“If you make just one poor decision, then you’re screwed.”

This is a story in the New York Times about Wilkes County, NC. I thought it was good journalism because it merged scope, personal anecdotes, research and a peculiar rallying point - e-cigs - into one portrait of America:

The post-World War II success story that people once told about themselves here was captured in a 1948 promotional film, uploaded to YouTube by the State Archives of North Carolina, called “This is Progressive Wilkes County.” It shows the locals of that era bustling on now-sleepy downtown thoroughfares here and in Wilkesboro, the smaller sister city across the Yadkin River, as shopkeepers offered pies and pastries, men’s suits and prescription drugs.

“Every day is Saturday in these thriving mountain towns,” a narrator says.

Today, Michael A. Cooper, Jr., 30, a lawyer who grew up in North Wilkesboro, compares the county to a Jenga tower whose pieces scattered when the old industries pulled out. The methamphetamine phenomenon crested here two or three years ago, but the labs continue to flourish among its 754 square miles of hollows and low mountains. Perhaps even more prevalent are prescription drugs — particularly opioids like Oxycodone and Opana.

Mr. Cooper is a rare young white-collar professional who stayed in town. Many of his clients are people he went to high school with and are now in trouble over drugs or caught in the tangle of family court and dead-end jobs. It doesn’t surprise him that Mr. Trump’s message resonates.

“If there were winners or losers in America in this century, they were the losers,” he said. “You’re talking to people who haven’t won in 30 years, and now somebody is telling them they’re going to win again.”

Mr. Trump is popular here for a number of reasons. The county is 93 percent white, but from 1990 to 2014, the Hispanic population there grew from 360 people to 4,154, according to census figures. On a Wednesday in March, Brona Wood, 58, a maintenance worker at the county courthouse, came in to the Tapering Vapor for a bottle of liquid called Fruity Juice. If Mr. Trump is elected, she said, “The Mexicans is going to stop coming in here and taking everybody’s jobs.”

 

Might one say that to the people of Wilkes County Trump is now The Last American Hero?

 

Damn Mexican! Takin' everybody's jobs ...




the fact these are usually low-paying jobs nobody (whites, anyway) wants is unimportant.

 

It's possible they're artificially low-paying jobs because there's a segment of the population that will take it at that low wage. It's not really the money, anyway, It's that undocumented/illegal immigrants will accept being treated poorly, receiving payment with cash, doing jobs that may cut corners or violate safety laws, etc, etc. Employees with a diminished awareness of right and wrong; not because they're dumb, but, because they either don't know better, or this shit treatment is an improvement over Central America.

I was in a meeting once where execs were discussing sending a glut of a company's processing jobs to another country. One of the selling points of the move, at least for one exec, is that the third-party company operating in said foreign country wouldn't allow employees bathroom breaks for at least 6 hours in each shift. Never mind lunch. It was the middle of the night anyway - who needed to eat?

This was a selling point.

There's no particular justification for it. it's despicable, how companies have embraced shit treatment of disadvantaged employees as a strategy for profit.

 

Good article, and a great photo at the top of it. If only the visitors to the vapor cigarette shop could puke out all the bad economic news of the past 30 years like that guy's exhaling nicotine vapor.

 

I'd say it's more than possible.