My career in journalism began with a small weekly newspaper in Red Springs, North Carolina. The town was only 16 miles from the seat of Robeson County, Lumberton, and 170 miles from my present home in Vilas, just outside Boone, North Carolina. Red Springs and Boone are at opposite ends of the state. Red Springs sits on the hot sandy soil of the coastal plain, while Boone sits high in the lush mountains at the other end of the state. Red Springs is where my life as a reporter began and where my marriage began. Red Springs also introduced me to the inequalities that exist.
In my daily trolling of news sites on the Web, I ran across this story in the Raleigh News and Observer (http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/683703.html) yesterday. The story by Kristin Collins presented a tale of poverty, disease, crime and lost hopes for Robeson County. It has lost its industrial base, textiles, and its agricultural base, tobacco. Those economic mainstays haven’t been replaced. I don’t hear many people talk about retiring in Robeson County. It’s been more than 30 years since I last stopped in that small community. I imagine not much has changed since I lived there and covered a community of blacks, Indians, and whites, and wrote stories about police brutality, trapped horses, the Highland Games, held anywhere but the highlands, Robeson Country Day School, Mark Twain impersonators, and a slew of local characters that kept my wife and me chuckling the two years we lived there.
Watauga County, my present home, is like most of Western North Carolina. It has become a beacon for anyone with the money to build a second home, or a retirement villa. The number of million-dollar mansions, and one would have to use that term to describe these personal flattery palaces, has increased exponentially over the past two decades. True locals, those born in this mountain county, are a dying breed, being replaced by people with funny names from South Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama. The one determinate of status has become the size of the pocketbook and the ability to afford to pay cash for houses that cost more than I’ve made in my entire working career.
We refer to our mountains as the App-a-latch-un mountains. We never use the term Appalachia, you know the term, the one that came into vogue when East Coast liberals in the 60s discovered poverty existed in the mountain regions of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Don’t be fooled, we still have the poverty, we just don’t see it because we have grown blind to it. You could spit from the front porch of some of these mansions I wrote of and hit poverty. But few seem to care, and those that do are often looked upon as poor throwbacks to an earlier era when we were supposed to care for our fellow man rather than view him as a competitor for the dollars in our pockets.
I would think we need a dialogue to take place. Unfortunately, the story about Robeson County probably went unread by the vast majority of News and Observer readers yesterday. I don’t expect the dialogue to begin, as the issue will be wrapped around the various presidential campaigns underway or soon to be underway. I recall, as a young high school student, watching film on the nightly news of Lyndon Johnson shaking hands with people living in Appalachia—people who probably didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Recently we had Hillary Clinton visit the High Country, but she wasn’t here to seek out poor people and shake their hands and promise to work on their issues. Rather, she was here to greet and grin with people with the money necessary to pay for an expensive lunch and make donations to her campaign. It would be nice if our politicians once again had to shake the hands of real people with problems, rather than those with the bucks to buy influence. And, before you take this wrong, it’s just as true for the other political party.
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