In the Southeastern and Appalachian US, the worst off in some communities - the "sand hillers" or "trailer trash," those "as poor as Joe's turkey" - are proverbially so poor they resort to geophagy (eating dirt, either for its minerals, or due to insanity). The frequency of clay eating is usually exaggerated. The poverty, just the opposite.
“While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free” - Eugene Debs
“Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.” - also Debs
My father was the first in his family to finish high school, maybe the first to attend. He worked in a truck stop when my parents got married. My mother quit college and went to work in a factory, but she got "laid off" for taking co-worker who collapsed on the job to the hospital. My dad died when I was 4. We lived in a trailer after that. When I was old enough, I washed dishes, worked on a railroad, in factories, and went to college before I went to work in the labor movement.
Long story short, I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians in NE Mississippi, with double-digit unemployment. At the time it was the insurance fraud capital of the US, and the number one industry was car theft and chop shops.
But when the feds decided we needed a nuclear power plant, we got ourselves together and fought it off. They tried not to listen to us hillbillies, and they built the plant. You can still see the cooling towers over the tree tops. It was built, but never operated, not even one single day. We beat them. That was round one, for me, growing up.
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