Subscribe"Green acres is the place to be
Farm living is the life for me
Land spreading out,
so far and wide
Keep Manhattan,
just give me that countryside.
New York
is where I'd rather stay
I get allergic smelling hay
I just adore a penthouse view
Darling, I love you,
but give me Park Avenue.
The Chores.
The Stores.
Fresh air.
Times Square.
You are my wife. Goodbye city life.
Green Acres, we are there!"
In between the Lower Class and the Middle Class, there's a Banging Class. The Banging Class has enough money to afford stereos, electric scooters, motorcycles, riced-up Hondas, and all the other modern noisemakers. But the Banging Class is too stupid--I say that objectively--to know how to appropriately use those crashing, cracking, thumping, whining, rumbling gadgets. The Banging Class can't imagine its effect on a group containing eight million members, so it acts as if it has none. The Banging Class likes the sound of the peel out, the booming bass, the revved engine. The Banging Class likes to put the gas pedal to the floor for a short street block, and then slam on the brakes at the stop light. The Banging Class jackhammers in the morning, but hardly make a noise the rest of the day. If anything has to be banged, the Banging Class bangs it when you're at home. The Banging Class never sets a thing down, it lets it drop: boxes, barrels, trash cans, dumpsters, cellar doors, tailgates, lumber, metal beams, anything. The Banging Class never met a door it wouldn't rather slam. The Banging Class likes to yell across open spaces, talk in dark movie theatres, shout into cell phones, talk to fill silence. The Banging Class listens to its voicemail on speakerphone, whistles aimlessly, chews with its mouth open, comes home from the bar drunk and screaming just before dawn. The Banging Class doesn't know when to shut up.
Myth: The vast majority of the poor are African American or Hispanics.*
In contrast to the myth, the majority of those living in poverty in both urban and rural areas are not minorities. Forty-eight percent of those living in poverty in America are white (O’Hare 1996). In 1990, 72.9 percent of those living in poverty in rural areas in the United States were white (RSS Task Force 1993:32). In the North Central region, the rural poor are even more likely to be white, comprising in 1993 more than 90 percent of those in rural poverty, with African Americans comprising 3.7 percent and Native Americans 2.9 percent.
Is childhood poverty more prevalent in rural America?I don't think there's any disingenuousness in my views, which are drawn from and fully accord with my life experience - I've lived in city, town, suburb, and the deep woods, in the South, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast. You know I'd be among the first to object to subtle racism, but I simply don't see this or the comments about it as necessarily weighted with ideas about race.
One out of five or 20.6% of non-metropolitan children (compared to 17.4% of metropolitan children) lived in food insecure households in 2000. The Rural Policy Research Institute reports that 23% of rural children live in poverty. According to a study by America’s Second Harvest, child poverty rates are higher in rural areas (18.9 percent) than in metro areas (15.4 percent). The 2000 Census revealed that some counties in the United States have three out of five children living in poverty.(Rural Poverty Research Institute)
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posted by RavinDave at 4:38 AM on September 4, 2007