this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Pretty much all of outstate MN and WI is like this (elsewhere too, I'm just from this area so I can testify firsthand). Working poor. Reliant on food banks (govt grants), Medicaid healthcare, subsidiaries for their healthcare insurance, government grants for housing starts or multi family housing, government funding for low income childcare and preschool, government jobs, and on and on.
But these people read at a sixth grade level and do math lower than that. Younger people only get information from TikTok. Older people from Fox News or Facebook. Most have never earned a post secondary degree or even attended college. Most adults haven't read a book since highschool. Many have never traveled more than 150 miles from home their entire lives.
It's like the absolutely perfect group to be duped again and again by propaganda and ruled by robber barons. When viewed as a group, it's easy to say, "haha get fucked." But interacting with many of these leopard victims, especially the young ones, I just kind of feel bad for them. Unpopular take here I know, I enjoy the schadenfreude as much as the next person.
Yet, I usually end up talking to someone at a bar or somewhere and we talk about a lot of other things first, animals usually or kids or the weather. And I think, "hey that's cool... they adopted 3 shelter dogs and are volunteering at the school and so on." But then the political shoe will drop and I'm like, "Really? You too? Don't you know x, y, or z are all the things you, well, need to survive?"
They're just ... Well... Dumb. Dumb in the way little kids are dumb. Naive and unable to tell truth from fiction, mentally and emotionally stunted people who will never grow out of it. Lied to and taken advantage of so many times they eventually become diehard bigots and lonely assholes.
Sigh...
This comment sent me on a deep thought train. These places are populated by those that remained, while others left and became the sophisticated urbanites that broadened their horizons. My father was one of those people that left, he left the day after his mother died and joined the military, a common enough story. He was quite the teacher, and it made me the person I am today.
My father often also pointed out those who had also left, who had also done well. There's a selection bias there but I feel like having a mix of both a rural and urban experience is extremely helpful in human development.
Those that stay... well my father was often disappointed to hear how poorly things went out there, but with no family remaining there he never returned. Abused, poorly supported (though sometimes it seemed not for a lack of trying), with an evaporative cooling effect removing the best and brightest as they went to urban areas seeking better lives, and perhaps resentful they didn't get to leave. The crab bucket effect is in full play as well, dragging back down many who climb but don't get out.
In the end the remainers feel not quite unlike a medieval peasant: A prize for nobility to fight over, an accessory to the land they work, and body that can be drafted when someone threatens to take that prize away.
I grew up in one of those places. It was a town that anyone from a real city would think of as tiny, but was seen as the "Big City" in the area: population of around 35k, by far the largest in a several hour drive. I left when I graduated to go to college and have never returned from more than a holiday break to visit friends and family. Some of my friends and family left and some stayed. Everyone who stayed... well, it hasn't worked out well for them. They all ended up with dead end jobs in a dying town, hoping for the boom times again that will never come. They've become bitter, paranoid, and fearful of the outside world. The last time I was there, in 2021, was so damn sad. The town is so run down, there is a bad meth problem, and everything just felt despondent. Yeah, the town has chosen to do it to themselves in a lot of ways and I wouldn't be part of this community if I didn't enjoy at least some schadenfreude, but I also have to wonder how will those 35000 people, and their kids, ever have a chance at a better life?
And God forbid the town try to save itself with an injection of immigrants to revitalize the economy. Factory towns are dying and it seems like everyone is hell bent on keeping it that way.
These are people of the land. The common clay of the new west…
you know, morons.
You hit the nail on the head. I know good, wholesome people who voted for this evil, awful man and it blows my mind.
I grew up in rural Minnesota and can testify that all of what you said is accurate.