This article by Vox’s Sarah Kliff will seem to some to be an indictment of Williamson, WV and all those backward hillbillies that call the place home. To some it will be an indictment of the medical profession, the drug companies, government and others who should have fixed the problem. To me, it is a sad human story of the plight of so many in downtrodden rural and urban communities ...men, women and children of all races, colors and creeds. It extends beyond the penniless in these communities, opioids affect people in all walks of life, the monied and those dependent on others to feed them, to house and otherwise care for them.
Opioid usage, metaphorically, speaks loudly to many in America ...many who, on November 8, flipped the lever, darkened the oval, selected the box next to Donald Trump’s name ...people who thought that doing so would fix their economic, physical and/or emotional pains. They are wrong on Trump, of course, as they are on opioids. Apparently, it is difficult to wean oneself of opioid addiction. Undoubtedly, it will be equally as difficult for the country to rid itself of the pain of Trump. Many of those same people in the backwoods of West Virginia were taken-in by the easy fixes that Trump offered. Make no mistake about it, many people across our country followed the same logic (or illogic), many continue to be addicted to Donald Trump. Unfortunately, Trump adoration isn’t restricted to people that you may have written off as low intellect, backwoods America.
Though I was born and spent my first ten years of my life a county over from Mingo County, the home county of Williamson, I had the good fortune of having parents who believed it was no place to raise a family. We got out early. First to another part of WV, then to Ohio where I lived until high school graduation. A stint in the Navy was followed by ten more years in WV. First in Charleston. Then I spent the remainder of the ten years in Huntington where I worked and attended Marshall University. My children were born in Huntington. I have deep-seated feelings for West Virginia and to many of the people who lived there, some of whom continue to live there.
The state is not a bad state. It has pockets of well-to-do middle class families. There is considerable wealth in the state. Unfortunately, some areas of the state are poverty stricken wherein people have little to look forward to economically speaking. Jobs are scarce. Many are minimum wage or lower. Hope isn’t a word that is functional outside the sanctuaries of the Bible-belt churches that saturate the area. Hope peddled in these churches is for the hereafter with little expectation that things will improve on the part of planet Earth where the West Virginia citizenry has had the misfortune to have been born. Outsiders wonder why people are bound to the area. Why don’t they move, en masse, out of the state to localities where work is plentiful, opportunity is more abundant? Oftentimes, this is the question that outsiders voice.
Much of the reason for staying put, sticking it out in the Williamsons’ of West Virginia is family loyalty ...to some tradition. It is the life that they have known. Their extended families live in the area. Moving away to Ohio, to Virginia, to North Carolina and leaving Mom and Dad, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandpa and grandma is not on the radar of many. Is it clannishness? To some degree, yes. In other cases the need to help out, the responsibility to remain close by for an ailing parent overcomes what many of us would consider to be the logical decision to move on to a better way of life ...at least a more economically better way of life. Coming out of the mountains of WV with few skills puts the adventurous on the bottom rungs of their new location. Many, who make the move, struggle with their new environments with a large proportion eventually moving back.
The hills of southern West Virginia are addictive to many. Not unlike the addiction of opioids suffered by many from the area, the addiction of the West Virginia way of life has people hooked. In my seventy-five years plus of life, more than fifty years of which has been lived outside the state, I know and have family links to many who just cannot kick the habit living in the state. Many of them struggle every day to survive. They carry their Good Book, they witness for their beliefs of a better afterlife. In the meantime, they see, they listen-to, they buy-in to the charlatans who peddle an easy fix to their health problems, to their economic problems, they become addicted to the blather that they hear. I have little faith that these multi-pronged addictions can be easily broken. Certainly, pissing on their political prophets, their medical (opioid dispensing) saviours will have little effect.
Maybe you can see a different outcome in Donald Trump country. I am unable to do so.