Youth Today Special Report

SUMMER 2013

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SPECIAL REPORT

Rural America [after the recession]

Rural America [after the recession]

by JAMES SWIFT

photographs by JAN BANNING

Contents: •3 •4 •9 •11 •15 •17 •19 •21

The Numbers Part One: A Plague of an Entirely Different Kind The People Part Two: The Dollar Store, Boiled Peanuts Lifestyle The People Rick Bragg’s View of the White Rural South Part Three: Defining Poor Versus Impoverished The Author of the ‘Redneck Manifesto’ Speaks Out on White Southern Poverty

•23 In Memoriam

Leonard Witt EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR/PUBLISHER

John Fleming

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Ryan Schill ASSISTANT EDITOR/DESIGNER Rachel Alterman Wallack CONTRIBUTING EDITOR James Swift REPORTER Jan Banning PHOTOGRAPHER SUBSCRIPTIONS youthtoday.org/subscribe.cfm

A publication of the Center for Sustainable Journalism at KENNESAW STATE UNIVERSITY 1000 Chastain Road Kennesaw, Ga., 30144 Phone: 770-423-6924 | Fax: 770-423-6740 E-mail: info@youthtoday.org

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THE NUMBERS:

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A

ccording to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately threequarters of the United States is officially classified as a “rural area.” Despite making up 75 percent of the total land area, rural residents continue to represent an ever-dwindling percentage of the nation’s total population. In 2010, rural Americans were found to represent just 16 percent of the nation’s overall population — the lowest ever recorded.

One part of the rural population that is not shrinking, however, is school-aged children. According to a Rural Community School and Community Trust (RSCT) report released in 2012, nearly one-fourth of the nation’s children attend school in rural areas, with the enrolled population increasing 22 percent between 1999 and 2009. Compare that to the enrollment rates in urban and metropolitan communities, which increased by just 1.7 percent during the same years.

All told, as many as 11 million school-aged children live in America’s rural communities. About 41 percent of them live in poverty, but 10 states report rural student poverty levels in excess of 50 percent. In New Mexico alone, about four-fifths of the state’s rural, school-aged children participate in federally subsidized meal plans.

While rural student poverty is a problem in all 50 states, the matter is particularly pronounced in the southeastern region of the U.S. Of the 13 states rated “critical” by the RSCT, 10 form a contiguous bloc across the southeast, stretching horizontally from Arkansas to North Carolina and vertically from Virginia to Florida.

Estimates from the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (ERS) indicate that poverty in rural America is increasing after nearly a quarter century in decline. While poverty rates in metropolitan areas shrunk from 14.9 percent to 14.6 percent from 2010 to 2011, rural poverty rates increased from 16.5 percent to 17 percent.

Rural inhabitants ages 20 to 39 reported higher levels of unemployment than those living in metropolitan areas during the first half of 2012, according to the ERS. From 2006 to 2011 — the beginning of the housing market bust and the purported end of the Great Recession — average income for the poorest 20 percent of rural Americans dropped by 12 percent.

Nationwide, more people experience poverty living in rural communities than those who live in urban and suburban environments.

In all four corners of the U.S., poverty numbers are consistently higher among rural populations than metropolitan ones; a national trend that began in the 1950s. But nowhere in the country is the gap between rural and urban poverty more significant than in the southeastern region, where an estimated 20 percent of rural citizens, compared to 16 percent of metro inhabitants, are poor.

The current federal poverty line is fixed at about $23,000 for a family of four. Of the 47 million Americans who lived outside of metropolitan areas in 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated 8 million were living at or beneath the poverty line — representing not just 17 percent of all non-metro Americans, but 17 percent of all Americans living in poverty. §

PART ONE: A Plague of an Entirely Different Kind

A

lot seems to have changed over the last four years. At first, things, momentarily, appear a lot better than I thought they would. The subdivisions which buffer my folks’ neck of the woods on both sides - left and right, in front of and behind - seem to be filled with people, perhaps frugal transplants who eyed some available real estate and snatched up property at reduced prices. There is a lot of green en route to Griffin Road, from rolling pastures to the leafy tops of trees that somehow managed to survive a tornado outbreak about a year earlier. The bucolic countryside, with its almost incandescent green fields and an array of knotted and twisted oaks in the background, reminds me less of northwest Georgia and more of the landscape described by Tolkien in “The Lord of the Rings.” In some ways, I felt like Frodo Baggins returning to the Shire - after a long journey, for better and for worse, I was finally home.

After awhile, however, I notice perhaps a bit too much green dotting the landscape. The weeds had grown ridiculously tall, standing four or five feet high. A makeshift memorial, built for a kid who died in a car wreck on my home road several years ago, once loomed over the hillside. Now, I can barely see the tip of the cross, which was obfuscated by a sea of yellowish vines. Fire hydrants rested in low-lying ditches, completely wrapped up in brambles and briars and snaky wildflowers. It was as if Mother Earth had opened her mouth, and had began the slow process of digesting the entire neighborhood whole.

But it wasn’t until I pulled into my old driveway that I realized just how bad things had truly gotten. My parents’ mailbox was battered and punctured, barely standing erect next to the road. The first two homes I saw had been totally abandoned, with ivy and kudzu engulfing the trailers. And then, I got to my old stomping grounds: a sight I could barely recognize, despite living there for most of my adolescent years.

A small herd of dogs greet me at the gravel-strewn driveway.

They’re yelping so loudly that, at first, I assume that I had accidentally run over one. I make my way up the porch, and a bizarre sense of déjà vu strikes me. I look out into the backyard, and I hear what sounds like turkeys gobbling in the distance. It’s everything I remember, except older, more broken down and most definitely smaller.

My parents’ trailer is, for lack of a better term, a complete mess. Sofas are overturned, puppies are scurrying all over the floor and there are dozens of DVDs - most of them, still unopened scattered all around the den, covered in centimeters of dust. My mother hunches over in her recliner, while the hum of a humidifier and an oxygen concentrator rattles throughout the living room.

My stepfather and Wayne - the longtime neighbor - try their mightiest to nail some wooden planks to the living room floor. I talk to my mother a bit, and show her how to access the Internet on her laptop. It’s so loud and chaotic inside the trailer that verbal communication is all but impossible.

“God, they’re so ignorant.”

I guess that’s what most people in my predicament would be thinking. My stepfather and the next-door neighbor keep slamming wooden planks to the floor, while my mother just stares into her laptop screen, watching a YouTube video of my college graduation, as if she was peering into a crystal ball. They pay no heed to me whatsoever, as the opening music of “Judge Mathis” booms out of their flat-screen television. It’s as if they are intentionally ignoring me, or just being straight up rude. But I know better.

“That’s just them being them,” I think to myself.

The bookcases in the hallway connecting the kitchen to the den

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house giant bottles of picked pigs’ feet, while the dining room houses a gun cabinet - but no table to eat on. I peer into the gun cabinet, and observe that the rifles and shotguns are literally latched to their racks with sandwich bag twist-ties.

