#but all three counties are rural and poor | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ausetkmt · 11 months

Text

It took LaToysha Brown 13 years to realize how little interaction she had with white peers in her Mississippi Delta town: not at church, not at school, not at anywhere.

The realization dawned when she was in the seventh grade, studying the civil rights movement at an after-school program called the Sunflower County Freedom Project. It didn't bother her at first. By high school, however, Brown had started to wonder if separate could ever be equal. She attended a nearly all-black high school with dangerous sinkholes in the courtyard, spotty Internet access in the classrooms, and a shortage of textbooks all around. Brown had never been inside Indianola Academy, the private school most of the town's white teenagers attend. But she sensed that the students there had books they could take home and walkways free of sinkholes.

"The schools would achieve so much more if they would combine," said Brown, now age 17 and a junior.

But more than four decades after they were established, "segregation academies" in Mississippi towns like Indianola continue to define nearly every aspect of community life. Hundreds of these schools opened across the country in the 20 years after the Brown v. Board decision, particularly in southern states like Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Virginia. While an unknown number endure outside of Mississippi, the Delta remains their strongest bastion.

A Hechinger Report analysis of private school demographics (using data compiled on the National Center for Education Statistics website) found that more than 35 such academies survive in Mississippi, many of them in rural Delta communities like Indianola. Each of the schools was founded between 1964 and 1972 in response to anticipated or actual desegregation orders, and all of them enroll fewer than two percent black students. (The number of Mississippi "segregation academies" swells well above 35 if schools where the black enrollment is between three and 10 percent are counted.) At some of them -- including Benton Academy near Yazoo City and Carroll Academy near Greenwood -- not a single black student attended in 2010, according to the most recent data. Others, like Indianola Academy, have a small amount of diversity.

Recommended Reading

"These schools were started to keep white children away from blacks," said Wade Overstreet, a Mississippi native and the program coordinator at the national advocacy organization Parents for Public Schools. "They've done an amazing job of it."

It would be easy to see Indianola -- and Mississippi more generally -- as an anomaly when it comes to education: hyper-segregated, fraught with racial mistrust, stuck in the past. But in some respects, the story of education in Indianola is becoming the story of education in America.

As the Atlantic reported last week, throughout the country, public schools are nearly as segregated as they were in the late 1960s when Indianola Academy opened. In many areas, they are rapidly resegregating as federal desegregation orders end. White families continue to flee schools following large influxes of poor or minority students. And in Indianola, as in the rest of the country, there's stark disagreement as to why: Whites often cite concerns over school quality, while blacks are more likely to cite the persistence of racism.

Indeed, as Indianola struggles to make its way educationally and economically in the 21st century, the town's experience serves as a cautionary tale of how separate and unequal schools can not only divide a community, but fracture a place so deeply that its very existence is at stake.

Flight From Gentry

Indianola's tale of two school systems -- one public and black, one private and white -- began in January of 1970, when a U.S. district judge ruled that Indianola could no longer permit blatant segregation in its public school system. For years, white students had attended schools north of the train tracks that divide the town, while black students were relegated to inferior school buildings south of the tracks. The plan was to merge the schools and send all high school students -- white and black -- to the previously black Gentry High School.

In anticipation of the ruling, the white community founded Indianola Academy in 1965. But the fledgling school did not yet have a facility large enough to accommodate the hundreds of white students who left the public schools during Christmas break in 1969, knowing the decision was imminent, said Steve Rosenthal, a senior in high school at the time. Rosenthal said he was instructed to bring his textbooks home with him over break. When school started back up in January, he attended one of the academy's new satellite campuses in a Baptist church. The situation was far from ideal: Study halls sometimes were interrupted by weekday funerals. Yet not a single white student showed up at Gentry that semester. In the spring, Rosenthal received his diploma as part of the academy's first graduating class.

Today, Rosenthal serves as mayor of Indianola, a two-hour drive north of Jackson. The academy still thrives. According to the Private School Universe Survey, the school enrolled 434 white students and two black ones during the 2009-10 school year (the most recent year for which such data is available). Yet fewer than 20 percent of the town's approximately 10,000 residents are white.

Little else is publicly known about Indianola Academy apart from the information the school promulgates on its website. As a private school, its students do not have to take the state's standardized tests (much to the chagrin of the town's public school students), though a student handbook on the school's website states that students should score in the top 30 percent on a student achievement test to gain admission.

Sammy Henderson, the academy's headmaster, never responded to a reporter's request to visit while in town. But he did answer several questions via e-mail. Henderson wrote that African-American enrollment at the school has risen to nine students this school year, and "we also have Hispanic, Indian, and Oriental students." Annual tuition, which includes money for books and other fees, ranges from $3,795 to $5,080, depending on the grade level. And the academy budgets money annually for minority scholarships, spreading word about their availability via newspaper advertisements and word-of-mouth, Henderson said.

IRS tax forms filed by Indianola Academy show the school has raised a modest amount for scholarships in recent years. In 2010, for instance, the school paid out $6,500 for "minority scholarships," according to those forms.

Tradition and history partly explain why the scholarships aren't more widely utilized: Black families know their children could be isolated and shunned at the academy, and those with the means and desire to avoid the public schools have long relied on other -- more historically welcoming -- private schools, including a tiny, nearly all-black Christian academy in Indianola.

But Indianola Academy is also highly selective and opaque in its recruitment and admissions processes for African-Americans, according to public school students and teachers. Applicants have to be top students and submit multiple letters of recommendation, said a Sunflower County Freedom Project participant whose younger brother thought about applying. And some black students appear to be recruited at least partly because of their athletic abilities, said Sam Wallis, a current Gentry teacher, and Katie Cooney, a former one. Henderson denies that claim, writing that several of the academy's African-American students do not even play sports. He said a "minority scholarship committee" reviews the applications and awards money to those who "meet the qualifications," although he did not spell out what those qualifications are.

The academy, like other private schools, is eligible for federal money through what are known as Title programs that flow through public school districts. Indianola school district officials say the academy has received about $56,000 in Title II money for professional development over the last two years.

But apart from that exchange of money, there's little formal or informal interaction between the academy and the public school system, say Indianola residents.

Wallis, a New York native who attended public schools in Westchester County, expected to encounter segregation when he moved to Indianola in 2011 to teach in the public schools. But he had not anticipated such a laissez-faire attitude toward it.

"When I taught Plessy v. Ferguson, I offered it up that separate is not equal. I said it was one of the worst decisions in American history," he said. "But several of the students said, 'Why? That sounds okay.'"

Sinkholes and Low Scores

Compared to Indianola Academy, Gentry High School is an open book, its academic struggles exposed to the world. While there's some modest racial integration at Indianola's public elementary schools, by high school all but a few white students have departed. Ninety-eight percent of Gentry's students are black, one percent are Hispanic, and one percent are white. A plaque at the school's entrance states that Gentry was erected in 1952 as part of South Sunflower County's "special consolidated school district for colored."

The campus is made up of several worn buildings, which means that students have to walk outdoors between many of their classes. Since the outdoor drainage and sewage systems are outdated, sinkholes dot the walkways; when it rains, students and teachers can find themselves wading through foot-deep floodwaters.

Even Gentry's current students believe white county leaders deliberately built a partially outdoors campus 60 years ago, after a fire destroyed the previous school building, because they hoped it would deter black students from coming to school in the rain or cold. "They didn't want black kids to get an education," said Brown.

Gentry has struggled with test scores since the state's accountability system began in the 1990s: Last year, 56 percent of students at the school had passing scores in algebra, 51 percent in English, 42 percent in history, and 17 percent in biology.

But students like Brown believe the poor scores are at least partly because the school lacks the resources it needs to be successful. Students sometimes swelter in classrooms without working air-conditioning during the hottest months and they can shiver without enough heat during the coldest. In some classes, the teenagers cannot take textbooks home because teachers fear they will get lost. Computers crash constantly because of low bandwidth. In Wallis' first year at Gentry (2011-12), he inherited government textbooks identifying the latest U.S. president as George H.W. Bush.

"The school needs to be torn down and rebuilt altogether," says Brown.

Her classmate, 16-year-old Primus Apolonio, says poorly behaved students also keep Gentry down -- partly by scaring away the teachers. Of the six young instructors brought to Gentry in the fall of 2011 through the alternative recruitment program, Teach For America, Wallis was the only one to return for a second year. Others left for personal reasons, or because of frustration with the job, according to Gentry staff. Teach for America participants typically make two-year commitments to teach in a high-needs school.

"The students are disrespectful to the point where the teachers don't stay," said Apolonio. "And the school [administration] does not do anything but paddle them and send them back to class." (Corporal punishment has long been legally employed by Indianola's school district staff, as in other parts of the state. Earl Watkins, the "conservator" recently appointed by the state to oversee the school district, wrote in an e-mail that teachers have also been trained in other discipline strategies. "Because corporal punishment has been a practice for many years in the district, professional development must precede the reduction/phase-out of it," Watkins wrote.)

But Apolonio agrees with Brown that students would behave better if they felt like the community placed more value on their education. "During the winter it gets cold and the heaters don't work in the classrooms," he said. "Of course the kids are going to get more disruptive."

Gentry and Indianola Academy do not play each other in interscholastic sports; academies typically play other academies. Yet throughout most its history -- and for reasons that remain the subject of urban legend in town -- Indianola Academy has maintained control of a large football field adjacent to the old public junior high school (which now houses the district's early childhood center), on land town leaders say is actually privately owned by the American Legion. Instead of sharing the field, the academy leaders put their logo, IA, on the buildings like territorial markings. There's also a six-foot barbed wire fence around the field's perimeter: a stark reminder that outsiders should stay away.

Two Communities, Two Narratives

Indianola, like other segregated communities across the country, is defined not only by two school systems and two sides of town, but by two competing narratives that attempt to explain segregation's stubborn persistence.

According to one narrative, white leaders and residents starved the public schools of necessary resources after decamping for the academy, an institution perpetuated by racism. According to the opposing narrative, malfeasance and inept leadership contributed to the downfall of the public schools, whose continued failings keep the academy system alive.

Hury Minniefield is a purveyor of the former narrative. He was one of the first black students to integrate the town's public schools in 1967 through a voluntary -- and extremely limited -- desegregation program. He and his two younger brothers spent a single academic year at one of the town's white schools. "Because the blacks were so few in number, we didn't interfere with the white students too much and never did hear the 'n word' too much," he said.

Despite his unique personal history, Minniefield does not believe the schools in Indianola will ever truly integrate. "It has not been achieved and it will likely never be achieved," he said. "It's because of the mental resistance of Caucasians against integrating with blacks. ... Until the white race can see their former slaves as equals, it will not happen."

Steve Rosenthal, the mayor, takes a different view. He argues that many white families have no problem sending their children to school with black students, but choose Indianola Academy because the public schools are inferior. His two children, both in their 20s, graduated from the academy, where he believes they received a strong education. "I would not have had a problem sending them to public schools had the quality been what I wanted," he said, adding a few minutes later, "If there's mistrust, it's the black community toward the whites."

Rosenthal and Minniefield also have divergent views on what led to the public schools' decline.

The white community "would prefer not to pay a dime to the public schools," said Minniefield. "It's had a devastating effect on resources and the upward mobility of the community."

Rosenthal is not deaf to such arguments, agreeing that the Gentry campus should be updated or replaced. However, he cites mismanagement as well. When the state took over the schools in 2009, the district reportedly employed dozens of unnecessary employees, he says. "The old saying was that even the secretaries had secretaries," he said. "I don't think funding was our entire problem."

Students tend to offer the most nuanced perspective on why wholesale segregation endures. "It's because of both races," said Brown. "No one wants to break that boundary or cross that line. Both sides are afraid."

The Academies' Local Impact

The private academies scattered throughout the state have more in common than racial demographics and founding purpose. Many of them, like Indianola Academy, are located on their town's "Academy Drive" and embrace mascots that hearken back to the Civil War: the Generals, the Patriots, the Colonels. Their websites often prominently display non-discrimination clauses -- yet feature photos only of smiling white children.

The academies are also partly responsible for destroying the economic and educational fortunes of their communities, contends Dick Molpus, a former Mississippi secretary of state who co-founded Parents for Public Schools.

