An open letter to a broken region
I have a theory that if people treat you like garbage for long enough, you’ll be tempted to prove them right by being the biggest, rankest piece of trash they ever stumble across. Human beings are inevitably shaped by the labels they are given and the categories they are confined to, often detrimentally. Such is the case in the rural south. Down here, we’re a proud, tenacious people, regularly reduced to crude characterizations by the outside world. For many of those outsiders, rural suffering serves as a clever punchline while our relative absence of privilege is shrugged away as a necessary consequence of some hereditary ignorance. I’m reminded of the conventional Hollywood portrayal of the rural south as an incestuas breeding ground for welfare queens and pill heads. Yet, the gritty truth is that many of us have been used up and forgotten; sucked dry and tossed aside after there was nothing left to take. Meanwhile, most resign themselves to playing dead like a possum, raising hardly even a whimper and waiting for their abusers to bring us more of the same bullshit, whether that takes the form of labor exploitation, resource extraction or, more often than not, a little dollop of both. Those maintaining power and wealth continually rape the land for all it’s worth, sacrificing the bodies of rural folk to build a colossal fortune that white trash…
