Just saw this and will post the related articles mentioned in the story.
Senator Paul from Kentucky and his supporters are getting ready for the GOP primaries. The gentleman has some very big issues to fix in his home state.
Rand Paul’s best days as a presidential hopeful might be behind him
Rand Paul for President 2016 - Home
Rand Paul for President 2016! ... We will not rest until Senator Paul becomes President Paul in 2016!
White poverty exists, ignored
By Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Samuel Riley, right, stops at the Valero gas station after getting off work as a mechanic to buy some cigarettes from Roger Baker in Booneville, Ky. Wednesday August 6, 2014. Booneville and Owsley County are statistically one of the poorest in the country, but many of it's residents find it a good place to live unless you are young and looking for a job.David Stephenson
BOONEVILLE, Ky.
In a small office on the first floor of the Owsley County Court House, across the street from the Hometown Cafe, Johnny Logsdon, chief of the two-man police department, is talking with a reporter about life in this town of 82 people in the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Logsdon keeps his answers short. He acknowledges that drug use — methamphetamine, mostly — is a problem here, but insists it’s about the same as you’d find anywhere. He is much more interested in describing the department’s policy of free motorist assistance. “If they lock themselves out of their cars, we provide a service; we unlock it for them. Away from here, they charge $60 to $100. We just do it for free as a community service.”
It’s not that he is unfriendly, but there is something guarded about him, something that is constantly taking your measure. People here, he explains, have been burned before by media.
Indeed, people here are still talking about the story the New York Times ran in June declaring neighboring Clay County “the hardest place in America to live.” Which was positively complimentary compared to a piece the National Review ran six months before, declaring Owsley “The White Ghetto.” Reporter Kevin D. Williamson wrote that instead of contemplating their bleak reality, the people here escape it with “the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death …”
“You’ve got to understand,” says Logsdon, “people shy away from reporters.” Sure enough, a worker at the Family Dollar store doesn’t want her name used. A woman at a medical conference in Hazard warns everyone in earshot in a loud voice that a reporter is among them. So it goes during a week spent wandering this county and adjacent counties discussing something America almost never talks about: white poverty.
Granted, America seldom discusses poverty of any hue, except insofar as conservative pundits and politicians use it as a not-subtle proxy for racial resentments among white voters. But white poverty is the great white whale of American social discourse, believed to exist but seldom seen.
As it turns out, our deeply racialized view of poverty bears no resemblance to reality. Though it’s true that African Americans are disproportionately likely to live below the poverty line, it is also true that the vast majority of those in poverty are white: 29.8 million people. In fact, there are more white poor than all other poor combined.
Owsley County (Booneville is the county seat) is the epicenter of that poverty. Median income here is less than $20,000. The obesity rate is 50 percent. Life expectancy: 71.4 years, more than seven years below the national average. With 36 percent of its citizens living below the poverty line and 98.5 percent of its population identifying as white, it is the poorest — and one of the whitest — places in America.
If people are wary of reporters asking about such things, it’s not difficult to understand. You get sick of being defined as a problem. Still, nobody denies there are problems here. Indeed, walk down Court Street talking to whomever will speak to you, and very quickly, a theme emerges:
There is nothing here.
Senator Paul from Kentucky and his supporters are getting ready for the GOP primaries. The gentleman has some very big issues to fix in his home state.
Rand Paul’s best days as a presidential hopeful might be behind him
Rand Paul for President 2016 - Home
Rand Paul for President 2016! ... We will not rest until Senator Paul becomes President Paul in 2016!
White poverty exists, ignored
By Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Samuel Riley, right, stops at the Valero gas station after getting off work as a mechanic to buy some cigarettes from Roger Baker in Booneville, Ky. Wednesday August 6, 2014. Booneville and Owsley County are statistically one of the poorest in the country, but many of it's residents find it a good place to live unless you are young and looking for a job.David Stephenson
BOONEVILLE, Ky.
In a small office on the first floor of the Owsley County Court House, across the street from the Hometown Cafe, Johnny Logsdon, chief of the two-man police department, is talking with a reporter about life in this town of 82 people in the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Logsdon keeps his answers short. He acknowledges that drug use — methamphetamine, mostly — is a problem here, but insists it’s about the same as you’d find anywhere. He is much more interested in describing the department’s policy of free motorist assistance. “If they lock themselves out of their cars, we provide a service; we unlock it for them. Away from here, they charge $60 to $100. We just do it for free as a community service.”
It’s not that he is unfriendly, but there is something guarded about him, something that is constantly taking your measure. People here, he explains, have been burned before by media.
Indeed, people here are still talking about the story the New York Times ran in June declaring neighboring Clay County “the hardest place in America to live.” Which was positively complimentary compared to a piece the National Review ran six months before, declaring Owsley “The White Ghetto.” Reporter Kevin D. Williamson wrote that instead of contemplating their bleak reality, the people here escape it with “the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death …”
“You’ve got to understand,” says Logsdon, “people shy away from reporters.” Sure enough, a worker at the Family Dollar store doesn’t want her name used. A woman at a medical conference in Hazard warns everyone in earshot in a loud voice that a reporter is among them. So it goes during a week spent wandering this county and adjacent counties discussing something America almost never talks about: white poverty.
Granted, America seldom discusses poverty of any hue, except insofar as conservative pundits and politicians use it as a not-subtle proxy for racial resentments among white voters. But white poverty is the great white whale of American social discourse, believed to exist but seldom seen.
As it turns out, our deeply racialized view of poverty bears no resemblance to reality. Though it’s true that African Americans are disproportionately likely to live below the poverty line, it is also true that the vast majority of those in poverty are white: 29.8 million people. In fact, there are more white poor than all other poor combined.
Owsley County (Booneville is the county seat) is the epicenter of that poverty. Median income here is less than $20,000. The obesity rate is 50 percent. Life expectancy: 71.4 years, more than seven years below the national average. With 36 percent of its citizens living below the poverty line and 98.5 percent of its population identifying as white, it is the poorest — and one of the whitest — places in America.
If people are wary of reporters asking about such things, it’s not difficult to understand. You get sick of being defined as a problem. Still, nobody denies there are problems here. Indeed, walk down Court Street talking to whomever will speak to you, and very quickly, a theme emerges:
There is nothing here.
They can all starve to death for all I care. The funny thing is that these "middle class" CACs don't even fully realize that they're really poor too. They're about to find out soon enough though.
