[eigenstuff]

And this is why Appalachia still cannot break its cycle of systemic rural poverty.

I think people fail to realize or are just now realizing that the opioid epidemic beginning in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky (as well as on reservations) wasn't an indictment of the character of Appalachians as a distinct cultural group by any means, it was a calculated move to exploit the vulnerable and forgotten: rural populations isolated from the outside world, full of bodies broken in the mines and in pain, few prospects and little hope for anything better. Purdue was pumping hundreds of thousands pills into these little hollers. Just one more corporate entity committing... Can we call it genocide yet? Between this and tens of thousands dead in the mines and from black lung and cancer caused by pollution? Because basic safety would cut into the bottom line and these people are seen as disposable? Just a bunch of backwards yokels who can't speak English right and get what they voted for? Things have happened in this region that make the Flint water crisis look like amateur hour.

Their schools are chronically underfunded because industry owns local governments all the way down to the school boards and sherrifs, that they would pay their fair share of taxes and invested in these communities with that kind of death grip on the region is laughable. I live near a trailer park, it kills me to think there is genius in there and in trailer parks all over the place that goes unrecognized and never developed and allowed to grow to reach its full potential. What's the point of staying in school if all you've ever expected of yourself is working at the gas station because you don't know you can want more for yourself? Because your family is poor, and you need to go to work to help feed your little siblings?

That teenage pregnancy rates are higher is hardly surprising. If you're standing in line at 6 am for Remote Area Medical to get a tooth pulled, it goes without saying you have no access to birth control or abortions. Not that you could even afford the latter anyway.

And so the cycle of systemic rural poverty continues.