getting old isn't hard enough, I have to be marched off at gunpoint to the FEMA camp to be guillotined for not taking the mark of the beast? But even for the non-bible prophecy extremists, on the right, hopeful futures are wiped away, it's all about the money masters and their control of you. Young people are all "entitled snowflakes" who don't deserve everything certainly no liveable wages and no happiness. The politics of resentment and no hope rule on the right and in the America. They are angry. Instead of wanting better for young people they want WORSE.

And here's one question too, What's wrong with social justice? I always see memes where they mock social justice warriors, so social injustice is something good? Sometimes I wonder if you see God ready to smash you with a fist from heaven ordering genocide after genocide in the Old Testament, that anyone who wants to stand up for humanity is seen as the enemy against God. This is about holding out for power and the status quo of society. If your God is cruel, mean, perfectionist and cold, you will demand more prisons then parks. That's why the religious right loves to lock everyone up. This is why they have no problem with mass incarceration or the new Jim Crow.

There's a reason that show: The Handmaiden's Tale got so popular. Some of us worry that is the future in America. When I started having doubts while still attending churches, I knew people who lived the Quiverful life, who didn't believe in birth control for women. One man at a Calvary Chapel I attended published an alternative magazine calling for Patriarchy and for men to rule and for women to stay at home barefoot and pregnant. There's a reason why so many people homeschooled and said public schools were evil. One strange thing that happened to me, is watching all these Christian girls at these churches train to be midwives, I kept thinking about that book, "The Handmaiden's Tale" which I read in the 1980s even before the Netflex series came out.

One thing that is scary for me, is when I was a Christian, I wrote against Dominionism on Christian websites, as an "antichrist" force and told other Christians not to trust the Republican party. I was a lone voice shouting against the wind and then hadn't questioned the very foundations of the religion yet. I have read books like "The Family" and know about groups like the Council For National Policy. Trump is in with all those Dominionists and they helped give him power. One book, I wish everyone could read is the book "The American Fascists: The Christian Right and It's War on America by Chris Hedges. 

With Trump's election, they have gone fascist on many aspects. Rolling back the ADA, giving tax cuts to their billionaire friends, the list goes on and on. Pence is even more overly uber-fundamentalist then Trump who can do no wrong in many evangelical Christian eyes even though he's been married three times and brags about grabbing women on their private parts. Chris Hedge's warnings are coming true. Hell my own warnings on Christian message boards and websites as I wrote against Dominionism are coming true. Trump wanted his militarized parade, I am not sure if that is still going to happen. They have become more authoritarian,and more crazy. So many in my old small rural town have fallen completely under their spell.

Racism, sexism, authoritarianism, militarism, police brutality and many things are growing to make their dystopian dreams a reality. Some believe the system will self correct, and this is the last gasp of people who are aging, and knowing their power is waning but one thing anyone who is a student of history knows even a dying group who is aging out and still holds the reigns of power, can do incredible damage. Even though the Moral Majority are entering their 60s and 70s, that still gives them time to do a lot of harm to people. Why are our states turning redder by the minute? My own is purple and ready to fall. They already passed laws destroying worker's rights.

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My fellow liberals and many young people don't realize how backwards and theocratic some places have grown, they don't know this culture from the inside. I was inside it, lived it and I am scared.  They don't realize the true agendas that are desired and would be even more horrific for the poor, minority races and gay people. They have become more radicalized, I see the changes even in my old small town that are extreme. Even if young people are more secular by far by the numbers, many of our democratic institutions are in danger. Remember what I wrote regarding what Carl Sagan warned of and the growing antipathy against science in religious circles in America. Trump and his followers have made these things government policy. This is why the EPA was defunded.

I do fear a war or other disaster growing their influence. Worsening economic distress could be used to grow their insanity. All they need is a spark to set it off, and we could all be in big trouble. Just look at the history of Iran, read a graphic novel like Persepolis, religious groups take over nations all the time. We have Southern states while places implode passing laws requiring that "In God We Trust" be put on school buildings that just got shot up with dozens murdered.

Americans forget that one must be watchful of freedom. We are looking a power grab now that could turn into a potentially violent power grab to gain full control. Some of us dream of Trump being impeached. Groups like "Duty to Warn" and the resist movement have questioned his ability to be a fit president, but he has many followers who wouldn't like this. The pastors all praise Trump from the pulpit that makes him sound like the Second Coming. I know what is said about liberals in religious circles and the dehumanizing approach of religious right politics. Polarization is growing in this country and sadly it's leading to more extremism. I do hope that some sanity comes back. We need it.  I am seeing more extreme radicalization among old church members, my old town and just very poisonous and uncaring rhetoric. Lack of empathy is being advanced society wide with the narcissists and head sociopaths using these things for more power. This country needs a positive future, not a hellscape borne out of nationalism and extreme religions, that seeks to censor all but the most powerful and wealthy. It's scary, comparing today to the actual future I envisioned when young and disappointing too. Please vote and get involved as much as you can.

When You Notice Patterns in How You Were Treated And Change Them

When you are out for several years in no contact, you will ponder some weird stuff. You will notice patterns that escaped your notice before. I still socially struggle in real life but I am doing better on some things. I will explain more in this article.

Online, things are great, I make friends easily and have close ones, some I talk to even almost daily, but in real life while I can get some friendly acquaintances, I am just not close to anyone except my husband. About two years ago, I decided I am going to take the social pressures off, and I just didn't try to make real life friends anymore. This meant doing activities for the sake of the activity and it's enjoyment. Other Aspies have told me, they made this decision too. While there's that feeling of loss, off the Internet why can't I replace the relationships I walked away from, it did make me more far more relaxed about life.

This can be a time of heavy pressure for a scapegoat, and if you have a delayed no contact it can be tough to realize you spent decades being fooled by narcissists and hit this horrible revelation, that the majority of people in your life don't respect you very much. Fixing this can be almost as hard of a process as going no contact to begin with.

 I almost recoiled with horror at how the millionaire friend, and the Army friend treated me the same as my family. I realized other friendship patterns fit the dynamic of the family where an often an older woman "befriended" me and made a project out of me. This happened to me in my younger years and happened to me with that false deliverance minister and in my earlier years when we were living here. These older women did not see me as their equal but someone to fix.  That's a dynamic I nipped in the bud and ended after I went no contact.

 There's probably been a lot of times where I spent crying wondering "what is wrong with me" and hating whatever forces [I lean towards blunt chance since the Christian god in his indifference became a non-entity to me] pulled the levers for the outcome of my life. It was like I and my husband outside of one of his close friends and my online friends ended up on an island somewhere.

