The Political Thread

One should be aware of when he is posting opinions vs. when he is posting facts and stating them as facts. This is primarily propaganda. I'm not saying NONE of it is true, but it's also often a relative truth presented in a manner to make it appear to be more true. Just one example is the use of the number of deaths by gun to suggest that the guns are bad, not the people, and to assume that none of those deaths would have occurred if another weapon were chosen to do the killing. I'm going to state that since over 37,000 people per year die via automobile each year, and another 200,000 deaths per year can be supposed to be caused by the pollution from automobiles per year (and millions of innocent and uncountable other animals) that we should do one hell of a lot better job of deciding who drives these cars and that many drivers on the road today should be disqualified from owning or driving a car.

When looking at the list of counties where the American Dream is supposedly dead, I noticed a stark contrast between cities, like Atlantic City, NJ where large sums of money are being pocketed by a select few and crime is rampant because the voters in that fair state and city decided that casinos were a great idea. Historically money and crime both have followed casinos in every application. The voters there got what they asked for. People choose cities. Cities don't choose people.

Yet another large portion of those poor indisposed counties are counties that are rooted in Appalachia. We can pretend all we want that the so-called death of the American Dream in those counties has a recent cause, but this is a situation that was born way before any of today's politicians. Having myself lived on the fringes of this area for three years when I lived in Paris, KY, I can tell you that I worked with and spoke with some of the young folks in that town (and Lexington) they almost ALL said, "We ain't never leaving this area. We like it here. Life is slower, and there ain't all that stress like in the big cities".

Yep. It does become a chosen life style, just like some of the small mountain towns in Colorado where life is slow and peaceful and people choose to live in hand-built cabins or homes that were built during the gold strikes of the late 1800's. I priced one of those houses back in 2006. It was a small Victorian build in Victor, CO, right on main street. The owner was asking $17,000. Up on a mountain side at the end of town I also found a small mobile home with a new furnace in it that the owner was asking $29,900. It was on an acre and a half of land. I made an offer of $21,000 and the owner accepted, but I decided to back out for personal reasons. So, in either case I could have lived there very cheaply, and if the local economy didn't pay well, then someone would have said I was "living in poverty". Yes. I would call that perhaps "relative poverty". It all depends upon our needs, not our necessities. We inflict our needs upon ourselves. I did inflict further needs upon myself when I turned down those opportunities to live cheaply and peacefully. I had my reasons. I had just separated from wife #1, and my physically handicapped and wheelchair bound son was in tow. He was in his thirties at that point, and I decided that the small house offered poor access for him, as did the mobile home, which also stood among many tall pines that rocked to and fro in the wind, and were of course subject to forest fire. The land also had lots of bears, and I realized I would be working much of the time and he would be left unprotected at the trailer, often at night as I would work either a swing shift at the gold mine nearby or at the casinos in Cripple Creek. Those were 90% of the available jobs for the locals. Neither paid huge money, unless you were willing to work many hours. The work at the gold mine was hard, outdoor labor. The winters were harsh and they were always losing people. The people that couldn't bear up to the gold mines went to work for much less at the casinos, which typically didn't like to pay over time.

That's my "brush with poverty" if you will. It was there for the asking, and many choose it over the conventional life style. For them, it IS their American Dream. And they are happy. For me, I went back to the old family home in MD, and eventually divorced and bought my wife out, feeling like there was NO escape from the mortgage at that time. Not in poverty, but it was a suffocating and disturbing choice that I made in the interest of being a good father. The choice turned out to be the right one and the wrong one all at the same time.

Yes, I realize there is another side to the story and that there are some tragic stories that can be told. I realize that sometimes fathers die and wives and children are left with poor means. Those are sad tales and they get a lot of publicity. They do indeed tug at our heart strings and for good reason. Somehow we don't have enough sense to help those who need it and not build the system of aid under a larger blanket that rewards many others for making no effort to change their situations...

Choices. We all have them. Some of us exercise them, and some of us will settle for the status quo. One thing I am certain of is that we don't all want the same things out of life. Sometimes life is fair. Sometimes it's not. It's not always someone else's fault.

Peace and Good Will to all men...