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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...