Another interesting story, about the hopelessness of elections:
Every week, our town’s newspaper, the Whitesburg, Kentucky Mountain Eagle, runs a feature known as “Speak Your Piece.” Anyone is allowed to call in and leave a message concerning basically anything, and the newspaper will print it. The “pieces” run the gamut from small town gossip, to political...
www.versobooks.com
" Now, the first thing to understand about this statement is that it was published in a town where five out of six city council members forgot to file their campaigns for re-election this year. So right out the gate the commenter is making plenty of sense. The local politicians are all so inept they can’t even get their paperwork in on time to run for re-election—what hope do we have that they’ll turn this place around? "
" The economy has changed so rapidly in rural America over the last few decades that it’s hard to even make sense of things. Such dramatic change will be familiar to urban areas too, but the size, dynamism and turnover of cities have made for a different kind of metabolism, more capable of absorbing and normalizing transformation. In rural areas, things aren’t supposed to change all that much. And yet, because of deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic, the proliferation of payday lenders, and changes in the gender economy, the rural areas been completely revolutionized in a relatively short period of time. But for all the dust kicked up by these evolutions underway, it never seems to rise to the level of electoral politics, whose main players never even recognize these changes in clear and honest terms. This would make even the sanest person question their commitment to the democratic process. "
