Those who work vs. Those that don't - Dividing a town

[packman]

An article of the former coal town of Grundy, Va. and those people who managed to move on to other work, other jobs and those who stayed behind. A stewpot for political discourse.


"...the collapse of the coal industry had left two kinds of people in these mountains. There are those who work. And there are those who don’t: the unemployed, the disabled, the addicted, and the people who, like his family, belonged to all three groups. Those who work rarely mix with those who don’t, except in brief encounters at the grocery store, at the schools or, for Tyler, along the side of the road, where he knew he was likely to encounter acts of generosity as well as outbursts of resentment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/wp-content/themes/wapo-blogs/inc/imrs.php?src=&authapi-mob-redir=0&w=1200


As he walked toward the car and got inside, he had so many hopes in his head. He hoped he would get enough money to feed his family. He hoped the cops wouldn’t arrest him. But most of all, he hoped he wouldn’t run into a man named David Hess.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2017/07/21/how-disability-benefits-divided-this-rural-community-between-those-who-work-and-those-who-dont/?utm_term=.c563ea083e1a

[FSogol]

1. Amazing article. I highly recommend it. n/t

[Blue_Tires]

2. This is why I loathe the bros and useful idiots who still insist

that hardcore red/rural districts are going to accept socialism (free rent, single payer, GBI) in 2020 with the wave of a wand, like magic...

I haven't met the first republican yet of any stripe who didn't feel anything but utter contempt that his or her tax dollars were being used to help their neighbors...

[packman]

3. I'll be honest - I felt conflicted after reading this article

and living, in my earlier years, in an impoverished area riddled with closed steel mills and boarded up coal mines. My community knew another river-side hole-in-the-wall township where generation after generation lived on the dole. Frankly, we looked down on them and their lifestyle. We all knew that the children were healthy and fit and the men fully capable of seeking employment, but they stayed in their paid off homes and collected their monthly checks.

Yes, the liberal side of me and the human side of me sympathizes with those in need. However, there must be a bit of conservative Republicanism in me also that feels there are abuses in the system and they should be addressed.

[haele]

4. If someone isn't capible enough or lucky enough to be able to compete for a job -

you can't tell them to just "look for a job". If no one is hiring, there's no work to be found.

As for those .5% to 1% of the workforce who are too damaged emotionally or socially to be able to handle working a regular job, or have the overwhelming habit of looking for socially unacceptable "shortcuts" for survival purposes that no one will want to hire them for anything more but a particular short-term task no one else would take, what do you do about them? They're "functional" - but I know that I certainly wouldn't trust them enough to hire them long term, and I'm one of the most mellow managers you'll ever run across - so long as you show up on time as the work gets done to the appropriate quality level in the appropriate amount of time, you're golden.

I swear, "Conservatives" and the GOP will make 99.9% of people - including elderly and children - who need help needlessly suffer rather than let a potential 0.1% "able-body unemployables" scam the system for the pittance they might receive as temporary aid.
On edit - it's all jealousy - "How come I work hard and pay my bills, and they don't..."
Maybe because either no one will hire them or there's no one to hire them at a wage they can maintain their lives on; or they've got issues or "bad habits" that can't be diagnosed or fixed.

Everyone is different, and everyone's capabilities are different. While I'm a work horse, and there's a genetic trait for "keen mental/emotional observation and puzzle solving" in my family background, I've also got some serious faults to go along with those strengths.
So I've always held that in the grand scheme of being human, we all are both talented and nothing very special. It's just as hard standing for hours on end at the freeway off-ramp holding a sign for quarters as it is working in retail or as a drone-like resource extractor, if that's where one's capabilities lie.

Here's another thing Conservatives don't understand. Since there's no more "frontier" to send our social misfits and for people who have lost everything to go out and rebuild themselves, our freeway off-ramps are pretty much our new frontiers.
Unless we invest in living wage jobs or other alternatives for those large numbers of the population who don't do well with skilled or abstract thought work.

Haele