There was this friend, I had drop a book off for me for book club. She's my only local friend, beyond people who live farther away, and is a nice friend but we only see each other on occasion. She is a very busy person, has a huge extended loving family that demands her time and energy though she is childless, volunteers a lot, does ministry work for her church. I had been housebound a few weeks at that time. I'm not now as it warmed up this last week. And I asked her to stay, but she replied, "Oh I am so busy, I can't". I don't think she meant harm, and I smiled and nodded as she went on her way out, but I got some strange emotions during this interchange. The feeling of inner rejection bothered me. I learned to hide this stuff years ago. Being clingy does not win one social prices. Needy people scare people away. In her case, she was really busy, since she treats me well at other times, so I was able to calm down. The emotions that arose led me to think about a lot of stuff though.

If I was ever to point to the worse thing Queen Spider cursed my life with, it wouldn't be the being hit, or the feelings of unsafety that led to PTSD, or the constant Cinderella housework, or the constant being screamed at, it would be this feeling of inner rejection. The life long feeling that I don't belong anywhere. It is hard to describe it. The word summing it up: REJECTION. This probably is the worse inheritance people receive from narcissistic parents.

I realize now that this is what led to some very painful times, and depression. When I lost my last community, a place where people talked more openly even though later I moved away from their conservative beliefs, that was very painful. People who live their lives feeling no sense of kinship or acceptance among any group do pay a very painful price.

Remember how the family always rejected me? They still hoover me now. And no it's not real letters or offers to reconcile or anything like that, just more disrespectful one liners or the weirdness this January of my mother sending my husband a birthday card. We just threw it all in the trash. They are intent to keep "track" of me even this many years in. It's creepy and it's so fake. I also think too, they HAD THEIR CHANCE. I am not a sap!

The constant messages I got from them all was CONSTANT REJECTION, and where they announced they were "TOO BUSY". It was weird, I noticed this pattern. The way I was treated was always as unimportant. I was always "last in line" behind everyone else, and "low priority". When I analyzed things it was across the board.  I made this list some time ago. I was cleaning out old emails from my always ever-stuffed email accounts, and I noticed the pattern of rejection. It was right in front of my eyes. Just like the emails I saved to remind me never to crawl back. This list reminded me of patterns to break and things to change in my life to make it better. 

Now keep in mind as you read the below. I lived 75-250 plus miles from all parties and only contacted them a few times a year, once every 2-3 months at most. Several I only contacted about once a year.
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" Cousin: We went up later in the afternoon after having lunch with my dad. And we could only stay a few hours, because I needed to get the kids back to my ex wife last night. It wasn't anything planned. I didn't know how long I was going to be in town, so when it turned out that I got all of Thanksgiving day off, we decided to go up to see your mother."

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"Brother:"What email? The messages you sent above? Been too busy with Christmas and my van being in the shop and having to get the car repaired (needs new inner tie rods) and paying bills and buying food, and ------ having doctor appointments, and the boys mom hot water heater, washer dryer and......."

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Brother: The only reason I don't talk as much to anyone (youre not the only one I haven't seen any of my friends in months!) is because Im so damn busy running a business, taking care of personal stuff and dealing with Dumbass (his ex-wife}

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Brother: I am very fucking busy. Sorry that I you don't understand that but if you don't that's your problem not mine. You have no clue what it is like to RUN YOUR OWN BUSINESS. It requires a lot more than 40 hours a week. But I do it because I love it. But again with business and personal things that keep me busy everyday I don't have much time to do what I want. Fuck I haven't played golf in 3 fucking years! But I'm not complaining mind you I just had to adjust my priorities."

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 Referring to Aunt Scapegoat {who ignored my letters and cards of 2009-2012 and blew me off for several years). I believe she lied to the cousin now and gaslighted him about me now.

Cousin: She wasn't angry at you or anything - I think she just didn't want too much contact with people. If I called her more than once a month, she tended to not answer - though she always welcomed a visit once in a while.

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Cousin:

"I've had times when I stopped by unannounced and she just didn't answer the door (and that worried me so I called our uncle, and he said that's just how she is, and she's fine). I called her last week and left a message, which she never returned. She was tired a lot, and I just tried to respect that. I told her a few months ago that I thought you were wondering if she was mad at you. She said she wasn't, and didn't even know why you might think that. She told me some fond stories about you."

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Other cousin:

"I know I've felt guilty in the past for not getting back to you. I just get so busy and then I don't know what to say."
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Sister:

"We didn't have time to stop by your apartment. My days are spent on what needs done next. ______ has a visit to the dentist this morning to fill a naturally formed divit in her molar. Ouch! she'll be numb for a while. Before she sees the Ortho. in two weeks. ________starts band camp next week. We did meet yesterday to retrieve ________ 300 miles from point 'A' only to end up at point 'A' it was a long day. We were just too pressed for time to stop by."

[I live only half a mile off that route and hadn't seen nieces and nephews in two years at the time]

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Sister Again:
" Thanksgiving we are visiting _______ in ________who never see them either but maybe once year. My in laws are still fortunate to travel 1,000 miles to visit WI. We need to go see _parents before they age too much and cannot enjoy the kids.

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Sister Again:

"We are pressured by time. It seems there is never enough. Not an excuse I know. But the kids especially four at once visiting you _________ would be too tiring. Traveling is always a gamble you don’t know what is ahead of you. The kids are usually starting school the next day and they do get exhausted coped up in a car so we make the trip quickly."

[I lived 250 miles away from her, she was driving on a highway less then half a mile from my apartment, and there wasn't even even time for a ten minute visit: I had not seen the kids in two or three years at this time]

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Mother:

"Sorry we didn't stop, but we were tired and knew we had to get home to get unloaded and to church. We also had to drive to _________on Sunday to pick up _________from the airport who has stayed with us this week. We take him back to ________ to fly home. He spent the last couple of days with his aunt ______________."

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[she took a year to respond to an email, I wrote "Did you get my email?" this was my response, I had gone no contact then with the first set of people.

Aunt:

"The fact is I just saw your email tonight. You can believe that if you want but it is a fact. I'm working very hard at school and have a class of more than 30 kids. Being my first year back has been a challenge. I do not have time to comment on many of the points you have made properly this time. I can say that I'm sorry and sad you feel the way you do."

Other cousin:

"I'm sorry for not replying. I saw your email but haven't made time to read through it yet. I'm not much for keeping up a correspondence with people, so don't take it personally. I will try to make the time to read and respond to you in the next week." [he never did]
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Notice the pattern? When I went no contact, years ago, there was so much to change. I realized as I noticed this pattern, that I was running and begging to these people for their notice, attention and love far too long. It sent up a very negative pattern in my life. It needed breaking. I don't want people like this in my life, and would rather be alone. Sure real friends get busy, or behind online correspondence but this treatment was something else. It is to be avoided like the plague.