Those communities that continue to operate two separate school systems "are moving onto life support if they are not already dead," he said. "Companies don't want to come to places where both of the school systems are inferior." Molpus added that Mississippi towns have limited amounts of money, power, and influence. "When those three things are divided between black public schools and white academies, both offer substandard education," he said.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and expert on school desegregation, said he's concerned that increasing numbers of poor, minority students will attend under-resourced schools nationally if segregation continues to deepen. Although research has uncovered blatant racial disparities in school spending, Kahlenberg defines school "resources" more broadly -- including teacher quality, parent involvement and peer college aspirations -- all of which he says tend to lag at schools with predominantly low-income, minority students.

'We Would Give Away Our Empty Buildings'

Rosenthal maintains that Indianola Academy, at least, offers a superior education. But he, too, is worried about the town's economic future. The schools aren't preparing enough students for living wage jobs, and the jobs aren't always there for those who need them. Indianola has lost several major businesses in recent decades, including the yard equipment manufacturer Modern Line and a large catfish processing plant. The town's population dropped by about 1,400, or 11.5 percent, between the 2000 and 2010 census. "We would give away our empty buildings to a company that would agree to employ x number of people," said Rosenthal.

Indianola's students say they need more than jobs to entice them to stay in a town that feels provincial in more ways than one. "Indianola is small to me," said Apolonio. "I would bring my family back here and show them where I grew up. But as far as living here? No."

Brown said the community has been taking small steps forward. Earlier this year the Sunflower Freedom Project published a literary magazine featuring the work of both public school and academy students -- an unprecedented collaborative effort. Hundreds of blacks now live north of the train tracks in previously all-white neighborhoods. And youth of different races meet regularly in recreational sports leagues, if not yet at formal interscholastic events.

Brown, however, would prefer to live in a town where the milestones are not so modest, the racial divide not so deep. "I do want to give back to this community," she said. "But if I start a family I do not want to start it here. We are so behind on everything -- especially education."

Jackie Mader contributed material to this report.

#In Southern Towns #'Segregation Academies' Are Still Going Strong #segregation academies #southern racism #segregation #nimrata haley

8 notes · View notes

scotianostra · 2 years

Photo

On 15th September 1773 the emigrant ship “Hector” arrives in Pictou Harbour on Nova Scotia carrying 189 Highlanders, most loaded two months earlier in Ullapool.

Although they were not the first Scots to arrive in North America they were the vanguard of a massive wave of Scottish immigrants to arrive in what is now Canada. In the century following the landing of the Hector more than 120 ships brought nearly 20 000 people from Scotland to the port of Pictou. By 1879 more than ninety-three percent of the region’s rural property owners had Scottish names.

Ironically, very few of the Hector people stayed on the Pictou Plantation. They had been cruelly deceived by the shipping company that brought them out to Nova Scotia. The land was not ready for settlement as promised and supplies for the coming winter were meagre. Most of them moved on to settled parts of the province leaving an intrepid handful of their countrymen to fend for themselves in an uncultivated wilderness.

The Hector was owned by two men, Pagan and Witherspoon, who bought three shares of land in Pictou, and they engaged a Mr John Ross as their agent, to accompany the vessel to Scotland, to bring out as many colonists as they could induce, by misrepresentation and falsehoods, to leave their homes.

As they were leaving, a piper came on board who had not paid his passage; the captain ordered him ashore, but the strains of the national instrument affected those on board so much that they pleaded to have him allowed to accompany them, and offered to share their own rations with him in exchange for his music during the passage. Their request was granted, scrolling through various passenger lists I have found out the Piper was more than likely a man called William McKay.

All those travelling that were aged over 8 were required to pay full fare for the passage, those between 2 and 8 were charged half fare under 2’s were free. It was bad enough that they were conned with the promise of land in Canada but conditions on board the Hector were said to be horrendous, the ship was barely sea worthy and has been described as a crumbling wreck. I can’t find any mention of how may survived the 11 week journey or how the passengers were related to one another it was a nine week journey over the Atlantic, Smallpox and dysentery took their toll on the infants and children on board. In all, eighteen died at sea, I think by that they mean 18 children, poor things. By the time the rotting hulk landed, people were picking at the planks to find worms to eat. On arrival about all that they seen was the dense forest grew down to the water’s edge as far as the eye could see.

The unfamiliar customs and appearance of the natives inhabiting the area so terrified the settlers that they remained on board for two days despite their desire to walk again on dry land. Finally, on September 17, 1773, dressed in full Scottish regalia, with all pageantry of their kilts and the pipes, they went ashore The “Hector” pioneers faced extreme difficulties during their first year in the New World, but with the development of a lively timber trade with Scotland and the finalising of land grants, conditions improved and the development of what is now Pictou County was under way. The land was rich, the rivers and oceans plentifully stocked with fish, and the timber of high quality.

Pics are of a stamp issued in 1973 to mark 200 years since the crossing and the Hector replica at Pictou. The Hector Heritage Quay is one of Nova Scotia's major cultural tourist attractions. The Hector is a full-sized replica of the original ship. A Highland Homecoming, a celebration of the strong Scottish spirit, takes place on-site every September. and kicking off today. The ship is currently going through a $2.5 million restoration project just now, you can find all the details on their FB page here https://www.facebook.com/shiphector/

#Scotland #scottish #canada #emigration #the highland clearances #history

39 notes · View notes

brokenmusicboxwolfe · 7 months

Text

Gotta vent. Sorry.

Life is so….

I woke up after three hours sleep. I was too worried about things to go right back to sleep, and music wasn’t distracting me enough. I open Tumblr.

The third post I see is one if those damned “helpful” OMG warning signs you have a deadly disease and should rush to a doctor posts. I have an extreme medical “professional” phobia from serious traumas at their hands, no health insurance, no money at all, no local doctors in my rural area (no hospital in the damn county even), no one I can trust to help me……I mean, I haven’t been to a doctor in longer than some of you have been alive, and that was a horrible experience I do NOT want to repeat. Yeah, these helpful post send me into a freaked out spiral of fear.

An e-mail comes in. My reloadable debit card has been declined. New panic! I’d ordered a book, a gift in a way. I’d promised to read Mom this book over the phone as a birthday gift next month, and I’d found it cheap. I can’t afford books for me anymore, but this is for Mom, so I can’t just cancel it.

Frantic I scramble to figure out where the money went. I’m horrified to find out it is all looking legit.

I go to the bank website and move $100 over so I can pay for the book and beginning of the month stuff like my phone.

I see the numbers and my chest hurts, like a fist around my heart.

Today I have to do the shopping because I’m half way through my last bags of animal feed. I start doing the math.

After the animals I’ll have $100 for all my groceries, gas for the car, kerosene for the hot water heater, bandages for my ankle, batteries for the lanterns where I don’t have electricity, mouse poison for where I found the damn rodents had gotten into my storage container of clothes, and everything else. Too much else. I’d skipped everything I could last time, so I am out of everything from trashbags to toilet paper.

$100 and not a penny more for two weeks.

And OMG, that includes Halloween! I need a pumpkin and candy to give out!

Just $100.

I cried.

I get mad at myself for crying. I already got yelled at by someone disgusted and angered by my crying a couple days ago.** I HATE when I can’t keep from crying, even alone.

I felt so much…I dunno, everything. I needed to lash out. A sensible person would break something, but breaking something is stupid when you can’t afford to replace anything. I sure as hell don’t ever want to hurt anyone. So what did I do? Slapped myself in the face as hard as I could.

And geez, it was SUCH a relief! That tells you something. Physical pain is much, much easier than emotional. I’ve said that since I was little.

Sometimes I really miss Pop. I mean, I always miss Pop, but it was so nice to have someone that cared. Mom loves me, but she was never the cuddly one and not great at noticing emotions. She could be impatient with crying, once she finally noticed. Pop though… I got all upset and cried he’d pat my back or head and say “Poor Teffy Weffy” I miss feeling comforted. Loved.

Anyway, so I worried and tossed and turned and cried and worried some more and….

I’ve had three hours sleep. The sun is up. My ankle is already hurting. I have to go do the shopping without enough money, and not feeling up to it.

Damn it, I want to get to have a breakdown and not get out of bed! Just one day in my life I don’t want to get up!!! Or how about have a lazy day and do nothing? A guilt free nap, at least?

I am so fucking sick of making myself go through the motions of being alive, of watching it all drain away between my fingers while trying to laugh about it. Get up, take care of the animals, fix my meals, do my chores, repair endless things, research the day’s new problems….

Busy. Busy. From the moment I get up until the wee hours if the morning when I finally crash, stay busy. No time to think or dream. There is just too much to do!

Work on so many things I can never quite fix but keep trying, always trying, trying, trying, trying…

And failing.

I’m so tired of life.

** It was an awful incident, on a very bad day when I was already sick and in pain. I’d told by my brother they were sending the jelly I’d sent to Mom back, unopened, and no one of the rest of then would eat it.

I apologized to Mom for sending jelly since I didn’t know she didn’t eat the stuff, and she said she actually liked jelly. My brother started roaring at her, shouting at her to not say that, that she was a liar, that she never ate jelly, none of them do, don’t ever contradict him… (BTW, when I was there she ate jelly AND they had opened jelly in their fridge, so saying none of them ate jelly baffled me)

Mom was being yelled at because of me. I begged her to stay quiet to not provoke him, and I could hear his shouting…

I don’t get him. He’s always so… Not like the rest of us in my immediate family. Angry, aggressive, hostile, mean even.

I started sobbing. Guilt at causing Mom trouble. Helplessness to do anything to make things better. Frustration. Despair at how we are bound up, in so many ways at his mercy, and he is not a merciful soul.

Usually I am so good at this. I never cry when I’m on the phone with Mom. I try not to let anyone see me cry, but on the phone with Mom it’s especially important. I don’t want to upset her. She can’t help me, so I have to hide my struggles a bit.

But it’s also because of him. It makes him angry.

He yanked the phone from Mom to say some thing and he heard me crying. Disgust. Rage. He finds tears to be the way the weak manipulate people, a pathetic, scummy way of fighting, an attack on him. He snarled and ended by hanging up in me.

I think the call didn’t last three minutes.

I’d been on the verge of a meltdown for days as life was getting worse and worse, and I was dealing with feeling rotten on top of it. Now I actually wailed. Good thing I was in the woods, though the poor critters must have been terrified by the banshee.

#my day #tired #busy #problems #poverty #exhaustion #I’m really worried about the car BTW #I haven’t been able to afford to take it to be worked on in years #I’m having nightmares about it failing entirely as I deal with problems on my own #ten miles from a grocery store you need a damn car #i hate cars

2 notes · View notes

oldsalempost-blog · 1 month

Text

The Old Salem Post

Our Local Tamassee-Salem SC Area News each Monday except holidays Contact: [email protected] Distributed to local businesses, town hall, library. Volume 7 Issue 18 Week of April 15 2024 https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/oldsalempost-blog Lynne Martin Publishing

EDITOR: A new resident to Oconee said her family moved here to get away from the overdevelopment. “ There are not many places like this left, ” she said. Shouldn’t that be a message to us all that we need to protect what we love? People love community and the rural way of life. I say to leaders and developers who want to destroy our Oconee County life—you move! Move to the overdeveloped destroyed areas and cities. Sell your home to the people who want to come here to get back to real living. “There are not many places like this left.” Let’s keep it! LRMartin

TOWN of SALEM: 5 Park Avenue * Visit the Downtown Market every Sat, Winter hours 9am-1pm. Town of Salem Clean up day– April 27th meet at 8AM at the Calvary Baptist Church– Invite your friends, neighbors, civic groups, and anyone interested in coming together for the good of our community. Salem Beautification Committee is a group of volunteers who support the Town of Salem by maintaining the gardens and decorating some areas for the holidays. If you are interested in volunteering or donating please call Vickie Towe 864-6229 or Ethel Cameron 864-280-4040 SALEM LIBRARY: 5B Park Avenue. Hours Monday 10am-6pm. Tues-Friday 9am-5pm. Closed 12-1 for lunch.

