In the aftermath of Trump revealing highly sensitive and classified information to the Russian Foreign Minister, Russia Today oops RT.com has a puff piece with Vladimir Putin playing a piano entitled “Putin trying to decide on song to play for Trump during Trump visit next month.” I have a suggestion.
On a more serious note: It’s no longer a secret that white people are killing themselves at increasingly high rates. Opiate addiction and suicide are cutting short the lives of increasing numbers of white people — especially poor white people.
Yet — this isn’t happening to black people, or to Hispanic people. Just to white people.
Why? Some researchers think they’ve found the answer:
Q: When you looked into inequality and hope, you found some really interesting differences between poor whites, blacks and Hispanics, right?
A:Yes. One of the things we find is that there is really low optimism for the future among poor whites, and desperation and suicide. Even though Hispanics and blacks are equally poor and probably more disadvantaged on many fronts, they maintain much higher levels of optimism about the future, and they’re not suffering from the same levels of suicide and depression.
Now, I don’t know about Hispanics, but I taught plenty of poor whites and poor blacks back during my teaching days. So I think about the poor white people that I taught, and the poor black people that I taught, and what was the biggest difference between them, and what it boils down to is respect. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Specifically, the black kids damn well respected learning and professionalism. The black boys in particular might put on some attitude, but you go in there wearing a suit and tie and shiny black shoes instead of dressed like some high school kid and you’re strong and professional, and they respect the fuck outta that — and the girls especially responded. As did the parents. Now, there’s problems in the black community, I won’t deny that. But lack of respect for learning isn’t one of them, and neither is lack of respect for professionals. In fact, black women are on track to become the most educated group in America. A larger percentage of black women are in college than is true of any other group. Even Asians, the supposed “model minority”, send a smaller percentage of their population to college.
The poor whites, on the other hand… they didn’t respect learning. That was “egghead stuff”. “Why do I need to learn this?” was the constant plaint of their kids. They had no respect for intellectuals or professionals of any kind, who they viewed as “disrespecting them” by using all them thare big words with, like, more than four letters ‘n’ stuff, y’know. Education was treated with suspicion and professionals were as well.
Needless to say this completely limited their options when things didn’t go well. Meanwhile, blacks know why they haven’t gotten their slice of the American pie — white people been keeping them down. But not out. They have 150 years of survival experience dealing with what white people been dishing out and white people still ain’t managed to knock’em out. And now that their women folk at least are getting educated, and white people seem to be killing themselves off… fuck, why *shouldn’t* they have hope that their future may be better than their past. I mean, 160 years ago they were fucking slaves, and now a black woman is the billionaire owner of a television network! So yeah, things might suck — especially for black men, who have their own issues — but hope ain’t dead for them.
But for the poor white trash class that despises education and “desk jobs”? Whose sole aspiration was to be a truck driver or a factory worker or a miner, and never had any dreams beyond that? Well, their dream jobs are going away — even truck drivers are going to be an extinct species within the next forty years as self-driving trucks become the norm — and shit, what more do they have to hope for? They despise education and “desk jobs”, but that’s all that the economy is producing other than McJobs, so they end up sayin’ “will there be fries with that order sir?” at the local McFood joint and taking the proceeds and shooting up heroin and killing themselves.
So yeah, I ain’t surprised by this study that looked at “hope” showing that poor whites have less hope for their future than blacks and Hispanics. When you’ve systematically shut off all avenues for entering the professional classes by disdaining education and “desk job” people… well fuck. You might as well just go out in the cow pasture and shoot yourself in the head, already. Poor white trash culture is a sick culture, even sicker than black culture (where there is a lot of despair on the part of a large minority of black males, but that’s offset by the fact that black women are pulling above their weight class), and I suspect we’re going to see a lot more dead bodies — and not a helluva lot of good coming out of white trash America, where the politics of spite are still the rule. Where if they’re underneath a highway bridge living in a cardboard box cooking a dead pigeon over a hobo stove, they’ll gladly vote for someone who’ll take their hobo stove away if it means that the black guy the next bridge over don’t even have a cardboard box.
Well thing is, they done this already, and the black guy the next bridge over, he asked his woman for another cardboard box and she gave him one. So now what?