Everything is out of date. I open the refrigerator, and there’s a block of cheese - a large, white rectangle - still in its plastic wrapper. It looks like it was bought yesterday, but when I looked at the expiration date, the item had a “do not use after” notice printed a year earlier. The same can be said of the coffee in the pantry, too. The calendar in the kitchen has the right month, but it’s off by three years.

My parents don’t seem to do too much. My mother has to rely upon a motorized wheelchair to move around, and only leaves her home to visit her numerous doctors. My stepfather seems to spend most of his time gardening and driving to and from the grocery store one town over.

He appears to have an obsession with canning vegetables - essentially, pickling the various tomatoes and cauliflowers he plucks out of his own garden. For the last 15 years - as long as I have known him - it’s a ritual he’s performed. Eventually, he ran out of places in the trailer to put his jars, so he built a second tool shed to house all of his vegetables.

When I was a kid, I frequently asked him why he hoarded his jarred vegetables.

The response he gave was something along the lines of “because one day, we’re going to need them.” I guess he has always visualized some sort of catastrophe on the horizon - and looking at the influence of the economic downturn on the area, his apocalyptic visions may have proven wholly accurate.

The phone rings off the hook. If it’s not a bill collector - easily identifiable, according to my mother, because of the “800” digits that flash on the caller ID - then it’s a family member going through some sort of crisis. Their mom is sick, their daughter’s boyfriend left her, somebody needs to be bailed out. Good news, I suppose, never trickles out of the phone around these parts.

“I have spent my whole life around these people, and I still don’t understand them,” I think to myself. And it’s not just their decisionmaking that I find indecipherable, as their accents are so thick as to be unintelligible most of the time. Earlier in the year, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communication - a skill set, I drolly note, that seems like it’s going to be challenged quite a bit over the ensuing months.

Many times in college, I wondered what was “wrong” with us country folk. Why were we such backwards people, so incensed by change and hesitant to progress alongside the rest of United States culture? Why did we reject technology and contemporary cultural standards, and hold on to our hard-drinking, hard-praying and generally unfulfilling ways of life, when the route to a better life -- education and assimilation into modern society --was staring us in the face all the while?

From a human action perspective, the argument resembles the old “which came first, the chicken or the egg” dilemma: Are we poor because we’re stupid, or are we stupid because we’re poor? In college, I read several biological hypotheses on the matter, most notably a book entitled “The Bell Curve,” an incendiary tome penned by two academics in 1994 that caused a firestorm of controversy when it was originally released. The argument in that book, essentially, was twoSummer 2013 5 SPECIAL REPORT

fold: first, that people are usually poor because they lack intelligence, and much more controversially, that intelligence, for the most part, is an immutable hereditary trait. Of course, many more social variables may explain why poor, rural people have been poor and rural for so long, from institutional “classism” in U.S. society to a “Celtic Southern Thesis” that claims most of rurally impoverished behavior and ideology is a traditional holdover from the days of the Norman Conquest.

And then, it dawns upon me the major error I - and virtually the rest of society - has made when analyzing rural poverty: We’re focusing on excuses, when we should be focusing on the people who actually live there.

Even as a child, I knew I was so-called “poor white trash.” It wasn’t necessarily because I lived in a trailer, or I wore shoes purchased at the

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Family Dollar, or even because the other kids at school told me I was.

Rather, it just felt like something that was a part of my DNA, like some sort of mutated codon that just made me what I am. Being “poor white trash” had nothing to do with being trashy, or white, or even poor -- it was your biological fortune, and there was very little one could do to surmount it.

I grew up poor, but it was a different kind of poor. In the late 1990s, everybody in the neighborhood had jobs, and some of them were even paraprofessionals who earned wages way higher than the national average. My neighbors were nurses and construction workers, licensed technicians and certified mechanics. They may have lived in mobile homes and had crabgrass-choked lawns, but they were making payments on their cars, their electricity was on and they were living lives of, relative, comfort and safety.

But they still had those “poor white trash” tendencies. Most of them drank, and drank heavily. It was around the end of Clinton’s second term that a new menace -- crystal meth -- managed to sneak its way into the hinterlands, wreaking a substantial amount of havoc for just about everybody. If you didn’t have someone in your family on crank, you knew somebody a few houses over who was: Soon, cars and houses started getting broken into, and what was once a fairly peaceful community turned into a place where everybody was suspicious and paranoid.

But the greatest “poor white trash” tendency of them all, of course, was the mismanagement of money. We had cash coming in, but we had it going out of our wallets just as quickly. Instead of investing in things with long-term potential -- college education, property, small businesses and the like -- we were investing them in unnecessary things, like cars, big-screen televisions, and lots and lots of alcohol and tobacco. And in the process, we racked up an astronomical amount of credit card debt, setting into motion a series of events that almost drove us into oblivion.

When the housing market collapse and subsequent recession hit northern Bartow County -- a fairly small area, about 50 or so miles from Atlanta -- it hit hard. At the zenith of the crash, I was attending college, far removed from the rural world I once knew: Even so, while I was researching the works of Kant and Rousseau, I couldn’t help but think about the communities I grew up in, and often wondered just how bad things were up there.

The hamlets and burghs I recall were very much your stereotypical portraits of “small-town America,” with innocuous names like Kingston, Adairsville and Cassville -- all quaint, generally quiet communities, the domain of farmers, small retailers and especially textile mill workers. A large percentage of the workforce had jobs in carpet factories in nearby Dalton and Calhoun, two major textile production cities in northern Georgia. And major manufacturing cities they were: According to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article from earlier this year, more than two-thirds of all carpets manufactured in the United States are produced within 40 miles of Dalton, a city which often boasts of being “the carpet capital of the world.”

By the mid-2000s, however, the proverbial writing was already on the wall. For years, the humming of construction work was incessant, as the woodlands surrounding our enclave were churned, gutted and sliced to make way for new suburban tract homes. When I first moved to

my stepfather’s place in 1997, the area was so sparse and secluded that people literally paid us to go deer hunting in our backyard; by the time 9/11 transpired, only a small stretch of trees and shrubs separated our property from the ever-increasing clutches of suburbia.

As the 2000s continued, the whizzing of the bulldozers and backhoes just stopped. That neverending hammering eerily faded out, and a familiar - albeit haunting sound - began echoing again. To some, it might have been nothing more than the chirping of crickets, but the cry of the locusts soon indicated that something dire was ahead: a plague of poverty, an economic drought the likes of which the community had never experienced before.

First, one of your friends lost his job. Then, one of your family members lost her home. Then, another story about a lost job, and another one about a lost home. The small businesses -- the record stores, the greasy spoons, pretty much all of the mom and pops -- disappeared. “For-sale” signs started popping up in front of those freshly constructed tract homes, but nobody was moving in. All of the transplants from Ohio and Illinois and Pennsylvania appeared to have left town as quickly as they came into it. Then you hear about your uncle losing his job, and your best friend tells you that he’s been evicted. You run into one of your old high school chums, and he’s on food stamps. More businesses start laying off workers, and this time, it’s the big ones: the tire plant, the warehouse, and, then, one of the mills. And then, another mill, and another and another. It all happens so quickly, and seemingly without pattern; everyone is on edge, fearful that the next job lost, or the next home foreclosed, or the next car repossessed, will be theirs.