Jottings from Miz Jeannie by Jeannie Barnwell. Walhalla HS Plant Sale Plan to visit the greenhouse area of WHS off HWY 11 and shop for hardy blooms at a reasonable price. Instructor Josh McCall's green thumbed students will carry your tray while you select from Zinnias, Okra, Daisies, Latana, Ferns and Hostas, just to name a few. These high school students will educate you while you make your choices. Then they cheerfully carry the buds and blossoms out to your car. I want to thank the students who planted and tended the seeds and prepared them for the sale. They are Aiden Wallace, Reagan Smith, Kristen Winland, Hudson Smith and Jackson Medlin I told these young entrepreneurs that YOU WOULD BE STOPPING BY! LOVE YA!!! Miz Jeannie ASHTON RECALLS by Ashton Hester SALEM SCHOOL NEWS, APRIL 1, 1964 continued from last week - The following are some more items from the "Salem School News" column, written by Mrs. Nelle Rochester, in the April 1, 1964 Keowee Courier. . . BETTY CROCKER SEARCH. . .Our senior girls did very well on The Betty Crocker Search for the American Homemaker of Tomorrow contest. . .Ruth Lusk and Sharon Rankin both received "excellent" ratings. Ruth had Salem's highest score but Sharon was only one point behind. We had nine girls that received "good" ratings, and three received "fair" ratings. None of our students received "poor" ratings. . .LEAP-YEAR CARNIVAL. . .The juniors did real well on their Leap-Year Carnival. They had a net profit of $309.74. Thanks to all of the merchants, parents, students and teachers who contributed to the success. . .ILLNESSES STILL ABUNDANT. . .We are still plagued with a variety of illnesses. Mumps seems to be taking the greatest toll while measles and chicken pox are also still prevalent. Ruth Lusk, Sue Murphree and Larry Jones are a few that have had mumps recently. . .DONKEY BASKETBALL GAME. . .The juniors are sponsoring a donkey basketball game on April 2, Thursday, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $1.00, 60c. for students and 25c. for children.

JOCASSEE VALLEY BREWING COMPANY,(JVBC) & COFFEE SHOP* 13412 N Hwy 11 Open Wed–Sat 9am-9pm and Sunday 12pm-7pm Events this week: Wed: Blue Grass Jam 6:30PM Wings and more by Blue Ridge Grill starting at 4PM. Thursday: Trail Talk Thursday at 6:00PM Food: Kodesh BBQ Blue Ridge Grill Fri: Music: Scott Low ( Appalachian Blues Singer-Songwriter) at 6:30pm Food: Sat– Music: Conservation Theory ( Americana Mountain Folk Singer-Songwriters) at 6:30pm Food: Just a Smile Caribbean Sun: 12pm-7pm Food: El Charro Music: 11 North with Chad Rawlings 4PM More info 864-873-0048 April Book Club meeting on Wednesday, April 17th at 10AM to discuss The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose. COMBAT VETERANS MOTORCYCLE ASSOCIATION SC 34-2: 7th Annual Veteran Benefit Ride April 27th 2024 Register 0900 at Harley Davidson of Greenville, 30 Chrome Drive 29615 All vehicles welcomed. ** These riders will be stopping at the Jocassee Valley Brewing Company around noon. JVBC is proud to be a host stop-off.

Carolina Hemlock Festival: April 20th 11AM-4PM at the Mountain Rest Hillbilly Grounds. Music, Conservation Groups &more!

2024 UPCOMING EVENTS Check out our website Eaglesnestartcenter.org as future events are added. April 20th 7pm– The War Cry Band will host a benefit for Ralph Turpin medical expenses at the ENAC venue. April 26th, 7 PM Friday Evening Wellness Event: Reclaiming Our Inalienable Wellness Doors open at 6:30 PM Free event hosted by ENAC featuring speaker Meredith Orlowski, AFMC, INHC. Bring your friends and family along. Gain Energy, Lose Weight, Feel Happy, & Save the World While Doing it! Call 864-280-1258 for more information Mother’s Day Afternoon Tea on Saturday, May 4th from 2PM-4 PM: Join us for a special afternoon and treat yourself to delicious goodies, hot tea, and a guest speaker! Our youngest guests will enjoy manicures and a craft! $10 per guest. All funds will be donated to support the Eagles Nest Art Center. There are also opportunities to sponsor a table for the event. To RSVP or find more information: Kayla or Emma Lusk at 864-903-0681 Oconee Mountain Opry: May 18th at 7PM. Jef Wilson, West End String Band, Mystery guests, comedy and more.

June 3-7 ENAC hosts Art Camp for children 6-12 years old. 9AM-12PM Call 864-280-1258 $50 fee EAGLES NEST ART CENTER

The Eagles Nest Treasure Store is open every Saturday morning 9AM-12PM. Will accept donations also or call 864-557-2462.

Information on sponsorships, events, volunteering, donations, or rentals call 864-280-1258 or email at [email protected].

Interested in becoming a YOUNG APPALACHIAN MUSICIAN? For ages 3rd grade through adult. Call 864-280-1258

CHURCH NEWS Bethel Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), 580 Bethel Church Rd Walhalla, 29691. Worship at 10:30 a.m. Come visit us. All are welcomed! April 29, 2024, Mel Davis will give the message. Boones Creek Baptist Church, 264 Boones Creek Road, Salem invites you to join us for regular worship service on Sunday morning with Sunday School at 10am and followed by worship at 11am.

Salem Methodist Church: 520 Church Street, Salem. 9AM for breakfast, 9:30AM for Sunday School, and 10:30AM for Worship. You may tune in to our live service on Facebook or view it later on our website. All are welcomed!

Calvary Baptist Church in downtown Salem is inviting you to attend a special Bluegrass Gospel Singing featuring, "The Tugaloo Holler Band" on Saturday, May 11th at 6 PM. You will be blessed! Come worship God with us through singing and fellowshipping with believers.

News: On April 9th from 5PM-7PM the Jocassee Valley Brewing Company was the host site of the OPUS Trust unique wine tasting event featuring rare California Napa Valley wines provided by a donor family, and matched funding from another generous family patron. The tables were set up with white table cloths and fresh flowers. The wine tastings were from 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. Paring these delicious rare tastes with local farm products created a unique palate pleasure. The Reed Homestead owners David and Casey Thornton presented herbed flatbreads, pickled watermelon rind, pepper jellies, chocolates, spiced pecans and more. The Split Creek goat farm provided 3 types of tantalizing cheeses. The McPhail Angus Farm was the featured farm for a delicious cut for smoked beef. This proved to be quite a social event for our Salem area with these fine tastings from local farms and this special stock from California Napa Valley wines. You may purchase from our local farms on the Clemson Area Food Exchange online farmer’s market. Check out CLEMSONAREAFOODEXCHANGE.COM.

Love & Blessings to you! LRM

0 notes

systemtek · 2 months

Text

UK government’s 4G rollout signals end of mobile blackspots in rural Wales

Several rural communities in Wales can now access fast and reliable 4G mobile coverage, as UK government delivers on plans to tackle poor and patchy connection. The first of 86 4G masts have been switched on in Wales this month, benefitting residents, tourists, and business owners and boosting economic growth in areas such as Pont-rhyd-y-groes, Ysbyty Ystwyth, LLanafan,Tynygraig, and West Fedw and Trawsgoed. The rollout comes as part of the Shared Rural Network programme, a £1 billion plan led by the UK government and telecoms companies that seeks to close the digital divide and spur economic growth in remote areas of the country by boosting mobile connectivity. It has been carried out by upgrading existing phone infrastructure, rather than building a new one, meaning communities can benefit from improved connectivity without the visual impact involved when building new masts. Digital Infrastructure Minister Julia Lopez said: Bad mobile signal can cause people immense frustration and hold back businesses in rural areas. This is why I’ve made it my absolute priority to ensure that no one feels like they are being left behind because of the lack of reliable signal. I’m thrilled to see our rollout signalling the end of mobile blackspots in rural Wales in Powys County. Everyone – from residents and business-owners to tourists – can access future-proof mobile connectivity and enjoy the opportunities it unlocks. As a result of this upgrade, residents and tourists of Powys County will be able to access 4G signal from all four mobile network operators - EE, VMO2, Three and Vodafone. A further two 4G masts are set to be switched on in the coming months in the villages of Esgair Maen and Bronfelin, as the delivery of the Shared Rural Network programme ramps up. A total of 86 masts in Wales will be switched on over the coming months and reduce blackspots of coverage holding back communities reaping the benefits of digital connectivity. The switch on in Wales marks a further milestone in the joint £1 billion deal between government and industry to ensure that all four mobile network operators deliver 95 per cent combined coverage across the whole of the UK by the end of 2025. Ben Roome, CEO of Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited (DMSL) said: In Wales, since the Shared Rural Network was announced in March 2020, 4G coverage from all four operators has expanded across an additional 1000 square kilometres - an area larger than Monmouthshire. As more shared mobile sites go live, people visiting and living in rural areas will see better 4G service thanks to this programme. Welsh Secretary David TC Davies said: I’m delighted to see the end of these mobile blackspots in Powys with the switching on of three 4G masts, and more to come in the next few months. The UK government is proud of our investment in the Shared Rural Network which is helping residents and businesses in rural Wales have access to fast reliable internet connections. The UK government is investing over £180 million to enable all mobile network operators to utilise the infrastructure and deliver 4G coverage. This week’s switch on in Wales builds on progress already made by the industry to bring fast and reliable mobile connectivity in Wales since the SRN was agreed between the UK government and the four mobile network operators back in March 2020. Read the full article

0 notes

lastchancevillagegreen · 1 year

Photo

Top Ten Favorite Reads of 2022:

I read 62 novels this year, a number that is way down from previous years. This number is way down from other years, so I hope to do more reading in 2023. As far as choosing my favorite read this year, like previous years, I have chosen two novels (and I’m counting them as one).

The Gospel Singer Harry Crews (1968)

A Childhood: The Biography of A Place Harry Crews (1978)

The Gospel Singer is a dark and often hilarious take on the curse of one’s hometown, religion, worship and false gods, not to mention the subtext that most of humanity is nothing but serious freaks who would destroy just about anything given half a chance. While A Childhood: The Biography of A Place is a unique take on the autobiography. It documents Crews’ first six years of life as well as the story of his hometown Bacon County, Georgia. Yes, he relies on his family to fill in holes in his memory but the stories are amazing and sometimes shocking. Now that polio is back in the news, you will not forget Crews’ contracting the disease and no one in his family knowing what was wrong with him (he scooted the ground like a rock crab to get around for many months and then was bedridden for a year). Like The Gospel Singer, this is a dark tale and a very funny tale about the miseries of life in a poor rural Georgia town.

The rest of the novels I read were equally memorable and I look forward to reading as much of these authors as I can track down.

The Ladies’ Paradise Émile Zola (1883)

The Dream Émile Zola (1888)

The Conquest of The Plassans Émile Zola (1874)

There is little doubt up to this point in the Rougon-Macquart 20 novel series that The Ladies’ Paradise is far and away Zola’s best book. It follows Octave Mouret and his grandiose dreams to run the largest department store in the world. Based on real facts (the store Zola blisters is the Bon Marché which is still alive and well in Paris) the book documents some of the small shopkeepers that Octave puts out of business and Zola loves dark and depressing situations. Even when he is writing about opulence it always takes a dark turn. In The Dream, a novel unlike any Zola novel I’ve read thus far, Angélique dreams of marrying a prince but she is an orphan who is adopted by a childless pair of seamstresses. The young girl becomes a master embroiderer and her accomplishments become renown in her area as she brings in jobs that are delicate yet influential which leads to many new business contacts. Will a prince be among her customers or is it only crotchety, selfish priests demanding the impossible who make use of her services? In The Conquest of The Plassans we follow François and Marthé Mouret (Octave is their son) a married couple with different ideas for the future. All hell breaks loose when Marthé rents out the upper floor to a priest and his secretary who happens to be his mother. François despises religion (a trait many characters in Zola have) and he plots to bring misery down on the priest. Yes, I count all three of these as one book in this Top Ten count!

Harlem Shuffle Colson Whitehead (2021)

Ray Carney is a furniture store salesman in Harlem in the early 1960s and he might get into some dubious arrangements as he works overtime to tend to the needs of his family. His father was a conman and his wife’s family doesn’t think much of Ray no matter how well he provides and no matter how well off he becomes. I thought Whitehead only wrote serious historical novels having only read The Underground Railroad and The Nickle Boys, but this novel was such a joyous read (and it is filled with plenty of dark moments) that when I finished I wished I could read more of Ray Carney’s exploits. Turns out, there are to be two more Ray Carney novels and this is the first book in a trilogy (the new book, Crook Manifesto, comes out in Summer 2023).