Sadly for years I thought I was the problem as people treated me with the above disrespect and rudeness. They all acted like they were doing me a favor to talk to me at all. Today the me of today, would say; "No thanks, don't let the door hit you on the way out". I don't think I am the problem anymore. I don't waste time on people like this anymore. They had their chance. One cannot force people to love or care about you either. If you are in the mode of where you have to "prove" yourself, it's already over. 

I told my husband and close friends online some odd stuff, I said, "I don't want to have to sell myself anymore or work to be noticed" If I am feeling that strain in relationship I am going to step out. I realized too seeking validation via people was a dead end. It's a trap I feel into. This is a trap ACONs have to be very careful of. It leads to depression and expectations where you always feel let down. It worsens relationships instead of improving them.

Queen Spider would harangue me saying, "No one likes you" and like a mean girl in the movie Heathers would tell me how "popular" she was while telling me I had no friends. It was better to just try and enjoy one's life and let the chips fall where they may when it came to friendship. I wasn't going to run after people anymore or beg for their notice or visits like I did with my family. Changing some of these patterns did bring me a lot more peace in life.

One thing that can happen to scapegoats, is that they end up with a life full of narcissists and people who disrespect them. The cleaning out process is not easy. It can take several years. You realize you don't want to take abuse anymore. You don't want to go begging. It's time to break the pattern. I did grow stronger feeling more okay about life, and no longer blaming myself. I saw these patterns, and realized the depths of what had been done and what happened. I adjusted expectations too enjoying activities and people I met at those same activities as too. It made things more relaxed for me and for others.

I realized that I met strangers online [some who would later become close friends] who offered me far more love, support, notice and validation then any relatives or family members. There was no loving support or treatment among the so called "family". I blamed myself for this failure for far too long, always thinking it was something "I did" but I realize now it was all their choice.

One thing when people tell us, "I love you, or I wish we could see each other more, and then follow it up with, "I am too busy, I just do not have time to...... or constant excuses, the fact is that person is lying. All these family members were lying to me. The gaslighting hit huge levels too when I was told an aunt that had refused to answer emails and cards for three years was "fond of me".  One friend told it to me blunt, when I showed her this pattern and list some time ago, "Your family doesn't respect you." Do not keep people in your life who have no respect for you.

Many ACONs will work for a long time on relationships that are toxic not realizing they are all completely one sided. It does make people feel like failures and a bad people. Breaking this pattern is very important for an ACON who goes no contact and wants to be completely free. It can be a scary process leaving such a high number of relationships. I don't regret ending several friendships I have ended. My self esteem has improved and my anxiety has as well. Do not keep people in your life, who make you feel always like you are last on the list, a low priority, or make you feel like a failure. I and my husband had a discussion the other day, where I said, "I am so relieved I don't have to plead with these people for love or anything anymore", and he said he was relieved too. The burden has been cast off.  Even with my other struggles life definitely can become more meaningful and peaceful.

A Trump Supporting Small Town with No Empathy

                                          [source]
so·cial Dar·win·ism
noun
the theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Now largely discredited, social Darwinism was advocated by Herbert Spencer and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was used to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism and to discourage intervention and reform.

The Survival of the Fittest, social darwinism, that's the philosophy that runs this place. Only winners matter and losers are to be crushed. That's the narcissistic philosophy that is running America now.

Narcissism is a danger to America.

The head sociopathic Cheeto and his many followers lack empathy, and are destroying the bonds of civil society.

If there's no hope, no ideas of progress, or goodness or civility between people, what "glue" is going to keep society going? Social Darwinism isn't going to bring forth societal cooperation but societal hatred and infighting. 

With the destruction of the ADA, and other rules all meant to punish us, and not make life any better, life here is going to get harder, meaner and nastier. Hopefully during the mid-terms there will be some push-back and some hope of the system self-correcting but if that doesn't happen, this place after three more years of this probably won't resemble anything of what it used to.

More and more I see people discussing leaving America. I considered this. Sometimes I am not sure I want to stay in a place that is culturally and socially becoming such a sink-hole. Even this sick, I want to have my latter years to have some meaning and connection.

 Life seems to becoming just brutal and nasty. Social connection is so hard to get. People seem AFRAID of one another. That's one thing I noticed around here. While we had to sign another lease and I have so many medical needs to think of, this place still remains a social wasteland to me.  Hey I see it as someone with major differences. They smile and are friendly but if you are "too different", you are closed out. No one wants to be close. I live in the land of shut doors. I miss having in real life friends, it's hurting me. I have to fix this somehow.  It's like everyone is on the "mute" button, show too much passion, and it's like they want to shut you down.

Being disabled is a giant barrier to emigrating. I found  a loophole that could take us back to my husband's parent's original country because they never became US citizens. Problem is my husband is not fluent in German, he knows some but not enough to function. He was born here. We don't have money for travel, to the EU. I know nothing of the culture there. Canada sounds like a far better option but they shut their door to the disabled long ago. Of course the conservative set would scream, "Love it or leave it!". If you are older, and can't afford plane tickets and immigration lawyers, you are stuck. I have considered this though, if Republicans destroy Social Security or Medicare, to the point I cannot survive, I would write a plea to Canada for refugee status. Some of us dream of living in more sane places where social cooperation is considered an asset to society.

That said, we are probably here for the duration and should do what we can, to stop the growing insanity, cruelty and evil that is taking over this place. The soul of America has become rotten. Just look at the endless shootings. While guns are a problem--I am more moderate on gun control thinking they should do something about all the assault rifles that are taking over our streets and so easily attainable, the real problem is narcissism and sociopathy.

This place is producing sociopaths by the dozens, young people with no connection to others, who are breaking down, cracking up and then shooting the place up. Ever notice most of the school shooters were raised by indifferent or engulfing abusive parents or were the "outcasts" of the school?  They are crushed by constant bullying and by parents who only want to see them "achieve" and don't see them as people. What's happening there? They play violent video games, they are not taught sharing, caring or given connection to others. Then another sociopath teen goes on a killing spree.

Mental health care here is a joke, and being cut down to nothing. Most people can't even afford a therapist. Americans seem to be going crazy, everyone's on edge and shutting down. One thing the young people are under constant pressure too, with constant messages of "don't be a loser", the ones who face social censure, and rejection are cracking up, most turn in on themselves as the suicide rates skyrocket, but some are turning the anger and rage outward! So while the adults go fight, the kids are imploding and that's the elephant in the school room. The shooter and others like him made their choice for evil, so he is responsible, but this sick system helped form him. Again we see the ignorant and the delusional ignoring the endless warning signs until the next school shooting. His obvious severe mental conditions where he heard voices, was ignored. No one helped or intervened.