Much like the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 14th century, the late 2000s recession galloped through the back roads and countryside of my youth, sapping entire cities of their economic livelihood. A litany of demographical changes -- from an influx of Hispanic workers and transplant laborers from the Rust Belt to an overall graying of the locale’s scant skilled workers -- only exacerbated the hardships.

Coupled with a still ongoing methamphetamine crisis -- not to mention those old nags, alcoholism and prescription medicine misuse -- the repercussions of the economic crisis weren’t just disastrous for my rural kin, they were almost terminal. A plague of an entirely different kind had ravaged the kingdom, this one ushered in on the backs of nonperforming bonds as opposed to diseased rats: Across the land, a Green Death emerged, and not a single household remained unscathed. .

At 69 and 60, respectively, my mother and stepfather claim to have lived “through it all.” Both are deemed disabled following major health scares; cancer for my stepfather, and a stroke for my mother, leaving her partially paralyzed. They currently live in a doublewide trailer with a tarp covering the roof.

According to my stepfather, they’re “in a lot better shape than some other people” they know. They both consider themselves fortunate to have private insurance. My mother, a former nurse, is particularly outraged by the state of modern healthcare.

“There’s so many people that don’t have any insurance at our age,” she said. “They can’t afford their medicine, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it, trying to change the healthcare system.”

She said she was on disability for more than two years before she was eventually cleared for Medicare.

“From the bills I’ve got right now, if I had to pay out of pocket,” she tells me, “it would probably be over $300,000.”

Like many people in the area, my stepfather says he has no idea what “caused” the recession. “They say President Obama inherited most of it,” he said.

“He may have inherited some of it, but he’s caused a whole lot more.”

Oddly, his umbrage sounds remarkably similar to the complaints of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

“You bail out all of those automotive factories and all, and this is stuff a taxpayer has got to pay off,” he said. “All these people that was bailed out on Wall Street, [they] turn around and give their employees a big bonus, out of our money?”

His grey eyes look like they’re swelling up a tad.

“That’s just not right,” he tells me.

I ask my stepfather -- a Vietnam veteran who grew up as a sharecropper in the fields of south Georgia -- what he considered “poor” to entail. His response was a strangely philosophical one. “We was so weak, we couldn’t hardly load the furniture to move,” he tells me. “That’s poor.”

My mother tells me, these days, she’s just living one day at a time. She rarely, if ever, moves from the recliner in the living room, where she’s connected to several oxygen tanks.

“Our biggest struggle is trying to manage and take care of what little money we do have, and hope and pray things don’t get worse than they already are,” she said.

I ask her what gives her hope nowadays. She tells me she believes in prayer, and begins describing her hypothetical political savior.

“We need somebody to run this government that knows what they’re doing and that can fix it,” she said. “We need somebody that’s got different ideas.”

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Neither my mother or stepfather believe their economic hardships are going to conclude anytime soon.

“I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” my stepfather said. “I hope that I’m wrong, but I just don’t see it turning around anytime soon.”

My mother says she sees it getting worse everyday.

“It’s not just the United States, it’s the whole world that’s in trouble,” she tells me. “Every country is in debt, and fighting, and [making] nuclear bombs.”

She pauses for a moment, lightly twisting the plastic nasal cannulae above her mouth. “I just don’t see it getting any better,” she concludes.

Their image of modernity almost seems to be the inversion of the “21st century” world I was told about in college. For the last four years, my professors spoke about how globalization and technological advancement was going to forge a new, multicultural civilization that revolutionized the way we view humanity. Diseases were going to get cured, hunger was going to be eradicated, and interplanetary travel was going to become a reality before I died. When I thought of the future, I thought of the grand, the fantastical and the mesmerizing.

But when my family thinks of the same thing, they see nothing at all. Their culture doesn’t envision a negative utopia, they don’t envision any sort of future at all. The recession hasn’t just killed their optimism, it seems to have killed the very forward movement of time itself.

They’re just stuck there, in their little mobile home, with a flat screen television, two broken toilets and black mold growing on the ceiling. Essentially, they’re trapped, unable to move out of the world created by 2008. For the rural poor, the years since the Great Recession have been a five-year stint in purgatory, with the scent of a Green Death wafting overhead at all times. §

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THE PEOPLE: L

ike many people in the area, Vera Evans, 43, said she has had difficulty finding employment. A former nurse, she said she hasn’t been able to find a job in more than two years.

“A lot of places, you have to have experience,” she said. “And if you haven’t ever actually done that type of work, you can’t have that experience.”

Nowadays, she said she barely makes enough money cleaning her friends’ houses to keep her light bills paid.

“You don’t go out and do the things you used to,” she said. “You don’t go out to eat, and you don’t go out to the movies. You try to save every penny, because it’s hard buying groceries and getting gas for your car.”

She said she has lots of family members who are also unemployed, but for them, the effects of the economic downturn haven’t been as dramatic as they have been for the rest of the country.

“As far as my family, I don’t think the recession’s really bothered them, because they’ve lived in the older days, planting gardens and taking care of all that stuff,” she said.

She says she has no idea how the recession began, but says that most of her friends and family think

Vera Evans it has something to do with the state of modern American politics.

“Everybody wants to say it’s because of the way things are going in the [Oval] Office, with the govern- ment,” she said.

Vera’s not optimistic about the prospects of an end to the recession, either.

“Honestly, I don’t see any changes any time soon,” she said. “If anything, I see things getting worse. The gas prices keep climbing, nobody’s finding work and you’re not making any money, but all the prices are going up.”

Over the last few years, she said she was disappointed by the lack of assistance from the government and other social institutions.

“You hear a lot about the rich, and you hear a lot about the poor, but you never hear anything about the people in the middle,” she said. “We’re not looking for handouts, we’re just looking for help.” §

B

obby Lee, 65, started collecting social security payments when he turned 62. He considers “recession” to be nothing but a “slicked up word” for “depression.”

“It’s just a word to make ‘depression’ sound a littler bit better,” he said. He brings up an old platitude about the difference between a depression and a recession. “If you’ve got a job and your neighbor doesn’t, it’s a recession,” he said. “And if you don’t have a job, it’s a depression.”

He believes the federal government is largely to blame for the economic downturn. “The government promises more than they produce,” he said. As a result, he says that the American public ends up expecting “more than they’ve got.”

Bobby, with a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth, seems aware that his argument is a common one. “If all else fails,” he says before spitting into a plastic cup lined with napkins, “just blame the government.”

He says the effects of the downturn on the area are obvious. “They used to sell [this land] here at $30,000

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Bobby Lee an acre,” he said. “Now, they can’t give it away.”

