02-24-2018, 02:25 PM
We are in need of a new New Deal -- and it may be ironic that the South, then by far the part of America most left behind in mass poverty, was its most enthusiastic supporter by region. The New Deal kept its wild promise of making life better for those to whom it paid attention.
Poor white people in the Mountain and Deep South (Alabama straddles both regions) need to recognize themselves as victims of economic oppression as severe as in urban ghettos. It may be surprising, but Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was planning a tour of Appalachia that -- well, James Earl Ray made that impossible. Its focus was not Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but poverty just as bad as was normal among Southern blacks. Race wasn't the problem in America; poverty is.
If we don't deal with mass poverty, under-education, and malnutrition, then other countries will surpass us. Ask yourself -- would you now rather be reincarnated in South Korea or West Virginia? Statistically, would you rather be reincarnated as a black kid in the UK -- or in Alabama?
Poor white people in the Mountain and Deep South (Alabama straddles both regions) need to recognize themselves as victims of economic oppression as severe as in urban ghettos. It may be surprising, but Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was planning a tour of Appalachia that -- well, James Earl Ray made that impossible. Its focus was not Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but poverty just as bad as was normal among Southern blacks. Race wasn't the problem in America; poverty is.
If we don't deal with mass poverty, under-education, and malnutrition, then other countries will surpass us. Ask yourself -- would you now rather be reincarnated in South Korea or West Virginia? Statistically, would you rather be reincarnated as a black kid in the UK -- or in Alabama?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.