While taking away easy access to assault rifles may curb the increasing death rate, nothing is going to fix this until some inherent inner problems are dealt with. A society based on hyper-competitiveness, that advances narcissism and sociopathy is not going to become a peaceful society. A society with no care for it's severely mentally ill, who uses prisons for asylums, isn't going to protect innocent people from those who would harm others, and will only be there to clean up the mess afterwards. 

The civil order is breaking down. If kids can't even go to school without worrying about being blown away, how is that going to affect things? Already one sees the cracks forming in the civil order. People don't trust each other, your own class mate may be your future murderer.

I was on a board, where some people from my old town hang out. It's a politics board where they discuss local happenings. I don't go there that often, but just stop by on rare occasion, I moved away 11 years ago after all.  There's a few others who post there too who all moved away from the same small town, who I have contact with too. My old small town was very rural, extremely religious and conservative. What scares me is reading posts there, is you can see almost a micro-cosm of conservative religious right small town America now, and the picture is not pretty. It's sociopathic. The vast majority STILL all support Trump. Where I live is too conservative now but it's a good thing I never moved back there.

One post discussed the local senior and disabled building being taken over by bed bugs and with the heat not working in the dead of winter. This is a problem here too. If anything has delayed my own entrance into the subsidized housing world, bed bugs is it. From what I can tell it's a giant problem state wide and they have hit the inner city and now even subsidized housing in small towns. The local senior tower here got taken over by bed bugs. I knew someone who personally had to flee and give up her apartment.

What I noticed however was a weird attitude the "conservatives" had towards the freezing and bug-bitten people on that board. They asked, "Why don't those senior and disabled people stand up for themselves or form a building organization?"  I thought well, their leases may get ripped up. I posted on there, that their bad politics and people like Ben Carson are cutting so much funding that low income housing is being impacted. They got angry. When cracks form in a society, the vulnerable are the ones who feel it first. Republicans obviously have a hard-on now for destroying disabled people's lives. Otherwise why attack the ADA, 28 year old law that has withstood the test of time? They do it because they can. They go for the jugular of those they see as the weaker.

My old town was very poor, when we were working class there, and my husband was working in newspapers, there was a lot of people far poorer then us. It has something like a 30% poverty rate. That's rural America in many places. While poor for our state, our state had a few other even poorer counties.

 There were multiple homeless people and people living in houses that were more like shacks. We had a boarding house downtown, that rented rooms to poor people.  One woman called my old county and one north of it, the Appalachia of our state. She was accurate. That old co-op we volunteered for almost became a day and evening shelter for the homeless and very poor of our town. Many people had to leave when we did. I was back in the town in 2011 for a visit, and it looked even worse off.

I asked others, "did things improve?" after gaslighted people on this message board told me that things had improved since the Recession, and they told me, "No way, if anything things are worse".  One grocery-store manager wrote that "no one wanted to work hard" and "many wouldn't pass drug tests". Sadly the hatred of the poor had grown. It was like almost the whole town had read J.D. Vance's book Hillbilly Elegy and taken it to heart. It was bad enough while I lived there, but the attitudes had grown more cold and judgmental.  Years ago I wanted to move back, I missed having community, friends and people I could talk to. While some nice people remain there among those with the horrible outlooks, today the town would not be a good fit for me. This community it's far harder to talk to people, but I worried about the growing meanness to the poor. We had slid down a few notches economically, did I want to bear the brunt of those attitudes? The answer was no. The fact doctors had left town and medical care was dubious there, made that decision for me, not to go back.

What scares me about that old conservative town, that is even worse, is how they decry young people. With narcissistic elders like this offering no help, and only sabotage, and glee over suffering, hopefully the flood of the young even for their own protection will leave small towns like this who have only judgment to offer. Sometimes I get sick of conservative Baby Boomers, who go on about the "snowflakes" and the "entitled", they seem almost pleased that young people are poorer now and failing to get lives. I know people have gotten mad at me for supposedly adding to the generational strife, and yes there are good Baby Boomers out there, but there's some adding to that sociopathic reputation.  It troubles me. I never had children, but I certainly don't want anyone younger then me to have a shitty life. Look what happened to me, I know poverty in one's 20s can lead to permanent poverty. With some of them it's almost like they are happy over their own children's failing. Well a sick society that pushes competition to the extreme, I guess the constant comparison for some, are applied to even their own children.

Social Darwinism is even applied to their own off-spring as well. If you "don't make it", you're a loser, but we will make it as hard as possible for you to make it. I saw one lady I used to know there, who owns a farm and her husband a small business with no mercy for her own children, who claims they are financially "better" off, then she was when she was young. She wrote that young people,  nodding to her own children who ranged from Gen X to millennial age and were long out of the house, that they don't know the value of "hard work" and are "lazy". There's no mercy even for their own off-spring. Sadly what I faced with my own narcissistic upbringing has only been increased for millennials. It is interesting some young people posted and said, "We have to get out of this town." I would tell them if you are around people who do not support you or your efforts, that is the wisest choice of action.

Then there's always the "its no one's job to support you especially the government" types. I guess they see government as only there to make war or something like that. It's funny how conservatives always cheer for the police state, and crack-downs but when it comes to any improvement of anyone's life, they start whining about "limited government". Even there, before Trump, there used to be such a thing as sane and moderate conservatives who were just more fiscally conservative, and were not religious. There's no love lost for the disabled. Entering political debates as a disabled person can be hell, I sometimes step out. They start bitching about "entitlements" and "how people are sucking off the government tit" That was all over this community board. They sure hate people on welfare, they have a special disdain for them. One liberal guy I used to know from the old music and art co-op, looked up cites, that showed the town has one of the highest participation rates in food stamps. Of course, it does, the place is poor!

This is those without empathy operate. Life is a zero sum game, where health problems and money problems are not understood.  Some seemed to think magically jobs could be picked off trees. One person absurdly wrote, "there's plenty of jobs that pay 30 dollars an hour in our town". I wrote, "LOL", and said "who? A few auto mechanics, doctors over at the hospital and business owners?" Wouldn't I rather be able to breathe outside and not have pain? Empathy is gone. Even for people who work full time, who may be paid minimum wage, their consensus is that "they have made some bad choices in life that led them there."