Although Bobby has most likely never cracked open a text book on Manichaean philosophy, his outlook on the recession displays an acute awareness of the duality created by the market collapse.

Like a car battery, he said, the recession has had both negative and positive effects for the region.

Contrary to most reports on the downturn, Bobby believes crime has gone down, directly as a result of the financial crunch.

With a faint smile, he said “They can’t afford gas to go steal anymore.”

Bobby believes that many politicians are ignoring the plight of rural families, declaring that one doesn’t have to be “a rocket scientist” to realize Washington’s disconnect with impoverished Southerners. “They don’t even campaign here,” he said.

Bobby, like so many individuals in the area, seems absolutely hopeless about the prospects of the economic downturn being remedied.

“I don’t think it will ever end,” he said. “This country will never prosper the way it once did.” §

A

ustin Worsham, like many of the high school students in the community, is trying desperately to find a job of any kind. The towering 11th grader - easily six feet tall, and certainly heftier than 200 pounds - has spent a majority of the summer on a quixotic quest to find part-time employment. Several times during the summer, he trekked down to his grandfather’s home, where he used his PC to submit job applications to several automotive care retailers in Adairsville.

He lives in a trailer with his mother, her boyfriend and his younger brother. Many evenings, he and his brother can be heard zipping around the neighborhood on their four-wheeler, but in the presence of adults, he becomes downright solemn. As he sits on a sofa, listening to his MP3 player, I couldn’t help but be reminded of when I was 16, too.

“There’s not really many things I dislike about it,” he said about Cass High School - the same high school I attended almost a decade ago.

“It’s a little overcrowded,” he continued. “[but] pretty much everybody’s friends.”

He said that his high school is populated by your “average” throng of teenagers, stating that about half of his classmates pass their classes while the other half “just don’t care.”

Austin says that “a good many” of his peers are poor, estimating that as many as half of his class-

Austin Worsham mates live in poverty. I asked him what he considered “poor” to entail, and his retort was almost automatic. “Probably, not very good jobs.”

Austin’s interpretation of the economic downturn is far more succinct than what I heard from a majority of the adults in the community. Despite being simplified, his description of the Great Recession is about as fine a summary as I have ever heard.

“Jobs are bad, and basically, the U.S. government is in a lot of debt,” he told me. “I think it really began with the U.S. government borrowing more money than it could pay back.”

He said that while the recession began in the mid 2000s, its deepest impact is just now settling in.

“Right now,” he said, “is when we’re really getting the full effect of it.”

I ask Austin how the recession his influenced his own life. “It’s harder for me to find a job,” he said.

“And with my parents, it’s harder to get them get stable with money.”

After high school, he plans on going to a technical school, telling me that he wants to do welding for a profession. At his age, I hadn’t even started dwelling on what I wanted to do with my life - perhaps the urgency created by the Great Recession has, in essence, given youngsters that serious impetus that was all but lacking for my generation. §

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PART TWO: The Dollar Store, Boiled Peanuts Lifestyle

T

he general store is the veritable heart of America’s small towns. They all look alike, but each building has a certain character all its own, like a worn-out rug that’s absorbed a million trampled feet. The discount store isn’t just the countryside’s footprint, however. In many ways, the Dollar Generals and Fred’s stores of the country also serve as the individual thumbprint of every rural community in America.

There’s a propane tank cage next to a Redbox machine. The tank cage has a flier taped to it, a “missing” sign from some guy who had lost several of his goats. One of the cashiers darts out of the store’s sliding doors, jamming a cigarette into her mouth as soon as her feet touch the cement. A high school-aged kid is blasting the local country music station in his jeep — some song about some lonely cowboy pining for his old flame — while a couple of shirtless guys who look like they are in their late 30s shoot the breeze next to a soda machine.

The cashier looks like she’s in her late 20s. Her hair is jet black, and her stomach pokes out from underneath her employee uniform, which looks like it’s about two sizes too small. It’s a tiny building, but it’s pretty crowded this afternoon. There may be 10, perhaps even a dozen or so, patrons zipping through the aisles, dropping discounted DVDs and knock-off Kool-Aid pouches into their shopping carts. A woman, probably in her early 30s, yells at her kids from across the store.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know what a motherfucking bag looks like, Jose!” she shouts. It was loud enough for everybody in the store to hear it, but nobody says anything. In fact, nobody even raises an eyebrow. They’re all too busy, it appears, tending to their own matters.

An elderly couple stands in the potato chip aisle. They both have leathery skin, a wrinkled, orange hue that more closely resembles a withered tangerine than human flesh. They weigh whether they should pick up a carton of snack cakes, ultimately deciding against the prospect after about a minute of deliberation.

The cashier sacks up my goods. I would say that her stare was vacant, but that would indicate more liveliness then she was actually displaying. I walk back to my car, and crank up the engine. It’s well above 100 degrees, and there are still another five or six hours of daylight left.

The sweat is already pooling up on my brow before I even get out of the parking lot. “It feels like hell around here,” I mutter to myself.

Most people, I have noted, have the wrong idea about rural America. They seem to think it’s either cozy and picturesque, like something out of a Frank Capra movie, or brutish and essentially lawless, like in “Winter’s Bone,” or, much more stereotypically, “Deliverance.” The reality, as is so often the case, exists somewhere in between the two.

The big question I find myself pondering as I walk down the aisles of the Dollar General — listening to mothers threaten acts of child abuse and to geriatric shoppers reminiscing about the good old days when they could purchase groceries without needing coupons — is whether people live like this by choice or because they have no choice. It seems to me irrational that anybody would want to live like that, but since so few people in the area seem to be attempting to alter their fortunes, maybe they really do enjoy living such a pell-mell existence.

It’s the kitschy ephemera of the environment — the boiled peanut stands, the tacky (and, to some, racist) lawn ornaments and the often humorous, if occasionally cryptic, church message signs — that best explain the local culture. Ironically, those same

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visuals are often the things about the region that most confound outsiders.

Driving around places like Kingston and Cassville and Adairsville, you see all sorts of off-kilter, roadside distractions that, to the Northeastern or Midwestern transplant, must appear awfully, tragically, absurd.

In northwest Georgia, mom and pop gas stations still exist — perhaps not thriving, but certainly surviving. While most of them only have two pumps, most making more money off grocery sales than fuel, they remain common dots on the landscape.

Throwbacks to half a century ago, the stores are still popular hangout spots for members of the community. Often, you’ll see old men — black and white — resting outside the stations. Sometimes, they’re fanning themselves while rocking back and forth in straw-weaved chairs, and other times, they’re just sitting on the concrete steps of the business, sipping on sodas in glass bottles. For a moment, it feels like you’re staring at a quaint display of rural tranquility — that is, until you note the giant placard in the screen door, which reads “EBT cards accepted.”

In the grocery store parking lots, you always see cars in various stages of disintegration. A rusted truck with a headlight dangling in front of the bumper, a sedan with grey adhesive wrapped around its taillights, or maybe even a van with a patched up tire or two. There’s almost always going to be at least one vehicle on the premises with the front bumper entirely missing — as a result, parts of the (often corroded) motor jut from underneath the hood like rotten fangs.