It Can’t Happen Here Sinclair Lewis (1935)

Imagine a presidential candidate who promises to outlaw Congress and give every citizen $5000 dollars (everyone save black people who will only get $2000) and who then abolishes newspapers, starts a military program called the Minute Men in which everyone is expected to serve and rat out their fellow man? Berzelius “Buzz” Windrop becomes President for Life and begins rounding up all Jews, liberals and anyone else who speaks out against him and placing them in concentration camps throughout America. Doremus Jessup, a newspaper man sees it as his job to bring down President Buzz, but Sinclair Lewis is a savage writer with no problem dealing underhanded. Things only get worse.

Bambi: or, Life In The Forest Felix Salten (1922)

Yes, this is the novel Disney poached for his feature film about the deer. This book so captivated me that when my workout ended at the gym I was startled to discover I wasn’t in the forest with Bambi and his mother. Completely engrossing and the secondary story about the weak little deer Gobo is equally captivating even if we all know how things must turn out for poor Gobo.

The Day of The Triffids John Wyndham (1951)

My father had this book on his shelves way back when I was a wee lad and I always thought it sounded so corny: plants that walk and kill humans! But what happens when all of the world goes blind, how easy is it to escape these odd plants? Then I saw the 1963 film directed by Steve Sekely which was only worse and didn’t endear me to ever considering reading this sci-fi classic. So when Modern Library released four of Wyndham’s novels this summer with very appealing covers (and with the intent of doing four more this coming summer) I decided to give the novel a chance. Wow! A true apocalyptic novel and the most startling thing is the triffids, those killer walking plants have nothing to do with the comet that blinds everyone. This book is stunning and I could almost believe it is far better than another great apocalyptic sci-fi I Am Legend. I wasn’t prepared for this novel and it only made it that much more intense. I will be reading more John Wyndham in 2023.

Doctor Glas Hjalmar Söderberg (1905)

An epistolary novel told via the good doctor’s diary, we watch as the fine and upstanding citizen that is Dr Glas slowly descends into madness as he decides to murder the husband of a woman he has fallen in love with. Absolutely haunting. (Equally good is Mai Zetterling’s film of the same name.)

Commonwealth Ann Patchett (2016)

The author wrote this in homage to Richard Hughes’ High Wind In Jamaica and her novel surrounds a group of children from two separate marriages converging into one. Patchett has a talent for merging timelines in the course of a conversation that make this story flow and allows the reader to understand the time span it does embrace as we follow some of these children from birth to death.

Crossroads Jonathan Franzen (2021)

I’ve never read anything by Franzen so why not start at the beginning of a proposed trilogy that follows a man of the cloth and his troubled marriage? It is an epic and there are plenty of characters who will only frustrate you with the poor decisions they make. It takes place in Illinois making pit stops in my hometown and surrounding cities which only makes it feel that much more authentic. I’m game for book two if it happens and I also plan on working backwards through his bibliography.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue VE Schwab (2020)

If you would have told me I would join a book club this year and that it would encompass novels I would never consider reading I’d ask how long will I last in such a book club? The first novel assigned was this book which is about a young woman who hates her life and wishes never to be anyone’s wife. She makes a deal with a devilish man named Lucien who may or may not be the Devil. Spanning centuries (it begins in 1740 and ends in 2020) this book proved to be a great surprise. Addie LaRue is one of the great characters of modern novels and I’m almost certain should there ever a follow up, I’d be interested in learning where Addie is at.

0 notes

dynamicsofthecity · 1 year

Text

The Thai Town and Thai CDC Legacy

Hanna Schoettelkotte

The official designation of Los Angeles’s Thai Town in 1999 came with applause from all around as the first and only official Thai Town in the United States was created. The country of Thailand and its people celebrated the recognition of its culture and people in the U.S., and those in L.A. were happy to see a form of representation for the growing Thai population. In retrospect, the path to this official designation was rocky to say the least as Chanchanit Martorell spearheaded the efforts and faced a number of challenges. Let’s take a look at the history of the Thai community in Los Angeles and how it got to this point with Thai Town.

Not too long ago, the Thai community was quite small in Los Angeles and the United States in general. From her experience, Martorell paints the Thai community as “few and far between” during her upbringing in a working class Thai family in the 70s and 80s.

“When Thais were few and far between, businesses were few and far between, and we kind of just stuck together in clusters in mostly like central part of LA,” Martorell said. “That was the experience and it was mostly working class, working poor Thais, and then some entrepreneurs and business owners at the time, but pretty dispersed, pretty scattered.”

Martorell describes the immigration history of Thai people to be split up in three stages. The first stage took place in the fifties and through the mid-sixties affluent and well-educated Thai people came to the United States for more schooling and then applied that to development mainly back in Thailand. In 1965, the United States passed the Immigrant and Nationality Act, which spurred further Thai immigration due to an increased quota for Asian countries, Latin American countries, and more. This legislation led to more Thai people coming to America as students and subsequently starting new businesses in cities like Los Angeles. Finally, the third and current wave started in the eighties with immigration of impoverished Thai people from rural parts of Thailand. These immigrants fell into exploitative working conditions as they came to the U.S. with little education and lower-level skills, which people, oftentimes Thai themselves, took advantage of.

These exploitative practices came to light more in the nineties, which was the beginning of Martorell’s activism. Her work exposed the poor working conditions and advocated for human rights of Thai people in Los Angeles. Around this same time, the 1992 civil unrest occurred devastating large swaths of East Los Angeles. The Thai community was not exempt in this destruction as they lived in the East Hollywood area as well as Koreatown and Melrose.

“It had adverse impacts on the Thai community, displacing them from their homes, their jobs, and their businesses,” Martorell explained. “And so when the dollars were coming down the pipeline from corporations and the federal government and other local county governments to rebuild LA in the aftermath of the civil unrest, the Thai community was excluded.”

This exclusion of the Thai community for aid motivated Martorell to advocate for the Thai people in Los Angeles and help them get the funding and resources they desperately needed during this time. Martorell would form the Thai Community Development Center, or Thai CDC, in 1994 with the support of others in the community and East L.A. area. These major events also triggered her campaign for the official designation of Thai Town as a neighborhood in Los Angeles.

“For most people, we're still invisible, and we're still marginalized. And we still need our voice heard. And so we have no political clout, you know, or voice to speak up… I felt that the civil unrest was really a manifestation of the growing social and economic disparities that we have been experiencing in Los Angeles and the polarization between the haves and have nots,” Martorell said.

Martorell’s wording of the “haves and have nots” is in reference to of course the wealth disparities between mainly white people and POC/immigrant communities and how the civil unrest was the culmination of this inequity. However, she’s also referencing internal strife within the Thai community and the economic disparities there. Martorell revealed that there was animosity towards the Thai CDC when it was created as wealthy Thai people disapproved of the Thai CDC’s mission to assist working class Thai people in upward economic mobility. Much of this disapproval was due to their belief that the Thai CDC was interfering in the deeply rooted social hierarchy embedded in Thai culture, as well as the belief that karma had led to their current economic position in society. Some of these affluent Thai people were human traffickers and exploiting Thai labor, and the Thai government did not like that the Thai CDC was exposing these cases because it would make the government look bad for not having stricter regulations. Thus, wealthy Thais and the Thai government turned against the Thai CDC and even actively attacked their work.

“I never let it get to me personally, because, you know, I understood sort of the bigger picture in terms of like these are folks who really have been socialized in thinking a certain way and having a certain mindset,” Martorell said. “We're so mission driven, that we have no time to lose or waste with those criticisms and pushback… We just have to really stay focused because there are people that need us.”

Their tune would soon change when the campaign for Thai Town grew more visible and popular in the late nineties. The designation of Thai Town in East Hollywood became a source of national pride for all Thai people and even the Thai government as they saw what that kind of representation could do for the Thai community. Thais across the community testified in City Hall for the designation and willingly worked with the Thai CDC to learn how they could further the campaign.

“We became then a legitimate force to be reckoned with. And now no one’s like there to criticize us because now we give everyone what they want. It's like, they got Thai Town, and they love it and they celebrate it,” said Martorell.

Now, much of the affluent Thai people and the Thai government supports the Thai CDC not only for their efforts surrounding Thai Town’s designation but also their development of the neighborhood. The Thai CDC is primarily a poverty alleviation organization but they also recognize the importance of building up the community through different events and spaces. They help fund small businesses trying to get on their feet. They still expose exploitation of the working class in the Thai community. They do it all.

Martorell and the Thai CDC have plans to develop more of Thai Town along Hollywood Blvd, and there’s still much to do. The neighborhood has seen a great amount of development over time with there being many restaurants, small stores, and motels located in the area. However, the closer one gets to Normandie Ave you see many stores barred or looking abandoned and unwelcoming. Covid-19 was particularly devastating for businesses and I’m sure Thai Town was also hit with the effects of the pandemic. It was quiet walking around, as most people remained inside restaurants and stores instead of wandering outside. The aspects of Thai culture that do exist currently in the space feel very much a part of the community rather than spectacles to draw in outsiders. The future of Thai Town appears hopeful as Martorell and the Thai CDC continue with their efforts to uplift the community and neighborhood.

#thai town #losangeles #thai cdc #ethnic community #ethnic enclave #ethnic culture #ethnic neighborhood #neighborhood #activism #diaspora #inequality #inequity #politics #covid

0 notes

sounmashnews · 2 years

Text

[ad_1] Lamu, Kenya CNN — Just earlier than sundown, Umra Omar boards a speedboat that can take her across the historic Lamu channel for conferences with voters. As her boat zooms previous idyllic islands and arrives at shore half-hour later, dozens of girls and youngsters rush to greet a candidate they hope can be their subsequent governor. Omar is native to Lamu, a conservative area close to the Somali border, greatest recognized for its preserved Swahili tradition and being a UNESCO heritage website. “If we’re to address the challenges we’re facing as women, young people, and indigenous communities, we have to take up the political battle as well,” she tells CNN. The 39-year-old is the coastal county’s first feminine candidate for the highest job. She is amongst a report variety of ladies working for workplace in Kenya’s August 9 common election. Omar is a humanitarian who has previously been named a CNN Hero for her work with award-winning social enterprise Safari Doctors, which offers primary healthcare in distant areas of Lamu. She says she is working for workplace as a pure development after seven years of offering “band-aid solutions” for poor healthcare. “Being able to really dig our teeth into the root causes of rural challenges is what definitely propelled us into politics,” Omar says. But she faces an uphill battle. Even although ladies make up nearly half of registered voters, Kenya nonetheless has the fewest elected female leaders in East Africa. A constitutionally mandated gender quota to interrupt the male supermajority in energy has persistently failed within the 12 years because it was handed. But this election may very well be completely different. If opposition chief Raila Odinga wins, Kenya might have its first feminine deputy president in 64-year-old Martha Karua. When she ran for president on her personal in 2013, Karua bought lower than 1% of the vote, coming a distant sixth behind 5 males. In the 25 years since a girl first ran for Kenya’s presidency, that is the closest any has come to the highest seat. Karua bristles when requested if Kenya is prepared for a feminine president like neighboring Tanzania. “That question suggests that women ought not to be on the ballot, because I have never had anybody question whether Kenyans are ready for yet another male. So that question is in itself discriminatory,” the previous Kenyan justice minister tells CNN. “I think that Kenya is ready for women at all levels.” Her nomination energized the Odinga marketing campaign and excited many ladies, a few of whom evaluate her to US Vice-President Kamala Harris. In her three a long time in Kenyan politics, Karua has earned a status as a principled politician and the nickname “the Iron Lady” – a moniker she hates. “That name speaks to the misogyny within society. Strength is not perceived as female, strength is perceived as male,” Karua tells CNN declaring that it was first used to explain former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who got here to energy in 1979. “It speaks to the misogyny and the patriarchy that rules the world,” she says. Although the variety of ladies coming into Kenya’s political sphere has grown through the years, solely 23% of seats had been held by ladies within the final parliament. That consists of the Woman Representative positions which can be solely reserved for them – 47 seats out of 349 are at present reserved for ladies for this place. “We’re seeing more and more women running, which tells us it has never been a problem about women