All welfare people are seen as "cheats" and they cheered for Trump's food box, because that would keep the poor from buying "junk food". They complain about the "societal leeches" and those"refuse to work". Some concede that many places don't pay livable wages forcing people on welfare, but then have the attitude that "they didn't work hard enough". Everyone that wants a phone or even Internet to apply for a job is "entitled". It's dog eat dog competitiveness. The working class and middle class small town conservatives really has been fully indoctrinated into complete poor-shaming and lack of empathy for anyone that struggles.  The irony too is that these are the most religious. It's like in their own struggles instead of caring, they embrace Social Darwinism, and cry to all who drown, as they tread water, "You have gotten what you deserve!" Fox news makes them obsessed with fraud among the poor as well. By the way, I never have lived in the south, so I am sure attitudes are even worse there.

One thing I find ironic, is some posted in panic that this extremely large store in their community that sells clothes, food and other needed commodities  had been taken over by bed bugs. It is a store I had to go to a lot during my sojourn there. It was more then one person too, expressing extreme outrage. I did not know if this was rumor or hearsay, but given the damaging effects of bed bugs, it was frightening to read.

For me, if this was true, this was a sign of outward rot for the rot in some of their souls. I imagined carpets of bed bugs joining the abandoned houses, and pot holed roads and thought, the outside will resemble the "inside" more and more.  Human being's ability to deceive themselves is pretty extreme. When I moved away from the place, there was 11 empty houses across the street from my apartment building, the roads had giant pot holes, the poverty was observable, and still people denied it. I had grief over the dying small town that once was my home, but now I have grief over what they have become.

There was shuttered businesses all over the place.  Corruption grew there too, and there was some major scandals among major town institutions where people embezzled money. The place probably is on the edge of becoming a ghost town within the next generation. I guess there's a special blindness that develops in narcissism, they aren't too keen to even "see" what is going on. I see that here too in this county sadly, as the rich and conservative, say "There's plenty of jobs and people just don't want to work", as the stores shut down and the would be photographic ruin-porn increases in number.

 Lack of empathy doesn't bring joyous surroundings and doesn't bring progress. Their politics suck. Lack of empathy is destroying America, on multiple levels. Perhaps nations rise and fall when there's too many narcissists. And Social Darwinism brings people to delusion about their very lives. 

The Insane Party

Many still worry about developments in the Democrat party, where too many are still sold out to neo-liberalism. Just let me make it plain the wealthier types who want to vote for Oprah, and who ignore important economic issues and disparage Bernie Sanders,  I barely consider on the same team either but at least they aren't insane like the Republican party.

 This week the house voted against the ADA, where basically they are gutting it out.  It's up for the Senate vote. Who were those Democrats who joined their team for this vote?  The irony of this is that Bush #1 signed the ADA to begin with. There's no notion of Republicans even pretending to be compassionate now. The gloves are off. The disabled are on the chopping block. They can be cold-hearted bastards in the open now, there's still plenty of dumb people cheering for them.

Trump also touted his idea of "food boxes" instead of food stamps, but even there, stupidity reigns. Most poor people already get commodity boxes full of peanut butter, mostly canned corn, oatmeal, and shelf-stable milk at their local food pantries. This type of food is a nightmare to try and control diabetes on. Poor people need more fresh fruit and vegetables and meat, not cheap carbohydrates. Here too, I saw many prejudiced wealthy Republicans on Facebook going on about how this would "curb all the welfare cheats". Sigh.

You know it's disappointing to live in a country where everything is about regression and disappointment and full sociopathy is now cheered. I almost unfriended every Republican on my Facebook hearing about the ADA. I can tolerate people who may have erred in voting against Hillary and have regrets, it's not like we were given great choices, but if anyone is supporting the sociopaths openly now, I don't have much patience for them.

Update: I consider both parties insane. 

Carl Sagan's Baloney and BS Detection

Carl Sagan's Baloney and BS Detection

Apply to politics and religion as needed. LOL

Hillbilly Elegy: Blaming the Poor in America

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

NOTE: I DO NOT AGREE WITH THIS VIDEO

I recently read Hillbilly Elegy. I hated this book. Imagine a country where a thin swathe of out of touch types, ignore the growing lack of middle class and above jobs, the crumbling infrastructure and where a book that blames the poor, especially white poor people for their own lot, becomes a best seller. Yes, that's America.  It is the land of denial, and delusions. The people who love this book are probably mostly older evangelicals who all support Trump. Their lives probably still include out of state vacations and garden furniture. They call the millennials and Gen X folks who didn't obtain their same socio-economic level "losers" and "snowflakes". They are disgusted with us. We supposedly failed and it's our fault supposedly.

The media and ultra rich will tell us the economy is booming, even as we drive around our home-towns and see the emptied out stores, cracking parking lots, pot-holes, broken windows, unpainted houses and decaying bridges that look like they are ready to fall into our rivers. Sure the economy is doing fine for them but not for most of us.

One thing they are doing too, is playing the usual narcissist/sociopath games of telling people their economic failures are all their fault. As they tie people's hands and knock them about, they will tell them, "You did it to yourself". There's plenty of sold-out types to stand up and repeat the chorus. The elites who profit off suffering in this country don't want much honesty to break out about poverty or what is happening. Even when I and my husband visit some churches, for food pantries and  food co-ops, the lecturing about moral lifestyles and living healthy, where we were told to 'exercise" at the last food co-op, never ends. Very little of reality is dealt with. There's no open discussion of real survival, it's all pretense.

 I suppose many conservative evangelicals aren't much into reality in general. It's constant patronizing and lectures. I told my husband at the last food co-op meeting, "Why are we getting all these health 101 lectures, you can tell where the assumption is, that "WE ALL LIVE WRONG".  It is a relief when we have had a better month, and don't have to be converted or talked down to for bags of food or hot dinners. At least the Lutherans are easier going but the constant pressure to join people's churches for charity does get tiring. How would a public and out atheist around here get any help? Don't forget most of these churches get money via government faith initiatives for the charity programs. Ignored is that with money comes more options.

J.D Vance loves his family, and his hard-working grandparents, even his supposedly rough uncles earn some of his respect but like others who have "made good" and won the job Lotto, he looks back at the younger members of his family as all "losers" who just decided to "drug" and "bum" their way through life.  His success has brought him a giant dose of self-righteousness. This is nothing new to me. His mother has drug addiction problems and this is growing in our society but to hear J.D. Vance tell his story it's like every poor white person is starting each day with an injection of heroin instead of a bowl of cereal.

My mother came from poor farmers and could be called a "hillybilly" though more technically her family was Ohioan dirt farmers. She made it out to the upper middle class. She hated poor people and openly called them "losers" including me. I grew up with my better off parents, telling me "Only losers end up poor!" I certainly was not given life skills or knowledge regarding how the world really worked. J.D. Vance reminds me of one of my narcissistic uncles who went into business instead of law, but had nothing but disdain for those who did not get rewarded by his same efforts. That's my Tea Party uncle who is racist to the hilt and considers every poor person a bum. He too like J.D. Vance loved the older people of his family, he had affection for my hard working grandmother-- his mother and father who were farmers, and a lot less appreciation for anyone in the family who didn't escape the farm or the country or obtain the middle class.  Older people became idealized in these cheery accolades to the past while younger people were "lazy entitled snowflakes". Reading this book was like reading a screed by my uncle if he had been literate enough to come up with one.