The churches are all small and more closely resemble funeral homes than the enormous cathedrals and basilicas found in the region’s more metropolitan areas. Oftentimes, the church parking lots are unpaved, with just gravel and dust laid out in front of the entrance of the buildings. The exterior paint is worn and weathered. The memorial placards have begun to rust, and some of them don’t even have crosses atop their steeples anymore.

Ever since the recession began, I’ve heard countless analysts and experts say they consider the United States of America to be a society in decline. If that truly is the case, it’s still a much better alternative than the fates suffered by these small, rural communities — civilizations that seem to be more in the process of rotting than regressing.

“When a child comes to school simply because he knows he can eat, learning is generally not on his mind,” said Meg Norris, an educator in Hall County,

Ga. While Norris has worked primarily with students in northeast Georgia, many of the hardships she speaks about parallel the challenges facing students and educators in all of the nation’s rural school districts.

“All things associated with not enough food, not enough money to pay bills, foreclosure, and even divorce can negatively effect the brain of a child as young as 6,” she said. When children live in high stress environments — as so many impoverished families in the community do — key functions of their developing brains, such as the functions that control behavior and motivation, are frequently damaged, she said.

“A study out of UC Berkeley compared the brains of children living in poverty to those of adult stroke victims,” she said. “They were frighteningly similar.”

Norris said the most difficult aspect of teaching impoverished students is letting them go home.

“We know at school they can see a nurse, and they can get fed,” she said. “Once students are home we don’t know the situation. We don’t know if there is enough food or if mom and dad are fighting. We don’t know if anyone is even home with them.”

Norris said that many schools have partnered with other community institutions, such as churches, to provide needy students with food and other supplies.

“The school where I teach has a program with a local church called ‘Backpacks of Love,’” she said.

“The church fills a school backpack with enough food for six meals, [and] our children, who are willing, take these backpacks home on Friday afternoons.”

This way, she said, she knows that some of her needier students are actually eating during the weekends and holidays.

Norris explained that teachers in Title 1 schools often spend thousands of dollars out of their own pockets to provide poor students with food, clothing and other supplies. And come tax season, she said, educators were allowed to write-off no more than $250 of these “classroom purpose” expenditures.

In many rural pockets, particularly the moreimpoverished communities, schooling isn’t treated with the utmost concern or respect, Norris noted.

“If parents are less educated, they are sometimes less likely to push education on their own children,” she said. “They don’t often wish for more or are even aware that there is more to be had. Parents with lower education levels find it difficult to help with homework and are often intimidated by, or uncomfortable around, administrators and teachers.”

Norris said she has witnessed far less parental

Summer 2013 12 SPECIAL REPORT

involvement in their children’s schooling since the recession began. She said that as parents have had to move to two, and sometimes three or more, income streams to survive, they generally have less time to spend with their children and help them with their educational pursuits or interests.

“When mom and dad are working crazy hours, children are left to care for each other, and homework is rarely a priority,” she said. “Older siblings are often responsible for dinner, bath, housework, homework and bedtime for younger siblings, leaving little time for their own studies.

With families getting smaller over the years, more responsibilities are placed on the children.”

Norris listed several reasons why she believes many rural parents do not consider their children’s education to be important, including extreme political and social convictions.

“Education and the institutions that further education are often seen as part of the government, and, for lack of a better description, schools are part of ‘the Man,’” she said. “Add to that the beatings that schools, teachers and public education as a whole have taken in the media over the past 10 years, and attitudes toward education have definitely been damaged.”

Norris said that inadequate access to technology, as well as a lack of opportunities to explore the world outside their rural communities, also considerably hinders the educational development of countryside youth.

“Students from rural or low-income communities need to be taken out of their bubbles to experience the world,” she said. “If our children don’t know what is out there, how can they be expected to plan for it?”

She recalls taking her students on a recent field trip to an aquarium, which she said inspired many discussions on how to become a marine biologist among her pupils. She imagines how a trip to an advertising agency or a medical laboratory could potentially inspire her students to consider possibilities they had never imagined before.

“So many students still do not have Internet access at home. They are getting left behind by educational advancements,” she said. “Learning how to find information, how to explore the Web and find trustworthy sources is an important skill. This is no way can replace a teacher, of course, but that link to the outside world is critical.”

Norris said that all school-age children require certain services, including Internet access at home, help with homework and safe places to spend their afternoons. She calls for greater community involvement in school programs and projects — an undertaking that’s much more difficult in rural school districts than in more affluent, suburban locales.

“I see schools in wealthy areas with dozens of business partners, while poor schools often have two or three, if any,” she said. “If every fast-food restaurant owner supported their local school and a second school that may really need their help, great things could happen.”

Norris knows that improvements for rural, impoverished communities are contingent upon a number of issues.

“Half of all students in public schools in the South are [living] below the poverty line,” she said. “This is a bigger issue than a few educational programs.” §

Summer 2013 13 SPECIAL REPORT

THE PEOPLE:

Summer 2013 15 SPECIAL REPORT

T

Tina Litton

ina Litton, 45, is something of an aberration in the community.

College-educated, she’s also one of the few small business entrepreneurs who managed to weather the 2009 meltdown - albeit, not without numerous losses and hardships.

“I had my home for seven years,” she said. “I had owned and paid for four homes before that.” Up until 2009, she said she had excellent credit - and then, in her own words, devastation struck.

“Total devastation,” she said. “In every area of survival.”

Not only did Tina watch her home get foreclosed in 2009, her tax preparation firm also experienced an astounding downturn in profitability.

In the 2008-2009 fiscal year, Tina said her services felt a staggering 72 percent drop in business, followed by a 10 percent decline the next year. Although her business rebounded mildly last year, the aftermath of the 2008-2009 collapse is something she doesn’t believe her firm will ever truly recover from.

Five years ago, her firm had five employees. Today, she has one fulltime worker, with members of her family often filling in for part-time positions. Since banks stopped lending her money, she said she has to rely largely on loans from her family to keep the business up and running.

“When all this began, it was like, well, ‘recession,’ that’s something that happened in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s,” she said. “Things I have heard of, but wasn’t born yet.”

Tina said that she didn’t think the recession would have as great an impact on her life as she imagined. “When the word was talked about, I don’t think people really knew how devastating it was going to be,” she said. “It collapsed the stock market, people have lost their homes, they’ve lost their jobs, [and] they have no food.”

She said that if she didn’t have faith, she doesn’t know if she’d still be here.

“I’ve lost my home in foreclosure, I don’t give to charities or people that I know that are in need as frequently as I have done in the past,” she continued. “I just feel like I’ve been stripped of security and trust.”

She said the economic climate in the area is “horrible,” and is thankful that her two children have already grown up. She hopes that her trials and errors have made her sons - one, a blue-collar factory worker and the other a college student - more “money-conscious” as a result.