wanting to participate in politics,” says Marilyn Kamuru, a lawyer and author on ladies in politics. “It continues to be a problem about the systematic exclusion of women.” That exclusion consists of monetary boundaries to competing in notoriously costly campaigns that may run into tons of of 1000's of dollars, and common violence employed in opposition to ladies working and even these already serving in workplace. For instance, in 2019, a Kenyan MP was arrested for allegedly slapping a feminine colleague and calling her names. “It chills the environment for women, it makes women think again, hold back,” and take into account working for decrease positions or abandoning their campaigns altogether, Kamuru says. The newest election cycle has adopted the acquainted sample, with many ladies reporting violence or threats of bodily hurt and misogyny getting used to intimidate them out of the race. “We’ve had some major, mindblowing character assassination, to the point of discrediting the work that we’ve been doing with Safari Doctors, but we try not to let that distract us,” Omar says. She laments the propaganda used in opposition to her within the race, together with taboo accusations equivalent to being an LGBT “recruiter” or a drug seller to derail her marketing campaign. It is tougher for ladies in rural components of Kenya to be concerned politically due to socio-cultural boundaries, Daisy Amdany, ladies’s rights advocate and government director on the Nairobi-based Community Advocacy and Awareness Trust, told CNN affiliate NTV. “There are certain cultures that don’t even give women the right to keep their voter cards, so you need a man’s permission,” Amdany mentioned. She added that negotiated conditions the place elders decide who will get to run for workplace additionally drawback ladies and they're “more common than you would think.” Despite the roadblocks to political workplace, Kenyan ladies persist. “As long as we remain non-negotiable players the system has to accommodate us,” Kamuru mentioned. The highly effective governor function Omar is eying is taken into account a protracted shot as solely three out of Kenya’s 47 counties are headed by a girl. One recent opinion poll positioned her third out of 4 candidates however she’s not discouraged. While everybody CNN spoke to in Lamu was conscious that she was working, some males felt that she was punching above her weight and may have vied for the much less highly effective Woman Representative county-wide parliamentary seat. But 24-year-old Constance Kadzo, proprietor of a small grocery stall, advised CNN she was impressed to see an indigenous Swahili lady working for a prime seat. “I’m voting for her because she’s the only woman who’s brave enough to go up against the men and I know she will fight for us.” [ad_2] Source link

0 notes

fatehbaz · 2 years

Text

Hundreds of small rural towns and several whole regions around the country - in addition to those in the South - became newly dependent on an industry that itself is dependent on the continuation of conditions under which "criminals" and criminality can be continually produced ("socially constructed"). Norton offers an interesting case study of a rural prison archipelago that developed in upstate New York based on arguments by local officials that buildings constructed for the 1980 Winter Olympics would serve the prison industry in the future. New York State built thirty-nine new state prisons between 1982 and 2000, all of them in rural counties. But it was the forty-fifth state senate district in the far northern region of the state that built more than any other district, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, there were fourteen prisons located in the district, more than twice any other. Norton shows that a short-term opportunistic argument to win the Olympic bid depended on a vision of a future archipelago of prisons and, indeed, a steady supply of prisoners to fill them. [...]

---

[A]t the height of the US prison-building boom in the 1990s, a prison opened in rural America every fifteen days. John Eason studies this phenomenon in detail, documenting the proliferation of prison building in rural America - specifically in poor, rural, southern towns - for the past fifty years. During this time the total number of prison facilities tripled [...].

Moreover, Eason found that from 1980 to 2006, nearly 28 percent of all rural prisons were built in just three southern states, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. [...] Hurling also offered a nuanced, regional examination of southern rural prison town archipelagoes. She followed the development of four such archipelagoes [...] [including] in the West Texas Plains (one out of every five new rural prisons in the 1990s opened in Texas, the state with by far the largest number of new prisons) [...].

Anne Bonds, citing examples from the Pacific Northwest, has documented arguments by local community leaders that prison building is the answer to poverty and resultant decline in social service provision needs. [...]. Williams, for example, studied the development of the thirteen-prison archipelago in Florence County, Colorado, starting back in 1871. He shows that state and local governments depended on the lobbying "myth" that prisons would bring economic development in order to find communities willing to accept new prisons, even though the profits of those prisons have accrued to industries outside of the local community. [...]

---

It is not only prisoners' labor that is increasingly commodified by work programs on the inside; their bodies and lives themselves can be bought and sold as well. With prisoners, in addition to laboring for abhorrently low wages on the inside of prisons, the profits of which accrue to the state and private entities, many local and regional economies depend on the income generated from the "purchase" of incarcerated bodies from other jurisdictions to continue filling carceral sites that were built during the 1980s and 1990s construction boom.

---

All text above by: Karen M. Morin. “Cattle Towns, Prison Towns: Historical Geographies of Rural Carceral Archipelagoes.” Historical Geography Volume 47. 2019. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

481 notes · View notes

poisonedapples · 3 years

Text

Patton’s Home for Traumatized Kids - Chapter Three

New School and Friendships

Chapter Summary: Roman has his first day in a new district while some bonds are strengthened.

First Chapter Previous Chapter Story Masterlist

Warnings: Past abuse mentions, mentions of hidden cameras, anxiety, some bullying, crying, and food mentions

Chapter Word Count: 5,860

Taglist: @shade-romeo, @grayson-22, @pixelated-pineapple, @acrobaticcatfeline, @astrozei, @edupunkn00b, @princey-7258

“Hey, dad?”

“Yeah?” Roman’s dad turned to face him. Roman felt his whole body start to shake.

“You know how you said that…I could ask for anything from you? Since, uh- since you didn’t know what present to get me last time?”

His dad smiled in a way so normal it was disturbing. “Got an idea?”

“Yeah, uh…I want a canopy bed.”

His dad’s face dropped, and Roman could feel the anxiety and regret bloom through his chest. “You know why I can’t do that, Roman.”

“Please? I know it’s probably a bit much to replace my whole bed frame, but I could make my own canopy for cheaper! I’ve already looked at a bunch of ways online how, I just need you to buy the materials-”

“It’s a no.” Roman’s dad looked angry, and Roman would’ve done anything to run the other direction at that moment. To burst out the door and never come back. “Nice try, Roman, but I’m not stupid. Come back when you have a better idea.”

Roman blinked to fight back the tears. “…I’m sorry.”

“Go back to your room.”

Roman ran up the stairs as fast as he could, wishing more than anything that there was a lock on his door. Instead, Roman took his desk chair and propped it against the knob for some kind of security, curling into the corner of his room as he shook and tugged at his hair.

He tried to block out the knowledge of the security camera on his shelf, hidden well but not well enough, pointed right at his bed.

***

Several fast knocks came onto Roman’s bedroom door, waking him up with a jerk. He groggily pushed open the curtain in front of his head to grab his phone and look at the time. Six o’clock on the dot, it read. Ugh.

The knocking on the door didn’t stop, and Roman whined. “What?” He called out.

“Get dressed, we need to leave the house by 6:30.” He heard Logan call back.

“Fine, fine.” Roman pushed the curtains out of the way and practically rolled out of bed, grabbing the clothes he’d organized for himself the night before. He put on a pair of jeans with a white and red t-shirt, nothing fancy but fancy enough for a first day surrounded by strangers. He grabbed his backpack and put his phone and some earbuds in his pocket before heading downstairs to the kitchen.

“Morning, kiddo!” Patton chirped as he made breakfast, “Didja sleep well?”

“Yes, I did.” That was a lie. He had some strange dream where his dad was also there, and he only managed to calm down and fall back asleep an hour ago. He still couldn’t stop thinking about it, even if the dream was hazy now.

“Good to hear! Be ready by 6:30 so I can drive all of you to the school. Then once you get there, you can ask about your schedule at the office.” Patton laid down a plate of bagels with cream cheese and strawberries in front of Roman, so Roman began to eat.

Once he finished his breakfast, Roman rushed back upstairs to style his hair and brush his teeth before they had to leave. As he brushed his teeth, he stared at the shower to the left of him and sighed. He touched his hair, feeling the grease slick onto his fingers.

He really needed to shower. He hadn’t showered since he got here, and with how thick his hair was it was really starting to gross him out. He hated feeling greasy and grimy, but Roman hadn’t checked the bathroom for cameras yet and he refused to shower until he did. Though, he knew that was also just an excuse. Roman also felt too tired to take care of himself.

Just brush your teeth, he thought, they told you that if you can’t shower, at least brush your teeth. Greasy hair can be fixed, cavities are expensive.

He spit out the toothpaste into the sink and rinsed out his mouth. He grabbed some face wash and decided to use it as quickly as he could to hold back the gross feeling he felt. It would help him feel a little cleaner, at least. A little more presentable for the first day.

A loud bang came onto the door. “Roman, hurry up!” Virgil called out, “Some of us need to piss!”

“Just a second!” Roman vigorously splashed water on his face and quickly dried it with a towel, rushing out of the bathroom so that Virgil could run in. He sighed again, walking downstairs to wait on the couch until it was time to go.

“Alrighty, everyone got everything?” Patton eventually asked, making Roman crack open the eyes he didn’t even realize he closed. Patton smiled and clapped his hands together when his response was tired hums of agreement. “Perfect! To the car!”

All three kids bunched themselves together in the back of Patton’s car, Roman and Virgil at the window seats while poor Logan was squished in the middle. Roman squeezed his legs together so he could fit his backpack between Logan and himself, acting as a barrier so Logan couldn’t touch him. It was uncomfortable, but it was what Roman had to do.

“So, Roman, are you excited?” Patton asked, making Roman open his eyes again to look at Patton through the rearview mirror. Roman leaned his head against the window.

“More nervous. I’ve never been to a new school before.”

“Well, hopefully you can make lots of friends here! The school is pretty big, so there are certainly lots of options!” Patton laughed at himself and Roman closed his eyes again.

We’ll see about that.

Eventually, after a failed attempt of getting in some extra minutes of sleep before school, Roman felt the car come to a stop. He opened his eyes and looked out the window to see the front of the large school building, kids with smiling faces talking to each other as they walked inside while others looked tired yet excited. Roman wasn’t feeling it.

“Alright, kiddos, have fun!” Patton exclaimed, “Remember to check in with the office for your schedule, Roman!”

All the kids started to pile out of the car, grabbing their bags off the floor to rush inside. Once they were all out, Patton’s car drove away to head for work.

Roman looked at the building as Logan and Virgil walked inside. It seemed huge compared to his old school, where the county was much more rural than here. They still had twenty minutes until school started and kids were already swarming in from multiple entrances, both from the main entrance and other doors connected around the building. Roman walked inside and held his arms close to himself, desperate not to be shoved around by the other students.

The office was fairly easy to find, considering there was a giant sign over the door in bold, white letters reading Office. Roman opened the door and stepped inside to get in line, feeling a little bit better that he wasn’t the only student having first day issues. The line shrank very quickly until it was Roman’s turn to ask questions, being faced with an old lady who could either be very sweet or the rudest person in the building. Roman could never tell.

“Uh, I’m a new kid at this school, and my guardian told me to come here to get my schedule?” Roman asked.

“Name.” Okay, well, rude it was, then.

“Roman Goldsberry.”

The desk worker didn’t respond, only typed something on her computer and didn’t make eye contact. “Next door to your left of that entrance is the counselor’s office. Your counselor is Mrs. Walters and she’ll call for you shortly.”

“Okay, thank you.” Roman had never scurried out of an office so quickly in his life. So much for a great first impression.

In the other office, Roman sat on a waiting chair and awkwardly glanced at all the college items they had hung up on the walls, waiting until his name would be called. The school day hasn’t even started yet, what’s taking them so long?

Roman drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair and waited. There was a lot of college stuff in this room. Granted, high school’s whole thing was trying to take you to college, his old school was the exact same. And he should really start thinking about that stuff since he’s a sophomore now. He only had two more years left after this, but it’s not like he could go anyway. He wasn’t even supposed to graduate high school, let alone college.

Besides, his dream was stupid anyway, so it didn’t matter.

“Roman Goldsberry?” A voice called out, taking Roman out of his thoughts. Roman stood up to follow the counselor into her office.

“I’m Mrs. Walters, and it’s nice to meet you Roman!” She said cheerily as she sat at her desk with Roman sitting right in front of her. “Your schedule was a bit last minute to pull together, but I tried my hardest based on your last school’s transcript and your test scores from last standardized testing. All I need is to schedule some extra electives for you. You have advanced English 12, advanced geometry, advanced biology, and world history. You can also choose Spanish 3 here if you wish to continue that. You also still need your gym credit, so you can take regular PE or strength training. I also have a list of other electives here if you want to look at that.”