I grew up rather uncultured. In fact a lot of my own knowledge and culture came from meeting that ex-millionaire friend in college, and while the friendship went kaput 30 years later. I was basically introduced to the more's that JD Vance and Charles Murray keep waxing on about.

While at home it was meat and potatoes and processed cinnamon rolls with orange icing out of a can, and a few National Geographic magazines, at my millionaire friend's house it was the NY Times, health food stores, caviar, and other class-based things I had no inkling of. My ex millionaire friend introduced me to more upper crust pursuits. We would attend museums, nature centers, musicals and lectures.  My interests switched to away from low brow TV and heavy metal music to PBS and British imports at the record store. It's ironic I probably was considered as being "too big for my britches" especially for a scapegoat became a snob to my family, while later, the real snobs, would kick me to the curb for being "too poor". Some here may point out but your family was upper middle class itself, but this came about from my father's STEM talents, the household culture still remained that of my mother's upbringing. These books seems even more ignorant to me because while they extol the virtues of education, proper "breeding" and "proper" living, most of these things cost money. 

My mother read Harlequin novels and cookbooks. She was very low-brow. She had the cunningness to "make it" but she was a very non-intellectual woman. She was not someone I could talk to about art shows or documentaries. What is odder for me is that my father came from bluebloods, they were immigrants but once owned a multi-million dollar  horse racing track. His father was disinherited though, and ended up working at a munitions plant that made chemical weapons. I was told it was a steel factory but found out some interesting things on my geneaology pursuits.

J. D. Vance's book was odd to me, I often wonder how no one who has gone the opposite way on the ladder is ever allowed a voice, it reminded me of Horatio Alger Stories, when books were published about immigrants who came to America and became millionaires. His book follows that formula too.  So much of our society now is just like the 1890s gilded age as the divide between rich and poor becomes wider and wider. I suppose the formula of an impoverished boy making it to middle class and upper middle class stability is being revised. There too, the impoverished masses would be told they would be rich too with enough pluck and morality.

Ironically while my money nose-dived and I became a member of the lowest classes, my knowledge of the upper middle class world increased. Perhaps this led to more discomfort on my part. I had the odd mixture of being my mother's family's first college graduate ever but then entering a level of poverty where I became the "embarrassment". J.D. Vances fortunes were just the opposite of my own.

Most people won't see through J.D Vance's book, but I did. Here's the problem, it's really the re-telling of another book. I read Charles Murray's book,  Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 a few years ago. Remember the racist who co-wrote the Bell Curve? Yes, it's the same guy. These books converged in an odd way for me. J.D Vance actually does praise Charles Murray in this book.  Why wouldn't he? They follow the same theme. The two have joined together in giving a lecture. While Murray's book Coming Apart, was an academic screed, and J.D. Vance's book a memoir the same message is the exact same. Here is that message stripped down to the core:

The American poor [now with the focus on whites instead of other races] are poor because they are immoral failures. They cannot blame society and have only themselves to blame for their failures. 

 Now Republican eugenics types have turned their jaundiced eyes not only above the "unwashed masses of other races" to debase but now they have turned those same eyes towards poor white people.  While black people were told for decades, they were "too violent"and "not smart" enough by conservatives and deserved their ill-economic futures as the elite dismantled manufacturing after the northern migrations, the same spiel is now being used on poor whites. 
This book is basically a memoir to back up these themes. People in America are not poor because of the jobs being sent overseas or automation or the 1 percent cleaning out the tills, or a sociopathic and narcissistic society, they are poor, because they are "immoral", because they "do too many drugs", or "are lazy".

“The wealthy and the powerful aren't just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores.” 

― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis

[source]

Charles Murray followed those same themes, claiming that even for poor whites, low IQ means lower income, and higher IQ means higher income. Education is not really something that costs money but is obtained via higher effort and morality. Charles Murray is an apologist for the our neo-conservative/neo-liberal uber-capitalist oligarchs and so is J.D. Vance. Trump fooled the masses claiming his billionaire pals would bring in more wealth to average people and these authors carry the same message.

In Charles Murray's book, he prescribed the Protestant work ethic, morality, working harder, patriotism and other Calvinist prescripts as the answer to poverty. People weren't poor because they got laid off or the factories closed in America, they were poor due to their own "bad behavior" and other shortcomings. To be frank this entire country is being gaslighted by many elites and conservative academics, as the infrastructure and economy go into the trash. Charles Murray and J.D. Vance are definitely among their number.

"Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc., have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class, whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class. Much of his argument is centered on a notion of self-selective sorting that began in the 1960s and 1970s, when he argues that cognitive ability became the essential predictor of professional and financial success, and people overwhelmingly began marrying others in the same cognitive stratum and living in areas surrounded largely by others in that same stratum, leading to not only an exacerbation of existing economic divides, but an unprecedented sociocultural divide that had not existed before in America."

Remember Murray followed this same formula on blacks and other races, where the Bell Curve claimed that some races all had "lower IQs" and now has turned his attention to poor whites. According to Murray, the rich are richer because they are "better people". He waxes on about the higher IQs of the wealthy as if intelligence is a guarantee for the money to pour into one's personal coffers. It's so bad, its nauseating, it's cemented and institutionalized classism.

I don't agree with either of these authors attitudes about intelligence, or better morality among the rich.
For those of us who have studied narcissism and sociopathy, we know this society is rewarding the amoral more then ever. Here we have neo-Victorianism shoved down our throats where to have money supposedly meant "better breeding" when the trappings that money could buy displayed that breeding to begin with. In today's more profitable STEM careers, there is a degree of elitism happening in some circles and those who focus on certain modes of thoughts as being more acceptable. Linear thinking as opposed to global thinking. Lack of empathy sadly seems to be one growing blight among the technocrats. Maybe this is why we are sending up with such obtuse social science such as from the likes of Charles Murray. 

Even basic analytical thinking can call these two to task, what did the money bring first? What came first? The poor do not have the same access to ballets, museums, the same science educations--an impoverished school will not have an lavish lab. As they give judgment for the drug abuse, would be violence and perceived brutishness among the poor, they hide the bigger picture. They won't admit that the despair is leading to the drug use, or that poverty in itself breaks down civil order out of the desperation. They expect poor people to live like rich ones, ignoring the basic fact the money isn't there.