Tina lists several culprits for why she believes the economic downturn happened. “Poor government management, all the government regulations, and greed,” she said. “The government is out of touch with the true Americans.”

As with seemingly all of her neighbors, Tina doesn’t think the recession will be ending anytime soon.

“For it to ever get to a place where things can start to get to an end, we’re going to need a change in government, smaller government, [with] no government stimulus for government projects,” she said. “Not everybody builds bridges and roads. The only way I believe the economy will ever recover is they’ve got to give more support to the private sector.” §

Stephen Abernathy

S

tephen Abernathy, my cousin, finds himself at a completely different crossroad, however. Like many 18-year-olds, he’s concerned about his future; a recent high school graduate, he said he’s had difficulty landing employment for the past year.

“It’s a lot harder to get a job,” he tells me. “And I have not been able to get another one no matter how many times I’ve applied. I’ve applied to everywhere.”

He’s heading into his third semester at a local technical college, where he’s training to be an automotive technician.

“I’d love to get out college and go start working on cars,” he said. “And maybe, one day, open up my own business. I’d love to do that.”

His room - which used to be my grandmother’s old sewing room - now looks like your basic freshman dorm. There are video game posters and prom photos and even an electronic keyboard (covered in Spray-Paint residue, no less) - scattered all over the place. The aroma of incense wafts overhead as he silences his beeping cell phone.

I ask him what he does with his free time.

“Considering I don’t have a job, I’m just living from day-to-day [with] whatever money I can get a hold of on the side,” he said. “I wake up, get on the computer, try to look for a job. Basically, that’s about it, the daily routine.”

He said the economic downturn has had a pro-

W

found effect on his family. “I know everybody else is having a hard time getting money now [and] it’s just making it harder for everybody to get around,” he said. “People losing jobs, people getting back into stuff, I mean, it’s just gone downhill.”

He takes offense to critics who say his generation is an unproductive one.

“I know a lot of stuff is them saying ‘our generation’s lazy,’ that we just go around, not doing anything useful with our time,” he said. “[But] I know a lot of people, a lot of my friends, that are out there, trying to get jobs, trying to work and trying to go into the military and go to college and better themselves.”

To him, the origin of the recession remains a mystery. “I don’t think it was because of the presidency or the stock market crashing or anything like that,” he said. “If I had to guess, it’s because we’re doing too many programs we don’t really need too much and cutting funds where they needed to be.”

Even so, he said he remains optimistic that things, gradually, will get better. “I don’t know if it’s a trend or what, but honestly, I think that maybe we’ll start coming out of it,” he tells me.

Before I leave, I ask him if he has any words for his Millennial cohorts. “Hang in there,” he said with a light chuckle. “Just try to keep your head up, that’s all I can say.” §

Wayne Lee

ayne Lee, 38, is the kind of guy that doesn’t say much. He sits on the couch, with his tattered blue jean shorts, and lights up a cigarette. As a teenager, I paid him a couple of bucks to install a CD player in my first car, a beat-up 1987 Toyota Camry. In the process, he ended up severing the factory wires of the car, making it impossible for me to drive with my headlights and simultaneously play music. For the longest time, I wondered how anybody could do something that careless. It wasn’t until much later that my parents informed that he was semi-illiterate, and couldn’t read the instruction manual to install my new radio.

I ask him how he makes a living nowadays.

“I’m a mechanic, a handyman,” he tells me. “I’ll do just about anything for money.”

Business “ain’t been good for awhile,” he says. “For the last couple of years, at least.”

His free time options are likewise limited. “Mostly, I just stay here,” he said. “[Because] the police is everywhere else.”

He’s done some roustabout work in Florida recently, but he can’t return until a tropical storm subsides. He spends most days just riding around the countryside on his motorcycle.

“I almost got me a ring the other day,” he said. “Out there, on 293. It was right there in the middle of the road, and right before I got to it, a car drove by and I couldn’t get to it no more.”

He shakes his head. Very rarely have I seen a person with a look on his face that disappointed before. §

Summer 2013 16 SPECIAL REPORT

RICK BRAGG’S View of the White Rural South

T

o many members of his family, Rick Bragg is a failure, he says — despite being a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist.

“I’ve written some books. I’ve made some money. I teach. I’m a college professor,” the Piedmont, Ala., native said. “But they think that I have failed, because to do all of these things, I had to leave home.”

Bragg, 54, has written for The New York Times and ESPN, among other publications. He emphasized the significance of family for many rural inhabitants. “The whole reason people live in the country to begin with is because they tend to have some sort of root there,” he said. “My brothers and many of my cousins still live within five miles of their mamas and daddies.”

Bragg said there are many misconceptions about Southern laborers, beginning with the stereotype that they’re shiftless. He describes a hypothetical rural-dweller, as many non-regional Americans tend to imagine them: “We’re sitting on the front porch, with a jug of moonshine and a floppy hat, scratching our dog behind the ears.”

“I’m sorry,” Bragg continued. “But a man like that in my culture is held in contempt.”

Bragg described rural, Southern culture as one centered upon labor, referring to the region as a “culture of working people.”

“People say we love stock car racing and football and bass fishing, and we do, but what we’re really wed to is work,” Bragg said. “We talk about work, about how many bundles of shingles we can carry.

We talk about this stuff when we get together.”

He said that if the average laborer loses his job at the mill, he’ll eagerly accept a job at a cat food factory, or even a plant manufacturing brake pads around asbestos.

“As flawed as we are, if you give us a hammer we will make something with it,” he said. “If you take our hammer away, or ship our machines away to Mexico or China, we’ll find some other machine.”

Bragg said most rural families abandoned agrarian labor decades ago. Today, he said, most rural workers are employed by textile mills or furniture manufacturing plants — industries hit very hard by the economic downturn.

“If you work with your hands for a living, you’re hurting right now,” he said. “Textile mills are one of the hardest hit. Construction has dwindled to damn near nothing.”

Bragg said the recession has altered the family dynamic in many rural communities. “The thing about blue-collar people, rural blue-collar people, is that men and women have been working for a long time,” he said. “The difference now is, that second job, and sometimes both jobs, are low-paying and often at odd hours, like night shifts and evening shifts.”

The recession, Bragg said, has changed the way rural people view the notion of education.

“In the past, if you could somehow swing a job, say, at the local mill, you could make more money right out of high school, or even dropping out of

Summer 2013 17 SPECIAL REPORT

high school,” he said. “If you knew you could make money and build a family and have a blue-collar life, then, yes, you saw little need [to remain in school]. It was almost like spending an extra two years in high school was going to slow you down.”

Bragg said he’s actually heard people say they didn’t have “the years to waste” in high school, and considered the way of life a “tried and true” aspect of rural labor for years and years.

“That option,” Bragg said, “doesn’t exist anymore.”

Nowadays, Bragg said, teens who drop out of high school are destined to walk up and down country roads instead of working at the local mill.

In his Alabama hometown, Bragg said that option literally disappeared. “There’s a padlock on the gate; the mill’s been closed, and it’s been torn down now for 12 years,” he said.