Well, you know the answer to that one. They be killing themselves with opioids and despair. How dare that black man get a free cardboard box from his baby momma!
And so they kill themselves.
– Badtux the Hope Penguin
I hate to say this, but I think another big part of this is that suddenly all these white boys are looking around and seeing that the old “if you white you right” standard is slipping. One thing they used to be sure of was that even as miserable and shitty as they had it they got r-e-s-p-e-c-t because of their skin.
And now? Still, yeah, but…not so much. I think a huge part of the Trump thing was white folks finally being able to let their inner hating-on-those-uppity-darkies freak flag fly. It was hell, hell for them, I tell you, having to “press 1 for English”. Having to watch those Muslims in their hee-jabs just walking around.
It’s hard out there for a white pimp…
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There’s something to this argument. Growing up in southeastern Louisiana, the few rebel flags I saw tended to be Ol’Miss related. A kid here or there would have one now and then, especially when the Dukes of Hazard was rolling. There wasn’t any “heritage” or other rationalizations for showing the flag either.
Fast forward 20 years and we started to see people wanting the show the rebel flag as part of their “heritage”, high school girls suing to be able to carry a rebel flag purse. 10 to 15 years on from that, and the rebel flags are all over. A local election judge flys one outside her house, next to the Texas flag. Diesel driving rednecks have a rebel flag flying from their trucks, people argue the Civil War was only about States Rights, and so forth.
The common factor here is 30-40 years of erosion of white supremacy, interestingly the age of the opiod overdoses seems to fall heavily in the 30-40 range…
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When the offal makes contact with the oscillating unit, they will be the first to go.
Interesting Times, we live in. An iteration, if you wish, in our evolution as a species. It is not necessarily the strong who will survive.
I would argue that sword, respect, cuts both ways. Their own lack of respect has ultimately left them devoid of anything to respect, and it is that lack of respect that is their Manifest Destiny that drives their desperation. They just can’t believe they’ve shot themselves in the foot.
The Ghost Dance took longer than we thought.
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My take on this post is the drug epidemic reference , the prescription drug problem is pretty much a suburb. mostly white kids. Funny that when the drug problem is inner city, anything goes or do whatever you have to do to get the drug off the streets. Stop and frisk, racial profiling, etc
But what I am not hearing or seeing is police stopping and frisking white midshipmen in the suburbs , if this is a policy that people swear works, the. Why not stop and frisk white kids , why not treat every white kid in the suburbs as a potential drug dealer or user? Why not pass draconian drug laws that will put these same people away in prison for absurd lengths of time?
The answer is obvious and this is what racism looks like, not always denying someone of color something, calling them bigoted names , it is also a complete and utter double standard on how we manage crisis in one neighborhood vs another , how we see one drug problem as being scary and one as being concerning. The inability to find the same compassion for one young man as we do another
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Chuckles, have you read many stories about the “hillbilly heroin” epidemic? One of the best was researched by a small West Virginia newspaper about a tiny town where 780 million prescription opiate tablets passed through three pharmacies over the course of six years. Riveting reading, with lots of details about why country people are killing themselves with that shit, not just pampered suburban whitebreads. Just like inner city junkies, there’s a lot of rural Caucasians who are in pain and have lost hope, so they turn to dope.
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Yes but they are not being barraged with stop and frisk , there are no George Zimmermans armed and ready to shoot a country bumpkin, they are white , drug addicts , drug users , drug sellers and not scary. They are being sent to prison with 25 , 30, 50 yr sentences. Do you know who has been sentenced to 25,39,50 yr sentences, they are black/brown , drug addicts , drug users, drug sellers and they scare white people. The only difference between these two sets of data, the word white and black/brown. If our officials were to be consistent, they would be pulling over any white kid dir no reason just because they are white and the drug epidemic devouring the country is supplied by white people and consumed by white people. But they are not consistent , why, because they don’t give a shit about public safety , they are racist fucks and this is a blatant , pathetic “their pants are down their covers blown” moment. If this recent epidemic was deviuring blacks in black neighborhoods, the tv would be filled with fucksticks demanding to be able to racial profile , because the children.
