If you missed ABC’s 20/20 episode on Appalachia last Friday, you missed a good look at reality.
Forty years ago, more or less, President Lyndon Johnson and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy came to Kentucky’s hills and promised they would declare “wars on poverty.” I think Kentuckian Diane Sawyer’s presentation confirmed that poverty has won the war, or perhaps, the war never started.
There are certainly naysayers out there who will say the program was simply a way to make fun of the people who live on the east side of I-75. But truth is truth.
I’ve traveled some of the same roads that Sawyer and her crew traveled. I’ve seen the shacks that pass as homes. I’ve been in homes that smelled as if two bodies were rotting in a backroom closet.
And I know it’s not the fault of the people living there. It’s not the fault of their neighbors or the rest of their family.
It’s the fault of nature. When their ancestors crossed the mountains from Virginia, eastern Pennsylvania, the coastal areas of the Carolinas, and put down their roots in the mountains of Kentucky, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania and east Tennessee and Georgia they just didn’t leave.
In those days the land was good enough to sustain life.
Then the coal companies and the timber companies came to the hills and started hauling out the produce of the mountains and the little towns there toward the cities and the populated areas. Big business, companies such as Ford, which bought huge growths of timber in Leslie County (used to make floorboards for Model Ts), coal mining companies that bought mineral rights to land and destroyed its surface, taking the homes and other structures of those who lived on that land, began to take the wealth away from the mountains.
Now mountaintop removal coal mining takes the riches of the land, fouls streams, cuts off water supplies and rapes the land.
In all truth, Sawyer’s program painted a veil of goodness over the mountains and their people.
As bad as 20/20 made the situation in Appalachia look, it’s much, much worse.
There was a time when moonshining, making illegal whisky, was the worst sin in the mountains. Now it’s pushing drugs. Apparently incest is another pastime, according to Sawyer.
But, the Appalachian Mountain range is not the only place where people find themselves in dire straits. It isn’t just the mountains that create the lifestyles in which the populations find themselves. The same situations can be found in the largest cities in the U.S. — Columbus, Louisville, Knoxville, Atlanta, New York, Baltimore, Houston, Sacramento, San Francisco and even Miami.
The rural areas across the nation have the same problems.
Is there anything that can be done to relieve the problems the poor in this nation face?
We can pour money into the problem, but that won’t help. It hasn’t helped in the past.
Is education a solution? Not really. You can’t pour education into the brain of someone who has a closed mind.
Forty years ago, I thought the War on Poverty would be over by now. It has yet to even start.
Perhaps the new administration can do something about it, but I really think there is nothing that can be done. People who have no hope for a good future will never have a good future.
I guess that’s what the phrase in the Preamble to the Constitution, “to promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” means, it’s up to the government to provide.
So we might as well admit that even if the War on Poverty did start, it never got off the ground.
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