In rural communities, Bragg said, people “work at Ruby Tuesday to shop at Wal-Mart, and work at Wal-Mart to eat at Ruby Tuesday.” If that’s enough to keep local teens enrolled in high school, “then it may be the only good thing you can say came out of all this mess,” he said.

Bragg said many social and political factors explain why so many rural individuals vote against their own interests.

“Change has not been good for them,” Bragg explained. “Democrats have utterly failed them, and the Republicans have managed to win them over through these emotional issues.”

Racism, Bragg said, has proven to be a “snake” that Southerners still cannot kill. He said politicians are often guilty of exploiting this, noting that in the modern era, politics may very well be the chief driver of racist sentiment in the southeastern United States — despite the fact that in many parts of the rural South, whites and blacks have been working together for decades.

“They’ll see each other at the hospital, or see each other at a funeral home or see each other at a restaurant and they’ll shake hands, and talk about work, and be, for lack of a better word, brothers,” he said. “And 15 minutes later, when politics enter the conversation, you won’t hear racial slurs, but you’ll hear a meanness.”

Bragg said he detects a complexity — and in many ways, a duality — as to why rural people believe what they believe.

“The same people that will bring you armloads of groceries at Christmas will fight to the death to make sure they don’t have health insurance,” Bragg said.

“We’re a lot more complicated than people think.” § Summer 2013 18 SPECIAL REPORT

PART THREE: Defining Poor Versus Impoverished

N

obody lives here anymore. Sure, there are people who have homes and populate the landscape, but what they’re doing really can’t be considered living.

“Imagine all the people living for today,” John Lennon once sang. His vision of a world without possessions and greed is a decisively cheerier portrait than what I’ve witnessed during the last three months.

When people are freed from the shackles of work, travel, commerce and, in many ways, communication from anyone who’s not their relative, the last thing they seem to achieve is a sense of happiness. Without the onus of employment and commuting and interaction with a greater society, the jobless, hopeless rural individuals I’ve encountered seem to have collapsed into a chronic depression. They’re miserable and obsessive, and many of them have turned to prescription medicine (which, in sharp contrast to the meth epidemic of a decade ago, is almost always legally obtained) to dull the insufferable pangs of aimlessness.

The rural landscape of northwest Georgia has become the domain of the living dead, both economically and spiritually. It’s a haven for the financially broke and the physically broken, where the daily grind has been replaced by endless ennui.

These days, in my neck of the woods, you’re more likely to be greeted by a vacant stare than a “howdy, neighbor.” When the locals do talk to you, you can’t help but sense a certain emptiness in their eyes. There also seems to be a lightness in their voices that just wasn’t there 10 years ago. After the Great Recession, it seems as if people don’t even have the energy to sound outraged anymore.

The community, for what it’s worth, has become a lot more tranquil than it used to be. After all, graveyards are typically rather peaceful environments.

The summer of 2012 was torturous at times. Georgia was enveloped in one of the most sweltering summers on record, with the temperature rocketing into the triple digits for weeks on end.

I spent many a sleepless night swatting ants off my bed sheets, only to be awakened by dripping rainfall from the ceiling.

I’ve found the corpses of starved puppies baking in the driveway, picked sprouting mushrooms out of my mushy bedroom carpet and heard the tearful spiels of about a half dozen people. My stepsisters bemoaning their troubled relationships, my uncle trying to keep his wits following his wife’s death and his mother’s heart attack — I even heard one of my stepfather’s distant relatives threatened to commit suicide, following his recent job loss.

If nothing else, the summer of 2012 taught me there is a profound difference between being poor and being impoverished, and neither is necessarily tied to one’s finances. The difference between the poor and those that live in poverty, I suppose, is hope. Poor people may not have much, but one of the things they do have — and cherish — is the hope that, eventually, things will get better. Their resources are scarce, but they have a drive and ambition, and at the end of the day a moral impetus to change their fortunes, almost always because they want to see their children live a better life.

But being impoverished? That’s something altogether different.

The impoverished, simply put, are hopeless. They have no faith that their hardships — or the hardships of their brethren — will ever improve, and they certainly do not try to change things themselves. They have accepted their misfortunes, as if peering outside their windows and observing a rainy day. There’s nothing they can do to stop the grey clouds, so there’s no reason to plan for sunnier days.

Summer 2013 19 SPECIAL REPORT

The Green Death is an affliction that not only devastated the rural families’ pocket books. It destroyed the very soul of the countryside.

It’s created two divergent camps — those who wallow in misfortune and those who have been shell shocked into action.

“It was better back in the ’90s,” my mother tells me. She can barely hold her head up, as if she’s too embarrassed to even look me in the eyes. “Every time you read the paper, it’s just pitiful.”

It’s one of the more quiet afternoons on Griffin Road. The grasshoppers are chirping, and only the rattle of my mother’s oxygen canister overpowers the cicada’s low-pitched song. My stepfather recently purchased a new flat-screen television, and this is the first time I recall ever being in the trailer with the TV actually muted.

“You could afford to make your payments, the majority of the people, except the homeless, were making it,” she said, reflecting on the Clinton years. Considering today’s market, she talks for a bit about how lucky she and her husband are to have Medicaid and their home and SUV completely paid off. “Financially, we’re OK,” she said. “But health-wise, what good does it do us? We’re both on disability.”

I ask my parents if they think they could have done anything to potentially offset some of the difficulties spawned by the Great Recession.

“We probably could’ve saved more money, but it pretty much took what you were making to make a living,” my stepfather said. “I don’t think we really could’ve done anything to prevent this situation we’re in now.”

My mother, similarly, says their financial hardships were all but inevitable. “It took both checks just to make the house payment and car payment,” she said. “We didn’t have nothing left over to put up and save for our old age. We were just busy trying to live in the present.”

Surprisingly, my parents seem to be acutely aware of the role class plays in their community’s economic fortunes.

“You’ve got to have all different types of people to do all different types of jobs,” my stepfather said. “Everybody can’t be a college graduate, everybody can’t have the high-paying job. You’ve got to have your common people to also do their part if you’re ever going to turn it around.”

My mother’s response is fairly unexpected: “You remember that old song, ‘We are the World?’” she asks. “The bottom line is, everybody

would have to learn to work together. There’d be no greed, no moneyhungry people. If you can make a world like that, where everybody agreed we could change this America, we could make it into the great country it once was.”

She lifts her head and stares directly into my pupils. “Something’s got to be done,” she said. “And it’s on your shoulders.”

My people are not responsible for their miseries. You can say they Summer 2013 20 SPECIAL REPORT

deserved it for being uneducated and voting against their interests, but they played no hand in what happened to them. My mother wasn’t responsible for NAFTA. My stepfather didn’t help pass the GrammLeach-Bliley Act. Nobody in my family sold off toxic loan-to-value subprime loans. We’re not the economists and speculators and MBAs who put more value in profits than people. We didn’t engineer the Green Death, but we’re sure as hell the people who suffer the worst of it. §

The Author of the

‘REDNECK MANIFESTO’

Speaks Out on White Southern Poverty

“R

egardless of color, pretty much regardless of income, Southerners are generally pretty friendly and forthcoming and helpful,” said author Jim Goad. “If you just depended on mainstream, national media, you’d think it’s all ‘Deliverance,’ but that hasn’t been my experience at all.”

