( No Title )
What tears me up about Appalachia is that before mass influx of mining+industrialization people were living in very close knit family communities who mainly survived under the bartering system and also farming. You didn’t need to be a wealthy figure to own some land to farm for yourself and your family, we just did it.
Factories came (hurrdurr those dumb hicks will work for whatever wage we give them prior to min. wage laws, so they’re basically cheap labor for mass production), laws were imposed about farming in “city limits”, people left the fields to go work/mine, and thus began the tear in family units and community. People started to hurt from factory labor, drugs were introduced to stop the pain while they kept working and da da da welcome to the opiate crises of 2018 and towns with abandoned factories because after we were done being sucked dry by the rest of the u.s. we were left to be forgotten only but as a “hillbilly” stereotype and “redneck” being used as an insult when it really referred to union workers in coal mines wearing red bandannas.
I absolutely adore when western “fight against the bourgeoisie” types turn around and make fun of us while simultaneously striving to live like us as a commodity because it’s “quirky”.
Recent Comments