mor ignerntz fum bak eest...

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The non tree huggers could go to Mars and save themselves a lot of work!

Wow Fnord you have outdone yourself! This is hands down one of the most terrifying things I've ever clicked.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

I read the original article (linked from Fnord's link) and apparently the town in question is located along a road that used to be a main north-south corridor...until Interstate 95 was built 40 years ago, after which town after town dried up and blew away. I read part of an article in a magazine (don't remember which one) at the doctor's office that talked about the decline of the Deep South, and the first place the author visited was another town along the same road as Woodland, and one which suffered the same fate when I-95 went in.

The deteriorating road leads past motels and greasy spoons that have been rotting away, abandoned, for decades. The side streets are even worse-most homes are apparently held together by inertia. Such places have seen anybody with half a brain leave decades ago. The only ones left truly believe that Jesus rode dinos and that solar panels cause cancer.

Where does Trump's base come from, well, places like Woodland. Folks, this is what happens when a country exports its industrial base-mills close, fields go fallow because the mills closed, and you have depopulation that leaves something that looks like it's out of a cheap 1980s postapocalyptic movie. And then roads are bypassed, and that's it, the towns just die. This describes towns that were built around cotton mills and turpentine harvesting, and much more.

Towns were built along trails where there was water. Often where two trails crossed.

Towns grew up where river traffic ended, and wagon roads started.

Where stages ran there was a rest stop every twenty miles. When the railroad came the stops were farther apart.

Almost all roads were there for thousands of years, and good places to settle were long inhabited.

People have lived in small towns mostly a short walk to the next town. Between were farms, meadows, forests, for most of history.

Small enough to know your neighbors, inhabitants scarce enough to all be valued.

I lived in a town so small that there were a hundred people in a hundred square miles. It had been bypassed when the rail road came and the stages quit running. It had a past, a bank now a bar, the site of the last bank robbery by horseback, and a gas station. I had a van with a bed in the back, I was told to keep it full of gas, and leave the keys in it, as it was the closest thing to an ambulance around, and fifty miles to a hospital. The community voted to use my van. Welcome to the country.

This is the America your grandparents would have understood. We were all Fire Department, no matter who you were, no matter who they were, if someone broke down on the road, the next passing car stopped. It was hot and dry, you could die in a day of summer heat or winter cold, I made several runs to bring in people who would have not lived the night. Forty miles through a snowstorm to pick up some people broken down and get them to a truck stop where they would not freeze. It was not heroic, it was what was expected of one human to another.

I may hate you, but when your house catches fire I will be there.

Country people are deep. I turned down an invitation to church, me and religion have a past, we divorced. The country people said, he claims to not be a Christian, but he acts like one.

Up to a couple of generations ago almost everyone lived rural or small town. The move to cities, urban, happened around WWII. Some people moved to industrial centers before that. Now almost everyone is city, endless soulless city, some recent monster with no culture, no history, but with old stories about when people left the land, when everyone lived in Rome, Babylon, Athens, till it fell and most died. In our history, cities have been tried, they failed.

They seem to fail because for all the benefits of numbers, the connection between people is lost.

"What does it benefit a man to gain the entire world, and lose his immortal soul."

The rural life, living within nature, beneath the star filled sky, being one with creation, one with all beings, has something worth more than the gifts and honors humans can bestow.

This thread hurts my brain. No, really.

Going to college is no guarantee that someone will give up their treasured right to hold whatever irrational beliefs they want to. Deciding science is a big conspiracy is a formidable resource for this; in fact, being taught science formally is a good opportunity to become even more firmly convinced it's a conspiracy, because, why else would they unanimously teach the same theories you have no respect for, never acknowledging as much as "the controversy" with whatever irrational alternative you prefer? Clearly, there's something fishy in there!

The moment you decide to be irrational, you're no longer constrained by the knowledge you gain, but free to use disconnected, twisted and inconsistent parts of it as ammo to defend whatever idea you want. Only by means of irrationality can you assert your right to believe whatever you want and the futility of any attempt to convince you otherwise, let alone get you to coöperate to solve any collective problem you deny or decide is less bad than the solution.