Curate, connect, and discover
My family is all in those mountains of East TN. I got married in those mountains in East TN. I've driven those back roads and ran through fields in the summer heat chasing fireflies. I've watched the sun rise and set over the vast peaks in the distance and I've smelled the thunderstorms that roll in the late afternoon sky. The fear, the unknowing. I'm thankful my family made it out alive, but the families that didn't don't deserve the hate for "not being prepared" or because of their state color is stupid and barbaric because how do you prepare for something like flooding in the mountains, the land slides, the no warning. Children ripped from their parents, grandparents who were raised on that land just like their parents before them and suddenly it's all gone under mud, rubble and fast moving water. People need help, people are missing and currently dying but hey, when you're nustled in your cozy bed with warm water and all the food you could eat, why bother to see the other side.
I’m from the south and I have family who live in Appalachia. While my family out there wasn’t within the zone of the damage caused by hurricane helene, their homes were decimated by another natural disaster a couple of years ago.
The response to their suffering then is the same as it is now, to the victims of Helene. That somehow, they deserved it, because they live in an area that votes red, or maybe vote red themselves.
This is elitist and classist bullshit and it’s fucking disgusting. Any person who claims to want a world in which we establish self-sustaining communities who, in the same breath, condemns people to death is not the progressive they tout themselves to be. They are vile and cruel.
You do not get to speak on Appalachia’s voting patterns if you do not understand the history and context that created it. You do not get to wish death upon hundreds or thousands of children or disabled persons or any marginalized community simply because they happened to be born in an area you’ve written off as irredeemable. You do not get to cower behind the generalizations you make about an entire region simply because its poverty and disenfranchisement make you uncomfortable.
I am so, so sick of coastal liberals speaking on the South/Appalachia when they have neither the interest nor desire to help the people here. Who seek only to condescend and then have the gall to act confused why they won’t side with the very people who tell them they deserve to lose their homes, their families, their lives, because they don’t vote for certain candidates. If you can’t be fucked to learn the first thing about the area, keep its people out of your mouth.