Goad, currently a resident of Stone Mountain, Ga., has lived in the southeastern United States for the last six years. In 1997, he published “The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats” — a book I read in eighth grade, which I still consider to be the most intricate and thorough examination of impoverished rural culture I’ve ever stumbled across.

Goad, who was born in Pennsylvania and graduated from Temple University, said he’s lived in all four corners of the United States, and considers southerners to be the most amicable people in the country. “I’ve never met nicer, friendlier people than Southerners,” he claimed.

However, Goad said, the Great Recession has left rural Southerners — in spite of their amiability, an already demoralized and disheartened population —hopeless and distraught.

“There are far too many people becoming dependent on welfare and on selling drugs,” Goad said. “Pretty much everybody I know around me are either on anti-depressants or painkillers.”

Like many writers, historians and cultural analysts, Goad believes some rural Southerners have defeatist dispositions — a distinguishing cultural characteristic that existed long before the downturn. This, he said, may be a holdover from the Civil War, and quite possibly even a genetic memory that harks back to the Celtic roots of many contemporary rural Americans.

“The defeatist complex comes from being defeated,” he said. “In the South, every third household lost a family member. Why can’t they mourn that? Why can’t they be bitter about that?”

Summer 2013 21 SPECIAL REPORT

He said the Civil War was one drawn across ethnic battle lines —an aspect of U.S. history that still has significance for many rural Southerners. “On the eve of the Civil War, 75 percent of the North Caucasian population was Anglo, and 75 percent of the South Caucasian population was Celtic,” he said. “My wife’s family is from Georgia, and for them, the real ‘n’word is ‘northerner.’”

Goad shared a checklist of all of the tried-andtrue rural stereotypes —racism, religious zealotry, rejection of modernity, and so forth —noting that none of them are exclusive to the region or its inhabitants.

In fact, Goad doesn’t believe rural residents in the Southeast are the only people in the nation who seem to dismiss education as insignificant. “I don’t think it’s esteemed much in American culture in general,” he said. “I’m pretty sure academic achievement is honored in a lot of other countries, but in America, you’re considered a nerd, it’s considered uncool.”

I asked Goad if he thinks that religiosity and violence are corollaries in Southern culture. He said that he does, but he added, “You can say the same thing about hip-hop.”

“I’m not sure that’s necessarily isolated to poor whites,” he continued.

Goad also observed that families living in rural areas are generally stronger than in other parts of the country. “I suspect marriage and childbirth and nuclear families are higher in rural life than in urban life, but I also think destroying that nuclear family unit seems to go hand-in-hand with urbanism.”

Generally, rural individuals had stronger family ties than city-dwellers, Goad said, and ultimately he believes that the value systems among rural Americans and urban individuals are completely different. Although many Americans think of rural individuals as “disconnected” from society, Goad said many city-inhabitants share a similar detachment from “mainstream culture.”

“I’m not sure that’s not a two-way street,” he said.

“There’s such a thing as ‘urban supremacy,’ and I think it’s a good way to control people — just corral them all into giant metropolises and eliminate their self-sufficiency in every way possible.”

Goad had much to say about allegations of racism within rural enclaves.

“What does bigoted mean?” Goad said. “I think tribalism is native, and if anything has changed since I wrote ‘The Redneck Manifesto,’ [when I said] that these kinds of things can be exploited, [now] I think these differences would exist whether or not they were exploited.”

As a social construct, Goad said the idea of “racism” — even now, considered a hallmark of rural, Southern culture — is too flexible.

“You pretty much have to erect a totalitarian state to get rid of

racism, because what you’re trying to do is get rid of a natural instinct,” Goad said. “Wishing someone harm because they’re different? Yeah, ok, that’s what I define as ‘racist.’ Noticing that people are different?

Entirely natural.”

To “pretend people aren’t different,” Goad concluded, is “idiocy.”

Perhaps rural folks aren’t as sociable as those that live in the suburbs or the city, Goad believes. And he thinks, ultimately, that’s more of a positive than a negative.

“It’s a different lifestyle,” Goad said. “As the years go by, more and Summer 2013 22 SPECIAL REPORT

more, I just want to haul off to somewhere in West Virginia and live in the mountains and get the hell away from society.”

Even while living in California in the 1980s, Goad said, he observed a certain friendliness in the rural confines of the Golden State that were lacking in the more metropolitan areas.

“Maybe rural people are less social,” he said. “[But] I don’t think socialism is necessarily an equivalent to ‘good.’”

After all, Goad, concluded, “Society, generally, has done a lot more harm than individuals.” §

IN MEMORIAM:

T

he Great Recession cost everyone something. For some people, it cost them their savings, their jobs or their homes. For others, it may have cost them their faith in the American Dream or even their own sanity.

The great toll of the Green Death for me, however, was my mother.

Shirley Ann McIntyre Lee, died on Sept. 11, 2012. It was just a day after her 61st birthday, and less than two weeks after I left Kingston, Ga. I’ll always cherish those three months I got to spend with her. I had no idea at the time, but the project was to become something much more important than just some immersionist essay. In hindsight, this series wasn’t just my opportunity to address the aftermath of the recession on rural communities -- and with it, a chance to humanize a portion of the United States that is frequently caricaturized -- it was my chance to say goodbye to a world I once knew and loved. And more than anything, it was my final chance to say goodbye to a person who meant the absolute world to me.

Walking out of the funeral home and leaving her behind was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I knew she was in great pain, however, and her physical health left her in an impossible, compromised state. She hated being bedridden unable to move around. She died much younger than anyone in this day and age should; but at the same time, she did more living in those all too brief six decades than most people would amass in several lifetimes. She requested Elvis Presley’s cover of the old Paul Anka standard “My Way” be played at her wake.

“I faced it all and I stood tall” the old song goes. “And did it my way.”

That describes my mom all right, up until the very end.

She was the toughest human being I’ve ever known, and the most loving. She was sincere and stern and probably the strongest-willed person I’ve ever seen. Like everybody, she had her vices and her flaws and her failings. But at the end of the day, I can still say I was raised by one of the most remarkable human beings to have ever been on this earth.

My mother loved lighthouses, so much so that at her wake a lighthouse was printed on her memorial card. In many ways, that was what my mother was, not just to me, but everyone around her -- a beacon, that one shining, sliver of safety against the turbulent waters of change.

And while she may be gone, I know her guiding light remains, a warmth I can’t see, but I still feel every morning when I wake up.

This story’s for you, mom. I know you would’ve loved it.

— J. Swift (06-04-13) Summer 2013 23 SPECIAL REPORT