So say what / think what- ever gets you thru the day, me, I am one who looks for the obvious and points it out . Bottom line, white kids, hillbilly, suburb, up someone’s ass kids , are not being harrased or sent to prison and they are doing much more heavier drugs than cocaine/ crack, dying much faster at greater rates and no one seems to see the racism in the non – action of the same law enforcement who gun down black youths all over are country . But what the fuck do I know, apparently not much. Explain to me again why not having read that article negates my thesis? And please , send me the articles of the stop and frisking going on with the white youth of today.
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More from The Guardian about a poor white town in Ohio that’s almost all addicts. Hope is something nobody there has. Except the girl who says she’s going to try to join the army, but looking at her, no way she’s going to pass the fitness test to join the army…
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I live with a partner who grew up in a Southern Baptist household with a theologian/preacher father. She has a profound Christian faith but has an anaphylactic aversion to churches and dogma.
She has said to me that a rote by-the-numbers religion and morality once sustained and directed the lives of much of the country…but that certainty and direction is gone. The shattered faith and morality of these people leaves them rudderless. What they once had guided them, even if it was a windup “faith”. Now they just go from day to day.
It occurred to me that, if they lost their religious/moral/cultural directions,they’d lost the moral and belief-based “facts” of their lives. And having lost those facts, they’ve also lost what belief they had in the facts of physical reality, lost what capacity they had to try to comprehend and direct their lives and governance by understanding the realities of their life.
After all, what is political incorrectness but speaking your beliefs (even if they are bigoted) that are out-of-step with whatever is au courant?
In losing their belief in morality, they may also have lost their belief in the facts and realities of their economic, social & cultural world…and are doing a sort of reverse Ghost Dance to try to restore their vanished prosperity and dominance.
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No surprise that the Trumkopf demographic is killing itself, one by one. After all, a vote for Twitwit is choosing political suicide. Some people just can’t wait for that, though. I’m all for it!
It would be so kewl if there was a crowdfunding site to buy Oxy for people in states such as West Virghillbilly and Alabamastan. Yee-haw! My bet’s on Fentanyl, though. I passed through Vancouver last week and IV Fentanyl OD deaths are off the charts. There was nunnathat when I left Canuckrainia in November 2013. Lethal drug habits can change fast. Won’t be long until it permeates through to Redneckalachia. I’m a good liberal, so I don’t want to kill people the way a reich-winger does. But I’m all for letting them determine their own fates. KKKonservatizm is a problem that will solve itself!
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Fentanyl is already being used to cut heroin in hillbilly country. There was a story recently about a county deputy who OD’ed on Fentanyl that was being used for that purpose just by touching it with sweaty hands… hmm… Ah yes, here it is, it was a small town cop, not a deputy. In Bugfuckistan, Ohio.
So yeah, shit’s getting real on the ground, and more and more deadly. There’s stuff on the near horizon that makes even Fentanyl look safe….
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My personal impressions of the different paths poor whites and poor blacks and hispanics have taken in the US:
1. While blacks and hispanics still have embraced the values of family and community, whites have succumbed to consumerism and individualism.
2. Speaking of individualism, white folks have isolated themselves both mentally and psysically from other people, by moving to or staying in the suburbs and rural areas, places that foster the fealing of isolation.
3. Since blacks and Hispanics tend to bemore extroverted and gregarious, its easier for them to talk about their problems, seek help and cooperate with each other to find solutions. Meanwhile whites believe they can solve all their problems through the power of “rugged individualism” and any attempt to ask someone else for help might lead to dependence.
4. Whites feel they are constantly under threat, either by “Big Government” or those minorities mentioned above. Therefore they stock guns, form militias and surround their homes with barbed wire fences. This degree of distrust further inhibits their ability to reach out for help, but increases the odds of blowing their brain out.
Are these correct?
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I think I’m beginning to see a reverse discrimination feedback. Self fulfilling. Interesting. But will they see the errors of their way? Especially, when the laws are against them? Laws in effect, codifing discrimination of one race over another. More interesting, I just learned we became a Christian nation, now, which flavor of christian? That will be a hoot.
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Kamazotz makes some good points.
There is also the deeper cultural roots: The Nations of Albion (the Borderers and the Cavaliers dominate Southern cultural roots. Anomie, violence, etc.
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