The conservative eugenics lens that once was focused on other races aka the Bell Curve to advance racism pertaining to African Americans and Latinos, has now been turned on poor whites. Sadly most in this country won't wake up. They will buy this feel-good story, with it's blame and disdain towards the poor and internalize it. Same as they bought the racism, they will buy the classism. They voted in Trump after all.

Hipcrime Vocab explained this quite well on reddit, and in various articles in his blog by the same name:

"Since African Americans did not own the land they farmed, and had few, if any, assets, they had no other choice than to become deracinated migrants and headed to Northern industrial cities in one of the largest internal migrations in world history, from 1940-1970 (the "Great Migration"). This was to places like the Atlantic seaboard, the Ohio Valley, Great lakes industrial cities, and Western cities which had significant manufacturing jobs (New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Oakland, etc.). America was the only major industrialized power to emerge unscathed from the war, and dominated the global manufacturing economy. Work was abundant. Blacks who had been primarily associated with the rural south became "urban" overnight.

These plentiful factory jobs allowed African Americans to develop burgeoning lower-middle-class urban communities. That all came to a halt starting in the mid-1960's, as a combination of automation and suburbanization decreased the number of jobs and moved them away from urban areas. Low-skilled occupations were the first to go, and African-Americans soon found themselves without jobs before they were able to build up significant wealth or assets. Inner-cities and downtowns became the empty, hollowed-out ghettos we simply take for granted today, as "white flight" promoted by the newly-constructed freeways allowed whites to follow the jobs to the distant fringe suburbs, purchase houses with Federally subsidized home loans, and build wealth to pass on to future generations. These opportunities were denied to African-Americans due to the cost of transportation, redlining, aggressive policing, etc. We all know that "job creation" is mainly suburban nowadays, from "office parks" to strip malls.

And what happened to African-Americans when their work disappeared? Their communities came apart. The only jobs left were government jobs which could not be suburbanized, and low-wage service work which did not pay enough to support a family (Popeye's, hair salons, etc.). Families broke down, drug abuse became epidemic, and many African-Americans rationally chose a shorter, riskier life of higher wages and self-respect in the black-market drug trade to the subservience and low pay of fast-food work. Were it not for government jobs (thanks to laws passed to favor the hiring of unemployed blacks), the inner-city unemployment rates and lack of good jobs would be even more acute. With no more use for their labor, blacks became virtual wards of the state, and a welfare-industrial complex allowed blacks to administer the conditions of their own dependence.

Entire cities became no-go zones for significant numbers of Americans, and creeping normalcy conditioned us to accept this situation as "just the way things are." We justified it by claiming that blacks are subhuman, have no self-control, have lower IQs, have poor family structures (which were destroyed by the legacy of slavery), were lazy, and so forth. Talk to any inner-city activist and what will they tell you is the root of the problem? "No jobs" (or perhaps poor schools, which is related).

Some escaped, but not all could. A small portion moved into the professional class and did well; a tiny handful became superstar millionaires in our winner-take-all culture (in entertainment, music, athletics, etc.), but by and large, African-American communities suffered a level of deprivation and destitution that most societies would consider literally inhuman. The success of the few escapees was used as a continued justification for the grinding poverty and ghettoization of the vast majority of the African-American community.

Meanwhile, suburban whites just avoided the inner cities their parents had grown up in and derided blacks as "lazy." The specter of "Cadillac-driving welfare queens" drove the now-suburban white working class into the arms of the Republican party, even in traditional Democratic strongholds in the formerly unionized North.

The mass incarceration of unemployed black males was the response to the unrest that automating and offshoring work had created. A "law and order" policy started under Nixon and accelerated under Reagan and his successors. The drug war was ramped up, and "three strikes" laws were passed. Blacks were portrayed as "superpredators," and we promised to "end welfare as we know it" (both under the Clintons). The end result: there are more African Americans in the legal/justice system today than there were slaves in 1860. One in four of the world's prisoners is in U.S. jails.

None of this was blamed on lack of jobs or automation/offshoring, rather it was "poor family structures," single parents, a lack of desire to get married, insufficient educational attainment, and so forth. Job training was touted as the solution, despite the fact that schools are funded by local taxes (and hence of poor quality in urban areas), and the fact that the jobs don't exist. Ghettos contributed to a self-reinforcing cycle of poverty. Many generations since the 1960's have never known steady work, and this is attributed to "work-resistant personalities" rather than automation, suburbanization and offshoring.

Now we're seeing the exact same arguments applied to lower-class whites. They just have poor work skills (which they never had before), it's just "bad behavior, "they have low IQs, they get married too soon, they talk, look and act wrong, they deserve their plight, blah, blah, on and on. Just like blacks, females are more able to secure jobs in the new "service/caring" economy because they are more amenable to low-pay/service work, while the men engage in self-destructive behavior because they can no longer afford a family. They are told, just as the blacks after sharecropping, to just get in the U-Haul and move to where the jobs are. Sound familiar?
............

We're now dehumanizing poor whites in the media the exact same way we did to blacks, because the media is owned by the same very corporations benefiting from offshoring/automation. The sneering derision of upper-class whites parallels the dehumanization of blacks when the jobs disappeared in the late 1960s and 1970's. You want to know why Trump? That's why Trump. Of course, keeping blacks and whites (and now, Hispanics) at each others' throats has been a fundamental tactic of the ruling classes since day one in America, which is why Trump supporters tend to despise Black Lives Matter, Mexicans, and Bernie Sanders supporters, despite the fact their core interests are aligned (higher wages, better jobs and working conditions, and getting the money out of politics). Whites' life expectancies are shrinking, family formation is down, single parenthood is common due to the lack of family-supporting wages (laughably blamed by conservatives as a cause, not as a result, of decreasing job opportunities), educational attainment is falling, social dysfunction such as child abuse is rampant, and drug use is reaching epidemic proportions (in this case, painkillers and opiates, predominantly). In other words, all the same pathololgies we attributed to the African-American community just being "different." Turns out, whites aren't so different after all.

The lesson of how African-Americans have been treated is an ill omen for the future, I'm afraid. Drive through any Rust belt inner-city today; that's the future, except now the faces will now be of every race instead of predominately African-American. Libertarian economists such as Tyler Cowen already predict massive favelas and giant ghettos housing 80+ percent of the American population in the years ahead thanks to outsourcing and automation.

Look at Detroit. That will be every major city in America in 20 years' time. A tiny sliver of prosperity behind walls and armed guards, surrounded by third-world poverty. That's what history tells us will be our future under mass automation, based on the African-American experience.

tl;dr: Automation decimated the African-American community and we turned a blind eye. The exact same dynamic is now unfolding for 80+ percent of White America. The outlook is not good.


