@revretch already posted this in the old thread, but I think a lot of people who grew up on the coasts, and especially people posting from other countries, have genuinely no idea what the population distribution of America actually looks like.
The state of wyoming is 97,914 square miles. That is larger than the entire united kingdom, and it’s one of a couple dozen states making up our midwest.
This is what the human population of those 97,914 square miles look like:
These are ISLANDS of human life separated by hundreds of miles of either cornfield or scrubland in every direction. I’ve been to and lived in little pockets of civilization like that; people are stuck with dilapidated old trucks they have to share, rotting farmhouses whole families still use, no hospital, sometimes no school, often no grocery store, high-price but still incredibly shitty phone and internet service and definitely no public transport services. Some people have little more than a few gas stations and a Mcdonald’s because they were lucky enough for their town to be on a major truck route.
When I spent a couple years with Rev in one of Iowa’s little truck-stop towns our only food options were one monstrously overpriced supermarket, two fast food places, a bar and a convenience store. We’d have to spend the gas to drive a full hour until we hit a Wal-Mart and stock up on all the non-perishables we could, which we could because we were privileged to have our own car, unlike a lot of our most immediate neighbors - who were still far enough away even in that same town that we never actually saw each other. Acres and acres of farmland separated those homes.
Any conversation around how to evolve our infrastructure and systems NEEDS to account for these areas and it needs to do so in a way that does not demand people abandon what little they do have; you can’t ask someone with almost nothing to gamble the rest of it on moving to a city that already has a homeless crisis and reacts to it with spikes on the sidewalk.
But it’s like that for EVERYTHING. Every discussion of the environment, of public services, of getting people food or health care or education or sustainable energy seems completely dominated by people who have no idea how most of the country actually lives out there, and part of that is because of that aforementioned shitty internet service. The poverty shuts them out of the conversation about their own poverty. It’s a nightmare.
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