“Yeah, I can look.” The counselor handed Roman a paper of all the electives organized by their subject. Well, Roman definitely wanted to continue Spanish, so that choice was easy. Strength training sounded like a fun way to do gym class with less dodgeballs to the face, but it was only a semester long, so he’d need to pick another semester class for the second half of the year. And he could join another painting or drawing class as his last elective, but he’d already taken those at his old school…

Roman gazed at the arts section of the packet, trying to find something he might like. His eyes lit up as he noticed the names of two classes: set design, which was a semester long and sounded magical, and something called sculpture. “What does the sculpture class teach?” Roman asked.

“It’s an art class that teaches you how to sculpt with different things. Like clay, wood, things like that. It’s a very hands-on class if you’re interested.”

Roman smiled. “I want that one then.”

The counselor typed something into her computer. “Have you chosen your other classes?”

“Yes, Spanish 3, set design, and strength training.”

“I’ll put you in strength training for this semester, but next semester you can join the set design class. I’ll email your elective teachers to inform them you’ll be joining their classes, but for now…” The counselor printed off a piece of paper and handed it to Roman. “This is your new schedule. Your first class is English with Ms. Fritz, and her class should be up on the third floor at room 316. Do you think you can make it there?”

“I can, thank you.”

The counselor smiled. “Have a nice first day.”

Roman walked off to head toward his first class, going up two flights of stairs and wandering across half the floor before he finally found his classroom. Thankfully, the halls were full of students desperately trying to locate their classrooms, so Roman didn’t feel as weird. He eventually stumbled upon the correct room number after checking multiple hallways and trying to follow their scattered number system. He looked at the door with a paper rabbit and a book with a phrase reading hop into a good book, and could guess immediately what type of teacher this would be.

Roman pushed open the half-cracked door and stepped inside.

The dozen kids who were already sitting stared at him when he walked in, but quickly resumed their conversations shortly after. Roman glanced at an empty seat off in the middle row near the other end of the class and moved to sit down in it. He looked around at the other kids off in their own worlds, with no one to get excited to see him and strike up a conversation. He was sitting alone in a class where it seemed like no one else was.

Roman got bored quickly with no one to talk to, drumming his fingers on the table and starting to daydream instead.

The long lost princess with the power to see into the future is forced to hide in protected wilderness, Roman thought, picking up from an old story idea he’s had for a while. Can’t have a teen novel without an orphan, so she lives with a guardian healer instead. Then, she needs a trusty companion to not only start her adventures, but to assist her alongside them. Perhaps he could be a peasant boy born with more magic power than the normal peasant has? It sure would be interesting. Or maybe, he’s not a trustworthy companion at all! What if he’s using the princess to promote his own selfish ideals? But as the story goes on, they actually become close friends and he has an intense internal conflict as he turns into the antagonist! Then maybe-

“Alright class, I think it’s been late enough for us to start!” Roman tried not to be aggravated at the teacher for interrupting him. The teacher stood at the front of the class with a wide smile. “I’m Ms. Fritz, but of course I’m sure a lot of you already know that since you had me last year. I teach all grade levels for advanced English, so if you keep down this path you might stick with me until graduation! Now normally, teachers will start their first day with class expectations, maybe a rubric or a supplies list, but I have a better idea! How about we travel across the class and try to get to know each other better? I can pass around a ball, and if you catch the ball, you have to share three fun facts about you!”

A sense of dread filled into Roman after hearing that. He usually didn’t mind games like this since it was a mindless way to pass the time, but he didn’t have any friends to pass him the ball anymore. Was he just going to sit there until the end? Sounded awkward, no thank you.

“I think,” Ms. Fritz said with her hand gripping her chin in thought, “I’m going to start with the new kid.”

Roman perked his head up as all the other kids turned to him. Well, that was unexpected.

Ms. Fritz tossed Roman the ball, and thankfully he caught it without making a fool of himself. The teacher smiled at him encouragingly as he stood up, looking around at all the kids waiting for him to talk. What should I even say?

“Can you say your name first?” Ms. Fritz asked.

“Well…I’m Roman. Uh, I like to paint, I’m half french, and…” Roman tried to think. What else was interesting about him? Something that shared a lot about him as a person?

Quickly, it dawned on him. One idea that I could possibly share, he thought. Well, it’s a bit invasive, but they’re all looking at me. So whatever.

He took a deep breath in. “…I’m a foster kid.”

When Roman admitted that, all the kids seemed to be more interested in him, leaning closer as their eyes widened. It was the first time Roman ever said it aloud, and it was so strange to hear coming from his mouth. He was a foster kid. That was an important part of his identity now.

He didn’t know how he felt about it.

“You’re half french?” Ms. Fritz pulled Roman out of his thoughts with that question. “Do you know any french?”

“I’m fluent.”

“That’s so cool! Can you say something in French for us?”

Roman seemed to think about it. “Quelque chose.”

Ms. Fritz blinked. “Well, I hope it was appropriate to say in a classroom. When did you move here, Roman?”

“Like…four days ago. Very recently.”

“You only got added to my roster last night, so I believe you! How about you pass the ball to another kid now?”

Roman looked around the room awkwardly before making eye contact with a random girl and tossing her the ball. He sat back down and only paid half his attention to what the other kids were saying. Well, at least he didn’t have to wait awkwardly anymore.

The rest of the class went like that. It seemed like a lot of these kids were students that Ms. Fritz had in the past, as well as being students that were also close friends with each other. They talked a lot and made lots of jokes with the teacher, and they seemed really close, which Roman understood since he was the same with his old group of advanced kids. The extra conversation dragged the game out longer than it probably should have been, but Roman didn’t mind. He didn’t want to actually work or anything anyway.

Eventually, the game ended, and the last kid tossed the ball to Ms. Fritz. “Alright,” she said, “That game dragged out longer than I thought it would, but that’s fine! The bells are shorter the first few days anyway. We only have a couple minutes left, so talk amongst yourself if you want, I don’t care. The assembly should be after your fourth bell for the sophomores, so don’t let your teachers forget!”

All the students turned around to talk to the kids around them. Roman simply watched their conversations with no one to talk to himself, realizing how all the new kids at his old school must have felt. It was like looking in from the outside, where no one else could see you. Roman was just…there.

“Hey,” the kid in front of him turned around to face Roman. Roman almost jumped at the sudden attention. “What’s your name again?”

“Oh, Roman. Roman Goldsberry.” Roman turned to sit properly in his seat and leaned in closer. This was a good start! He seems nice, maybe I can make a friend!

“Roman Goldsberry!” He mocked, turning to his other friends to laugh. “That’s such a pretentious name. And very American sounding, by the way. I thought you were French?”

Roman’s shoulders sagged. Nevermind. Eight in the morning on my first day, and apparently I’ve made an enemy before a friend. “I’m half french, not fully french.”

The kid turned to his friends and made a face at them before they all laughed. Roman felt his blood boil.

“So your dad is the American?” The kid asked.

“Yes.” Roman hoped his sharp tone would help them realize not to mess with him.

“Are you close with your dad?”

Roman froze, and the group of kids turned to each other to make faces at each other again. He really didn’t see what was so funny. Who asks a complete stranger a question like that out of the blue?

Before Roman could snap and tell the kid to mind his own damn business, another kid from the other side of the room scoffed. “Mitchell.”

“What? I’m just asking!”

The other kid opened their mouth to retaliate, but a loud and obnoxious bell went off before they could. Kids started to get up to rush to their next class, and Roman joined them. The sooner he got away from Mitchell (who had no right to bully Roman for his name when he was called Mitchell), the better.

Roman rushed out into the hall and hyper focused on the schedule in his hands. World history, room 203. The next floor down.

Roman was so occupied in trying to find a flight of stairs, he didn’t notice the kid trying to catch up to him.

***

The rest of Roman’s day wasn’t half as eventful as his first bell. History class had a chill teacher, which was nice, then next was his strength training class. His teacher was a little confused when he showed up but was happy to have Roman on board. He seemed very strict with his class rules though, and Roman hated that considering one of his rules was they had to change into gym clothes. Which meant Roman had to wear gym shorts.

…Well, guess he’d have to get used to wearing multiple pairs of boxers again.

Besides that, he also got lost on his way to sculpture, so he showed up ten minutes late telling this random teacher he was her student now. At least she didn’t seem bothered. After that, they all went to the sophomore assembly where they were told the school rules and updates, which Roman’s pretty sure he was the only kid who actually listened. Then, after the assembly, Roman went to the cafeteria to eat a lunch that Patton packed him. He hadn’t actually brought a packed lunch to school in years, so the sentiment was…strange.

Not that Roman would complain about an edible lunch, though.

Roman looked around the cafeteria for a place to sit. The place was starting to become crowded as more students got out of line for buying lunch, so Roman needed to find a spot fast. It’d be easier if he made a friend to sit with, but after the morning Mitchell incident, Roman hadn’t cared to try again in his other classes.

That’s when Roman spotted him. A kid with thick glasses eating a fruit cup as he worked on some papers next to him, completely ignoring the world to finish some homework. Roman wasn’t exactly close with his foster brothers, but hey, maybe Logan could prove himself a little useful. He had to be lonely too, right?

Roman took his chance and sat across from Logan. Logan didn’t look up from his papers. “Hey there, nerd!”

Logan glanced an eye toward Roman. He focused back on his work. “Hello.”

“How’s your first day of high school going?”

It took Logan a solid minute before he responded. “It’s going alright. I got unlucky with a teacher of mine, who already gave us a homework packet for the week, so I’m trying to get a head start on it.”

“Really? What teacher?”

“Mr. Owens, he’s the more strict teacher of the two that teach medical technology.”

Roman’s eyes widened. “Medical technology? That’s a class here?”

“Yes. I had to do a lot of things last year to get into it, however. It’s part of the intensive medical learning path. However, the extra work is necessary.”

“…Right. What other classes are you in?”

“Advanced biology, advanced geometry, advanced English, medical tech as I just mentioned, German 2, health, and painting.”

Roman tilted his head to the side. “Wait, I thought most of those were sophomore classes?”

“And I took freshman classes my eighth grade year. Your point?”

Roman blinked. “…Fair enough.”

Roman brought out his own sandwich and ate it in awkward silence. Logan seemed so focused on his paper that he wasn’t saying a word, and trying to spark conversation with him when he was like this was next to impossible. He felt like he was intruding by sitting next to Logan, the air feeling thick for a reason Roman couldn’t quite place. Once he finished his sandwich, Roman had enough.

“I think…” Roman said, “I’m going to sit…somewhere else.”

Logan didn’t react. “Alright.”

Roman stood up and awkwardly shuffled to an empty spot at a table on the other side of the cafeteria, placing down his lunch box and trying again. Well, he thought as he opened up a cheese stick wrapper, better get used to being alone, then.

“Hey, excuse me?”

Roman looked up at the voice while he was mid-bite. It was the same kid who scolded Mitchell back in his English class, tired circles under their eyes and a gray sweater on despite it being August. Though, Roman had been freezing in most of his classes today, so maybe this person had the right idea.

“Oh- I’m sorry, were you sitting here?” Roman asked.

“No, you’re fine, I just…” The kid looked side to side anxiously. “…Mind if I sit with you?”

“…Oh! No, I don’t mind at all.”

The kid smiled and set their lunchtray across from Roman. “Thanks. I’m Elliott by the way, they/them pronouns.”

Roman’s brain took a minute to process what they meant. “Uh, hello! I’m Roman…he/him?”

Elliott seemed to get happier when he said that. “Nice to meet you. How’s your first day been so far? Besides for you-know-who this morning.”

Roman laughed. “Well, aside from that uncalled for mess, it’s been quite normal. I got lost a few times, but that’s not new for me. My teachers seem quite alright so far.”

“That’s good to hear. We have a lot of good teachers, I think, unless they teach calculus, then they have some serious issues. But so long as you don’t act like an idiot it’s easy to get past those teachers.”

“I’ll keep that in mind! Hopefully I stay on this hot streak, though.” Roman took out a water bottle from his lunch and started to drink it. “But it’s the students I’m more worried about. They all seem so off on their own. Or just outright rude like that guy this morning.”

Elliott groaned, leaning his head on his hand and slouching. “I’m really sorry about him. He can be a huge jerk for no reason. I think he’s just itching for a fight.”

“You seem to know him quite well. Old friend or something?” Roman asked.

Elliott groaned again. “…He’s my ex.”

“…No offense to your type or anything, but…ew.”

