Appalachia: Poverty and despair in a 'rich' nation

[verte76]

That's another problem, the fact that outsiders who've gone into Appalachia with job offers and such have historically been rip-offs. Well, probably not everyone, but too many people have been. But, that's the reason there are cheapo gem mines in western North Carolina. When gem quality rubies were discovered in those mountains, the people got together to keep some big shot New York business people out. The New York people wanted to buy the mines and use them in their businesses. The locals managed to buy the land to keep the outsiders out. They used to let average visitors come in and look for gems, and that's how I got the gem quality rubies for a ring I have. Unfortunately this mine was closed two years ago. Bummer.

 

[BostonAnne]

I don't know if the Kennedys went, but I know LBJ did. He declared his "war on poverty" in 1964 from the front porch of a squalid Kentucky shack.

I did a little research on LBJ's "War on Poverty". It is too bad that the Nixon administration didn't try to fine tune the project instead of scrapping it.

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_3861.shtml

 

[U2Kitten]

Very interesting, thanks for posting these things, people.

There is still yet another aspect of poverty in the US we haven't talked about yet, the towns of the upper midwest that are dying slowly because the interstates passed them by. In some places the ghost town thing is much worse than even Appalachia. I have seen stories of towns that literally do not exist anymore, not just run down, but gone, off the map. In these places too, the old folks die off, the young leave town, no one new moves in, it's over I saw one story where they had to get about six towns that used to all have their own schools together to have an entire school worth paying for and they still only graduated 44 kids in the senior class. They are becoming extinct.