Alexander Karn
“Rural America knows the truth long before the rest of the country feels it. Nothing collapses all at once. It just stops working in small places first while everyone else calls it local hardship. That’s why wood banks—like a food bank but for fuel—are important. They’re the clearest sign that basic systems in this country have already failed.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/204051/firewood-banks-heating-bill-winter
Sheldon
@xankarn while I was in college, I spent parts of spring breaks chopping firewood and delivering it to people living in shoddy houses deep in the Appalachian mountains.
Anytime I feel sorry for myself, I remember how hard life was for those people and yet they always put on a brave happy face when we showed up with the firewood. We'd get invited inside to see some of their family photos. They wanted us to see their joys and know who they were.
That was indeed resilience, but words have multiple meanings. It was the resilience of the human spirit. It was pride and the will to survive when others are trying to kill you.
The resilience that is being inferred in fluff pieces about the resilience of rural communities is another form of the word. It's resilience in the sense of a safety net, which is not what's happening.
It's a perversion of a quirk in the English language and 30 years later, I remember this lesson: the opposite of suffering is not joy. It's pride. We overlook the difference at our own peril.
Aaron
"Almost one in four households couldn’t pay their energy bills in 2024, according to census data."
One in four. One in four. Read that again, folks. ONE IN FUCKING FOUR households. The propaganda is that we are a wealthy country. WE ARE NOT. There are a few wealthy people here, and there are a shit ton of poor people here. It's just that the wealthy people are *so* wealthy that when you include them in the average, it *sounds like* we are a wealthy nation. "A rising tide lifts all boats," my ass!
Alexander Karn
When the richest country in the history of the world can’t deliver affordable energy/heat to the people it claims to represent, that’s deep political dysfunction.
I’m not an anarchist, so I’m troubled by this fundamental violation of the social contract.
CM Thiede
@xankarn that's not collapse, yet, that's s taking care of each other. When collapse does happen, rural communities will fare far better than metro areas. Stay off the sidewalks for falling success.
Adam Moe
@xankarn America, the nicest third-world country in the world.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.