“Oh no, yeah, dating him was definitely an ew,” Elliot sighed. “We broke up like, four times in the span of a year and a half. It was a mess. Eventually, over the summer I broke up with him for good. I think he’s still upset about that and taking it out on the first easy target he finds. That, and he’s a jerk.”

“Well, he’ll soon learn I’m not one to be described as an easy target.” Roman gave a cocky smile and posed.

The bell sounded off again, and all the students stood up from their tables and started to swarm the trash cans and cafeteria exits. Roman and Elliott gave each other a look as they also stood up.

“So…what class do you have next?” Elliott asked nervously.

“Let’s see…” Roman pulled out the schedule from his pocket and looked at it. “Advanced biology with Mr. Weber.”

Elliott’s eyes lit up. “Me too! Uh…wanna walk together then? I can show you where it is.”

Roman smiled. “Of course!”

The two kids headed down the stairs, talking more and laughing long after they sat down in the class and the bell rang. Roman continued to whisper to Elliott during class until the teacher gave them both a warning glance, shutting their mouths but smiling at each other.

Even as Roman tried to pay attention, he felt a weight lift from his chest.

He’d obtained a friend after all!

***

The entire bus drive home, Roman spent it texting Elliott’s number that they’d given him right after biology ended. He talked about his last two classes and listened to Elliott ramble about his bad luck with classmates this year, grinning to himself with his eyes glued to his screen until his stop came. Virgil banged his fist on Roman’s seat to get his attention, making him jump and stand up to get off with Virgil and Logan.

During the walk home, no one said anything. Roman was off in his own world and Virgil just looked tired, with Logan staring intently at his own shoes as he walked. Virgil unlocked the door for them all to come inside, and they all branched off into their different directions. Virgil got a snack from the kitchen while Roman and Logan ran up to their rooms.

Roman spent a lot of his time in his room now that he’d gotten the curtains around his bed. Lying there was a lot softer than hiding on the bathroom floor with his legs propped up, and Roman was still confused as to how he managed to get away with installing this. He’d have to make sure Patton never entered his room again in case he planned to rip the curtains off their hooks.

He’d have to make a plan to effectively keep him out.

But for now, Roman actually needed to talk to Patton as soon as possible. He needed to ask for gym clothes, since that was the only thing Roman still needed to get for class, and he wanted to get it over with so Roman wouldn’t need to keep worrying about it. He was almost certain Patton had come home half an hour ago, but Roman just ignored him and stayed in his room. But he had to take advantage of the fact that he was remembering to ask for the clothes, so there was no time like the present to go find him.

Roman hopped out of bed and exited his room, making his way downstairs to the living room. He figured Patton would be either watching TV or doing something in the kitchen, but when Roman looked around, he didn’t see him anywhere. Virgil was sprawled across the couch on his phone, but no one else was around. Roman put his hands on his hips.

“Where’s Patton?” He asked Virgil.

Virgil didn’t look up. “Upstairs. In his room I think.”

Roman groaned and stomped back upstairs. He hated going into an adult’s room, so he instead opened the door and poked his head in so he wouldn’t have to step inside. But before he could get a word out to Patton, Roman stopped himself.

Patton was sitting on his bed with the lights dimmed, his back resting in the headboard, but what shocked Roman was that Logan was there also. He had his face hidden in Patton’s neck as Patton rubbed his back and played with his hair, holding him tight to his chest while Logan sniffled. Roman had never seen Logan emote before, so watching him cry was…disturbing. Roman wanted to run over and rip Logan from Patton to protect him.

Patton looked at Roman in the doorway and smiled. “You gotta remember to knock before entering, kiddo. What do you need?”

Roman forgot the main reason he came here. “Is Logan okay?”

Patton looked down at Logan and whispered something in his ear. Whatever Patton said, Logan agreed with a quiet nod of his head. Patton rubbed at Logan’s neck in a way that made Roman’s skin crawl as Patton began to speak. “He’ll be okay, kiddo. He’s just a little overwhelmed from school today. Do you need anything?”

Roman took a step inside Patton’s bedroom. It made his whole body shift into fight or flight, but he couldn’t leave Logan alone with him in good conscience. “I just wanted to say I need to buy gym clothes by next Wednesday. I’m in a strength training class this semester.”

Patton smiled. “That’s fine, we can go shopping this weekend.”

Roman looked down at the floor. “Well…I was more thinking, like…I go into the store while you wait in the car.”

Patton raised an eyebrow at him. “I need to buy the clothes, kiddo.”

“You can just give me the money. I’ll stay within the budget and give you any left over, so…please?”

Patton’s face dropped a little, but he didn’t get angry, so Roman considered that a win. “Sure, kiddo. We’ll do that Sunday.”

Even after the conversation seemed to end, Roman still stood near the door, shifting on his feet awkwardly. Patton shifted his eyes between Logan and Roman as if he was analyzing both of their mental states, but Roman’s throat felt stuck as he tried to bring out the words he wanted to say. He was so scared, but he couldn’t force himself to ask the question he knew he needed to ask now. Yet his feet refused to make a run for it out the door despite his fear.

“Do you need something else, kiddo?” Patton lightly prompted. Roman attempted to swallow the rock he felt in his throat.

“Can I…Can I stay with you and Logan?” He hated it, but he had to do it. He didn’t know what Patton would try when Logan was vulnerable.

Patton looked down at Logan, and Logan nodded. Patton turned to smile again. “You can if you want, Logan doesn’t mind.”

Roman carefully walked to the other side of the bed, sitting as far as possible from Patton but keeping his eyes glued to Logan. He knew he wasn’t helping much, not saying a word and not even being close, but it was something Roman had to do. Just because him and Logan weren’t close didn’t mean he’d leave him in danger. Even if Roman felt stuck in his head and couldn’t find the power to move his arms.

Roman sat there for a while, watching Logan’s chest rise as Patton rubbed his back. It felt like ages before Logan’s chest slowed and he fell asleep on top of Patton, somehow not caring at all about being asleep in Patton’s presence. Roman’s heart ached for him. He was too trusting and innocent for his own good.

“I gotta do some chores,” Patton whispered, “So I’m gonna tuck him in and let him nap. Do you still wanna stay with him?”

Roman nodded, not being able to get the words out himself. He felt stuck as Patton lifted Logan up gently, petting his hair to soothe him when he stirred. Roman helped by tugging the covers back from his end of the bed so that Patton could tuck him in and let go of him sooner, his hand on the back of Logan’s leg making Roman anxious. Patton tucked Logan under the covers and watched his reaction. After a few seconds, Patton grabbed a squishy stuffed frog from his bedside table, handing it to Logan who curled around it in his sleep. It’d be cute if Roman wasn’t so worried.

“Tell me if anything happens, okay kiddo?” Patton said right as he was halfway out the bedroom door. Roman nodded, only finally relaxing after Patton left and slowly closed the door.

Roman immediately ran over to lock it. He didn’t have his security bar, but this would be good enough. Hopefully Patton wouldn’t test anything when he knew Roman would be by Logan’s side.

Despite all of Roman’s worries, Logan slept peacefully on the bed. He didn’t shift or seem distressed at all, just snuggling closer to Patton’s stuffed frog and resting. Logan was calm.

Roman sat on the floor to block the door and watched to make sure no one took that away from him.

147 notes · View notes

antoine-roquentin · 4 years

Photo

obliquely, this is in reference to how formerly working class bastions in the midwest that used to elect socialists now elect republicans. if we all gave up the theory that LGBT people are normal, we might once again go back to the days where we elected socialists across the country. thomas frank, what’s the matter with kansas:

But its periodic bouts of leftism were what really branded Kansas with the mark of the freak. Every part of the country in the nineteenth century had labor upheavals and protosocialist reform movements, of course. In Kansas, though, the radicals kept coming out on top. It was as though the blank landscape prompted dreams of a blank-slate society, a place where institutions might be remade as the human mind saw fit. Maps of the state from the 1880s show a hamlet (since vanished) called Radical City; in nearby Crawford County the town of Girard was home to the Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper whose circulation was in the hundreds of thousands. In that same town, in 1908, Eugene Debs gave a fiery speech accepting the Socialist Party’s nomination for president; in 1912 Debs actually carried Crawford County, one of four he won nationwide. (All were in the Midwest.) In 1910 Theodore Roosevelt signaled his own lurch to the left by traveling to Kansas and giving an inflammatory address in Osawatomie, the onetime home of John Brown.

The most famous freak-out of them all was Populism, the first of the great American leftist movements.* Populism tore through other states as well—wailing all across Texas, the South, and the West in the 1890s—but Kansas was the place that really distinguished itself by its enthusiasm. Driven to the brink of ruin by years of bad prices, debt, and deflation, the state’s farmers came together in huge meetings where homegrown troublemakers like Mary Elizabeth Lease exhorted them to “raise less corn and more hell.” The radicalized farmers marched through the small towns in day-long parades, raging against what they called the “money power.” And despite all the clamor, they still managed to take the state’s traditional Republican masters utterly by surprise in 1890, sweeping the small-town slickers out of office and ending the careers of many a career politician. In the decade that followed they elected Populist governors, Populist senators, Populist congressmen, Populist supreme court justices, Populistcity councils, and probably Populist dogcatchers, too; men of strong ideas, curious nicknames, and a colorful patois....

For a generation, Kansas has been the testing-ground for every experiment in morals, politics, and social life. Doubt of all existing institutions has been respectable. Nothing has been venerable or revered merely because it exists or has endured. Prohibition, female suffrage, fiat money, free silver, every incoherent and fantastic dream of social improvement and reform, every economic delusion that has bewildered the foggy brains of fanatics, every political fallacy nurtured by misfortune, poverty and failure, rejected elsewhere, has here found tolerance and advocacy.

Today the two myths are one. Kansas may be the land of averageness, but it is a freaky, militant, outraged averageness. Kansas today is a burned-over district of conservatism where the backlash propaganda has woven itself into the fabric of everyday life. People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and suburban Kansas City. Survivalist supply shops sprout in neighborhood strip-malls. People send Christmas cards urging their friends to look on the bright side of Islamic terrorism, since the Rapture is now clearly at hand.

Under the state’s simple blue flag are gathered today some of the most flamboyant cranks, conspiracists, and calamity howlers the Republic has ever seen. The Kansas school board draws the guffaws of the world for purging state science standards of references to evolution. Cities large and small across the state still hold out against water fluoridation, while one tiny hamlet takes the additional step of requiring firearms in every home. A prominent female politician expresses public doubts about the wisdom of women’s suffrage, while another pol proposes that the state sell off the Kansas Turnpike in order to solve its budget crisis. Impoverished inhabitants of the state’s most scenic area fight with fanatical determination to prevent a national park from opening up in their neighborhood, while the rails-to-trails program, regarded everywhere else in the union as a harmless scheme for family fun, is reviled in Kansas as an infernal design on the rights of property owners. Operation Rescue selects Wichita as the stage for its great offensive against abortion, calling down thirty thousand testifying fundamentalists on the city, witnessing and blocking traffic and chaining themselves to fences. A preacher from Topeka travels the nation advising Americans to love God’s holy hate, showing up wherever a gay person has been in the news to announce that “God Hates Fags.” Survivalists and secessionists dream of backyard confederacies out on the lone prairie; schismatic Catholics declare the pope himself to be insufficiently Catholic; Posses Comitatus hold imaginary legal proceedings, sternly prosecuting state officials for participating in actual legal proceedings; and homegrown terrorists swap conspiracy theories at a house in Dickinson County before screaming off to strike a blow against big government in Oklahoma City.

the problem with this simple story is that social liberalism actually grew in lockstep with an economic policy tailored to the poor. in the 70s, the most common place to get gender reassignment surgery was at a catholic hospital in small town colorado. in 2010, in response to deep opposition in the town, the practice was forced to move to california. the second most common place was at a baptist hospital in oklahoma city, where such surgery was viewed as routine until a number of religious leaders decided to oppose it in the 70s. at the same time, many other religious leaders spoke out in favour of the surgery, saying that it comported well with religious tenets.

likewise, colorado legalized abortion in 1967, as did states like kansas, missouri, georgia, and north and south carolina prior to roe v wade. today, these states are considered anti-abortion and anti-lgbt hotspots, yet prior to the late 70s, compassion for such people was viewed as paramount in the life of america’s christians. so what happened? it clearly wasn’t an emphasis on the social aspects of poor american lives that shifted the political arena in favour of religious conservatism. rather, as thomas frank points out in the same book:

Nobody mows their own lawn in Mission Hills anymore, and only a foot soldier in its armies of gardeners would park a Pontiac there. The doctors who lived near us in the seventies have pretty much been gentrified out, their places taken by the bankers and brokers and CEOs who have lapped them repeatedly on the racetrack of status and income. Every time I paid Mission Hills a visit during the nineties, it seemed another of the more modest houses in our neighborhood had been torn down and replaced by a much larger edifice, a three-story stone chateau, say, bristling with turrets and porches and dormers and gazebos and a three-car garage. The dark old palaces from the twenties sprouted spiffy new slate roofs, immaculately tailored gardens, remote-controlled driveway gates, and sometimes entire new wings. One grand old pile down the street from us was fitted with shiny new gutters made entirely of copper. A new house a few doors down from Esrey’s spread is so large it has two multicar garages, one at either end.

