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A Hillbilly and a Survivalist Show the Way Out of Trump Country

#1

I've read Educated by Westover, so one immediately realizes that, of course, institutions saved her, although the people she left behind would strongly disagree. Westover's isolated Mormon parents hated all manner of organization, even the Mormon church itself, not just the government and medicine, and Tara had to leave that backward culture, to embrace education and academia, to finally grow. Nothing has changed. We still see the people of that world as backward, and the only way forward as leaving it behind.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/vance-westover-trump.html?comments#permid=30426296

#2

@Terry McKenna - I can empathize, since I have a similar story, my father died when I was 12, my sister 10, back in 1972, left with a stay-at-home mother with little real-world skill. We received Social Security and VA benefits until we were 21 or so, eventually curtailed by Reagan, but they kept the family middle class - my mother still worked 50+ hours per week, first as a clerk and then later as a manager of a local store - both my sister and I graduating from college and attending grad school. Both of us have six-figure incomes, are property owners, and presumably pay fairly high taxes.

Without that support, who knows where we would be now? When I hear about someone giving back, I can only think of the government, along with a few supportive elders. Rather than the state being a creator of dependency, it freed us to develop into educated, employed individuals. But maybe that's the problem. Republicans, with their love of authority and fear of change, need the poor to be poor, to justify their moralism...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/vance-westover-trump.html?comments#permid=30425978:30427158

#3

@Mary Brooke Baria - Have you heard of the success that cities have been having with giving the homeless homes? Part of the problem of being down is that the requirement that they climb out before they can move on likely makes the holes they are in bigger, as they struggle with the hole. Once they can get a hand out of the hole, with some assistance moving forward they very likely will be good to go, on their own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/vance-westover-trump.html?comments#permid=30425978:30427158:30431542:30438411

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