I agree with this post.

Hipcrime Vocab has warned sociopathy in America is growing. I have discussions with my husband about how much I hate the culture of America, and how it has become racist too and "winner take all" and far more oppressive to people it has deemed "throwaways". We see now authors who defend the "winner take all" ethos. They defend the lack of empathy of this society. Their response to all these poor people is not real help or any future but just blame, and "work harder" and put your nose to the grind stone as the jobs go away. I noticed long ago in the evangelical world, no one wanted to talk about what was really happening. The prosperity gospel ruled even in the non-Word of Faith churches. They had the Charles Murray and J.D. Vance outlook on the poor, the whole "I got mine, tough for you" attitudes.

J.D. Vance in his book gives the same prescriptions to "stop being poor", work hard, be religious--he goes on about how church attendance is higher among better heeled people, and how the military whipped him into shape into being a man who followed rules and learned not helplessness but willfulness. If you think about this, isn't this the message that serves the powerful? Obey, Obey, Obey and don't question the system. I wonder what kind of lawyer he will be? Will the realities of our court and political system wake him up?

JD Vance follows the same themes as Charles Murray though using his own life as an example His own classism makes itself more then apparent.

“In the past few years, I’ve vacationed in Panama and England. I’ve bought my groceries at Whole Foods. I’ve watched orchestral concerts. I’ve tried to break my addiction to “refined processed sugars” (a term that includes at least one too many words). I’ve worried about racial prejudice in my own family and friends. None of these things is bad on its own. In fact, most of them are good—visiting England was a childhood dream; eating less sugar improves health. At the same time, they’ve shown me that social mobility isn’t just about money and economics, it’s about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst.” 
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Isn't lifestyle mandated by the money available? That reality is ignored by both Charles Murray and JD Vance. You can afford better food, you can afford more educational opportunities. They of course forget that the egg [the money] had to come before the chicken [the better and healthier lifestyle]!

In Charles Murray's world and JD Vance's world, the poor are simply lazy. Somehow they missed the memo on all the unemployed college educated people.

"“People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” 
― J.D. Vance Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

He forgets here, that many jobs now only offer part-time hours and one new thing, is to require that one have open scheduling hours even for those few hours.

Of course in J.D. Vance's world, people like my husband do not exist, who put in 12-14 hour shifts and who did work hard, and got laid off.  He would not imagine that a woman like me once worked 4 and 5 part-time jobs at once to keep a roof over her head. Supposedly all the poor are bums who lost their jobs due to malfeasance.

“We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach. ” 
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

One thing I noticed about this book, is he kept repeating the phrase American Dream without exactly defining it. You mean the dream, that George Carlin used to say you have to be asleep to believe it? Here you get the usual lectures about "hard work", but even here I would say to have "hard work" work, you need the opportunities in the first place. I certainly heard a gutsful myself about the "fucking losers" who didn't make it.

“Mamaw and Papaw believed that hard work mattered more. They knew that life was a struggle, and though the odds were a bit longer for people like them, that fact didn’t excuse failure. “Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” my grandma often told me. “You can do anything you want to.” 
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

You know, America's a funny place, all this preaching about self sufficiency and independence. Maybe in agricultural and trapping and hunting days one could make their own way dependent on their own person. It's like a mythos has replaced reality in America, the self made man taking over, but I noticed J.D. got a string of lucky breaks. Did any of you know, that one of his professors was the lady who wrote the Tiger Mom book, and got him this book deal to begin with?

With attending Yale, he definitely learned a new lingo, and culture. When I read the below, what part of the money bought those good things that he does not get? One thing I learned as someone who fell down the ladder, twice now, out of the upper middle class the first time and out of the working class the second, that the one's who most often had the least empathy sometimes could be better off adults who were poor as children. They left behind their poor relatives, and looked back with a mixture of distaste and self-loathing. I suppose this describes some of the problems I had with my own mother. She complained of having no shoes and having to eat pop corn for dinner, and her built in loathing for her childhood poverty gave her no empathy for my adulthood fall into it.

“As a cultural emigrant from one group to the other, I am acutely aware of their differences. Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn—recently, an acquaintance used the word “confabulate” in a sentence, and I just wanted to scream. But I have to give it to them: Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer. These people are beating us at our own damned game. ” 
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

He sees the forest and not the trees, and with his religious blind spots, money buys that stability, money buys that happiness after a certain point. One researched pegged around $75,000 being that cut off point around 10 years ago. One of his major blind spots I notice is that his own grandparents escaped "hillybilly" destitution by moving to Middletown Ohio, where his grandfather held a good middle class providing factory job at Armco. His book, has an extreme disconnect in not tying the destruction of American manufacturing to the destruction of economic lives. Someone who worked hard and could provide properly for his family gave him the foundation to build his life upon. His lack of empathy for the very fact these opportunities have been removed from American people is sickening.

One could say I come out of a hillybilly past though these were Ohio dirt farmers on one side, they just happened to be "more north". For those who made good, there was a loathing for those who failed, it's one puzzle piece to my own story in why my family threw me away beyond the narcissism. I grew up being told to be poor, was to be a failure and money counted for everything. My mother's own family was divided with a crack between those who had "made it" and those who didn't. J.D. Vances' attitudes are not that foreign to me. I was the first to earn a college degree in my mother's entire family. Yes, I was the first. I remember the odd jealousy at the time, almost like I didn't deserve it. My mother did not go to college and got her good job via my father remember.

I lived in an area considered a "white trash"/"hillbilly"/"poor rural whites" area for over 10 years. The jobs disappearing affected that place. It went from a stable small town to having multiple abandoned houses, a problem with heroin, and home invasions. I knew the jobs disappearing destroyed family lives, and unlike J.D. who saw the drugs as the cause of the poverty, I saw drugs as a symptom of the despair that came to settle on my old small town and the future young people were losing out on. Sadly J.D Vance and those who support him see the drugs as the cause and not the result.  They also ignore the fact that unlike his grandparents, the same jobs like they had at Armco are no longer there.

Older people with empathy would tell me they feared for young people and told me their lives were much harder. They realized the rug had been pulled from underneath people in being able to make livings or support families. Republican types like J.D. Vance of course blame people for failing in a system when the moorings have been removed. I would even try to tell people do what you can, to survive and succeed, but you wonder about those who serve as apologists for the system, and defend the status quo, in claiming poverty is a result of one's own laziness and immorality. I suppose that's the only answer for the right in America. After all it's easier to steal this place blind and refuse decency, while blaming the victims and gaslighting them about the true causes of their economic misery. 

Gen X: The Scapegoat Generation is Dying Young