“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” Philip Alston, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told Connor Sheets of AL.com earlier this week as they toured a community in Butler County where raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.
The tour through Alabama’s rural communities is part of a two-week investigation by the U.N. on poverty and human rights abuses in the United States. So far, U.N. investigators have visited cities and towns in California and Alabama, and will soon travel to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.
Of particular concern to Alston are specific poverty-related issues that have surfaced across the country in recent years, such as an outbreak of hookworm in Alabama in 2017—a disease typically found in nations with substandard sanitary conditions in South Asia and Subsaharan Africa.
The U.N. investigation aims to study the effects of systemic poverty in a prosperous nation like the United States.
90% of the poorest areas in America are in Republican Red zones.
B-b-b-b-b-b-but poverty in the Red States isn’t all that bad, right?
Right?
Errrrr
Jesus christ, and to think how many billionaires we have in the US while this is happening
How is anyone surprised by this though?
Do people not look around?
Or is this really not prevalent anywhere but the South? It’s damn near everywhere you look in the South. I had friends in the high school with houses that when you flushed the toilet it went from a pipe in the trailer out to a ravine out back. I remember burning our trash. And it wasn’t unusual. I mean I’m in my thirties and it’s not uncommon for me to meet people in my generation who are the first in their family to have indoor plumbing.
The republicans aren’t blind. They aren’t naive. They’re just greedy. You can’t amass that kind of wealth by giving it away to the less fortunate. And don’t be tricked into thinking the wealthy Democrats are any better. Politicians will say whatever it takes to get voted into a position, and then they’ll vote however they need to in order to keep the money rolling in.
They really don’t look around. Myself included. (I knew things were bad in the Deep South but I didn’t think they’d been quite this bad since the ‘30s.)
Like… have you seen how many people complain whenever you talk about poor white people? Most middle-class folks don’t want to believe that things could be this bad for anyone. A lot of lefty middle-class white people want to believe that poor white people are poor because they’re stupid and racist and probably fat, and poor black people are poor because they’re ~discriminated against~ without thinking about what that means for 30 seconds. (And often with a side dose of subconscious racism– of course black people are poor, they can’t rise above their station.)
Talking about what that kind of ‘poor’ actually looks like? Bursts people’s bubble. It means they have to think about how people could be suckered to do something that’s not in their best interests, whether it’s white coal-mining families voting for Trump or black people being anti-abortion because they’ve bought the ‘abortion is racist eugenics’ lie. It means they have to realize that politics isn’t a Tribe Game where it’s good when Your Team wins and Their Team loses, it’s a matter of life and death for a lot of people. It means they have to realise people on Their Team aren’t just stupidracistcrazy, a lot of them are desperate and afraid and have been suckered by greedy people.
And we can’t have that, can we? However will we have the Horse Race if we have to acknowledge that real humans’ lives are at stake? However will we get to feel superior over other people if we don’t think of social class as a morality-based hierarchy? </sarc>
[insert obligatory disclaimer that a lot of Trump’s base had a college education and a lot of people who are in the worst circumstances here are black; it’s just that White Is The Default and so people get mad when you talk about poverty happening to Default People.]
(also side note: growing up in the semi-rural Midwest, we had a septic tank, and it busted really badly a couple times. the smell was undescribable and Mum, longsuffering as she was, had to keep us from playing in literal shit more than once. …I can’t imagine living like that full-time, but of course people do.)
Yeah, it’s called Meth Country for a reason.
It’s not just the South (though the South might be worse, because the winters and summers are survivable in a busted-up trailer), it’s everywhere 20 minutes outside of a major metro area.
The US is the world’s richest third-world country.
There are functional places, we’ve just made it illegal (or sufficiently expensive that there’s no difference) to move there.
gender-trash