These changes are of course not unique to Mission Hills. What has gone on there is normal in its freakishness. You can observe the same changes in Shaker Heights or La Jolla or Winnetka or Ann Coulter’s hometown of New Canaan, Connecticut. They reflect the simplest and hardest of economic realities: The fortunes of Mission Hills rise and fall in inverse relation to the fortunes of ordinary working people. When workers are powerful, taxes are high, and labor is expensive (as was the case from World War II until the late seventies), the houses built here are smaller, the cars domestic, the servants rare, and the overgrown look fashionable in gardening circles. People read novels about eccentric English aristocrats trapped in a democratic age, sighing sadly for their lost world.

When workers are weak, taxes are down, and labor is cheap (as in the twenties and again today), Mission Hills coats itself in shimmering raiments of gold and green. Now the stock returns are plush, the bonus packages fat, the servants affordable, and the suburb finds that the princely life isn’t dead after all. It builds new additions and new fountains and new Italianate porches overlooking Olympic-sized flower gardens maintained by shifts of laborers. People read books about the glory of empire. The kids get Porsches or SUVs when they turn sixteen; the houses with asphalt roofs discreetly disappear; the wings that were closed off are triumphantly reopened, and all is restored to its former grandeur. Times may be hard where you live, but here events have yielded a heaven on earth, a pleasure colony out of the paintings of Maxfield Parrish.

america's workers and small farmers were saved by the reforms of the 1930s, as frank explains, then crushed as the wealthy found out how to squirrel away their taxes (in part thanks to the collapse of the british empire), accumulate wealth away from prying eyes, lobby the government for preferential treatment, and between 1976 and 2000, triumph completely in the political domain. mission hill donates more money to politicians than the rest of kansas combined. unions are swamped in state politics, and see declining fortunes. as a result, neoliberal social atomization takes effect, which sees even workers demanding beggar-thy-neighbour policies. and when thy neighbour is socially distinct from you, it becomes easier to justify voting for such politics based on a survival instinct. the majority of the working class tuned out and do not vote any more. among the rest, low skilled working class jobs in highly stratified and inequitable cities vote democrat, hoping for some patronage from the white collar creative class voters they serve, while blue collar skilled workers tend to vote republican, devoid of any examples of class politics in their lives with the death of unions and hoping to keep their share of wages against their only opposition, the tax man.

ultimately, any socially liberal politics sustained by donations from rich big city donors is unsustainable. on the other hand, the notion that “woke” politics is holding back leftism is, save for a few clearly absurd situations (robin diangelo, for instance) also wrong. economic leftism leads to social leftism, because respect to the working class leads to respect for its identities. neoliberal atomization is a much deeper force than can be surmounted at the ballot box, even in a primary, but it is always an economic force first and foremost.

513 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

Text

The political possibility of cities

The coming year feels like an important one. Democrats have the chance to pass the For the People Act, which will reverse decades of right-wing voter suppression, steering the US away from the baked-in antimajoritarian characteristics of its politics

At the same time, a successful vaccine rollout (assuming variants can be controlled) will mean widespread "re-openings," most notably in cities, where we find the highest concentrations of virus-incompatible stuff: mass transit, elevators, theaters and "cozy" cafes.

Cities are of huge political significance. The rise and rise of inequality has been attended by skyrocketing rents in cities, largely driven by money-launderers and speculators who turned housing stock into empty safe deposit boxes in the sky.

Cities were also key to delivering the 2020 election: Biden took major cities by 13m votes, inner suburbs by 4m votes, and midsized cities by 1.5m votes. 80% of Biden's votes came from these three categories.

As Ronald Brownstein writes in The Atlantic, "If you draw an imaginary beltway around almost any major metropolitan area, Democrats are growing stronger inside that circle, while Republicans are consolidating their position outside of it."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-biden-could-partner-big-cities-and-suburbs/618294/

Last summer's BLM uprising was a mostly urban affair, but even before then, the GOP was waging war on cities, with Mitch McConnell cutting maintenance and relief funds for cities, and Trump demanding quarter for ICE snatch-squads.

America's urbanization is an unbroken trend, and cities are semi-autonomous, wildly imperfect, young, diverse and economically powerful. They are also politically important, and many of the reddest states would be blue or very purple if cities were given due representation.

Brownstein's account of cities during the Trump years makes the case that a Biden focus on mayors, rather than the deadlocked Congress and Senate, or the fringe ideologues who were crammed onto the Supreme Court, is the key to making real political change.

The deadlocked legislature is not a new phenomenon. Several presidential administrations have focused on executive orders and regulations from the administrative branch to effect change, but these are flimsy political wins. What one exec order can create, another can undo.

Net Neutrality is here, then gone, then (maybe) here again. Without legislation, these policies aren't worth the Federal Register pages they're printed on. But there are methods to durably inscribe policy, and these are primarily urban.

Mostly, we remember the negative ways that this occurs: redlining, driving freeways through Black neighborhoods or skipping over parts of the city when it comes to subway access. Infrastructure is policy - and it's among the most permanent forms of policy we have.

As recent years have demonstrated, the future is a chaotic place, but as Charlie Stross has noted, the elements of the future that are indeed up for grabs are actually pretty narrow: 90% of the future is here today.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html

Most of the homes people will be living in in 10 years are on the road today. Most of the people who'll be alive then are living today. most of the cars that will be on the road are already in service today.

Even sharp discontinuities like the pandemic don't change those facts much (Stross and I did a conference presentation last week where he said that maybe all the chaos of the past five years has reduced the present's share of the future to 80%, still a commanding majority).

Cities are places where administrative policies can inscribe themselves indelibly upon the future. As LA Sustainability Czar Lauren Faber O'Connor told Brownstein, "Every building in the country is basically a shovel-ready project."

A fed solarize/winterize subsidy for buildings makes a difference for decades to come: not just the carbon footprint of the built environment, but also the baseline expectations for decent buildings. It permanently alters the balance between energy companies and the nation.

Every local government could take the feds up on this, but self-owning culture war foolishness predicts that the benefit will accrue predominantly to the large/mid-sized cities and inner burbs that delivered the election to Biden.

Vehicles don't last as long as buildings, but they are remarkably durable. Biden wants to replace the fed fleet with EVs - he could subsidize cities to do the same, creating huge efficiencies of scale for EV production and demand for permanent EV charging infrastructure.

Of course, the future is transit-based, not private-vehicle-based. Just do the math: multiply the number of people who need to go places by the amount of highway a private vehicle operates, and you'll find an inescapable Red Queen's Race.

The more road we need for those private vehicles, the further apart everything gets. The further apart everything gets, the more cars we need. The more cars we need, the more road we need. The more road we need, the further apart everything gets.

If building mass transit is "socialism" then geometry is a socialist plot (and no, you can't fix this by moving cars into tunnels; do the math). Transit permanently alters where people live and work, and what they expect from their cities. A transit subsidy is a no-brainer.

Biden can't force the states to switch to carbon neutral energy sources, but he can subsidize municipal energy facilities' voluntary switchover, again, permanently altering the economics of fossil-fuel power generation.

Red states aren't red: they are gerrymandered purple states that punish and starve their economic and population centers in the name of culture war nonsense and white supremacy. There are opportunities to permanently alter this situation.

For example, the Biden FCC could resinstate the rule banning states from limiting municipal fiber, and then subsidize 100GB/s muni networks, with emphasis on the urban broadband deserts in the majority-minority neighborhoods created by redlining.

Once cities are operating profitable muni networks that connect *everyone* to service that is 1,000-10,000x faster than the aging copper lines that cable monopolists refuse to upgrade, those networks will become permanent facts.

(as with many anti-monopoly interventions, these will do double-duty: the cable companies' lobbying ammo comes from the monopoly rents that they extract from poor people; deprive them of those rents and you cut the supply lines in the war they wage on the public interest)

There's reforms coming to the Affordable Care Act: if one of these is a change to the rule that cities can only get federal health-care subsidies if their states permit it, then cities could opt-in to health care even when their gerrymandered GOP statehouses block it.

America has 50 governors, 435 Congressional districts, 100 senators and 9 Supreme Court justices.

America has 19,000 cities and towns and 3,100 counties. These local governments are far more accountable to the people than the larger political entities.

Officials in cities, towns and counties who deliver tangible improvements to their residents' quality of life will be rewarded with high approval ratings and re-election. The Trump years left the largest of these starved for friendly federal coordination and partnership.

Biden's cabinet already includes three prominent former mayors - Buttigieg, Walsh and Fudge - and the historically intractable task of directly coordinating with thousands of local governments is made far more reasonable thanks to digital technology.

History teaches that presidents can defeat America's antimajoritarian institutions by simply bypassing them.

When the pro-slavery Supreme Court struck down Lincoln's anti-slavery laws, he passed them again...and again...and again: "Let's see whose legitimacy tanks first."

Biden could write humane, sustainable equitable future on the country in indelible ink. He could also make permanent changes in the lives and expectations of people: increasing subsidies to local schools and wiping out student debt is a change that lasts for a generation.

As exciting as this is, it's not enough. The circumstances of rural life are range from bad to terrible, and they're only worsening. Saving the cities will save the vast majority of Americans, but it will still leave nearly 60,000,000 people in desperate circumstances.

This is unacceptable. Good governments look after all people, not just the ones it expects to win re-election from.

Working with local governments is a tactic, not a strategy - a way to erode corporate power and present alternatives.

It's the beginning, not the end.

Image: The Fifth Element/Luc Besson

#pluralistic

40 notes · View notes

96thdayofrage · 3 years

Text

Rural Americans are dying of Covid at more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts — a divide that health experts say is likely to widen as access to medical care shrinks for a population that tends to be older, sicker, heavier, poorer, and less vaccinated.

While the initial surge of Covid-19 deaths skipped over much of rural America — where roughly 15 percent of Americans live — nonmetropolitan mortality rates quickly started to outpace those of metropolitan areas as the virus spread nationwide before vaccinations became available, according to data from the Rural Policy Research Institute.

Since the pandemic began, about 1 in 434 rural Americans have died of Covid, compared with roughly 1 in 513 urban Americans, the institute’s data show. And though vaccines have reduced overall Covid death rates since the winter peak, rural mortality rates are now more than double urban rates — and accelerating quickly.

In rural northeastern Texas, Titus Regional Medical Center CEO Terry Scoggin is grappling with a 39 percent vaccination rate in his community. Eleven patients died of Covid in the first half of September at his hospital in Mount Pleasant, population 16,000. Typically, three or four non-hospice patients die there in an entire month.

“We don’t see death like that,” Scoggin said. “You usually don’t see your friends and neighbors die.”

Part of the problem is that Covid incidence rates in September were roughly 54 percent higher in rural areas than elsewhere, said Fred Ullrich, a University of Iowa College of Public Health research analyst who coauthored the institute’s report. He said the analysis compared the rates of nonmetropolitan, or rural, areas and metropolitan, or urban, areas. In 39 states, he added, rural counties had higher rates of Covid than their urban counterparts.

“There is a national disconnect between perception and reality when it comes to Covid in rural America,” said Alan Morgan, head of the National Rural Health Association. “We’ve turned many rural communities into kill boxes. And there’s no movement towards addressing what we’re seeing in many of these communities, either among the public or among governing officials.”

Still, the high incidence of cases and low vaccination rates don’t fully capture why mortality rates are so much higher in rural areas than elsewhere. Academics and officials alike describe rural Americans’ greater rates of poor health and their limited options for medical care as a deadly combination. The pressures of the pandemic have compounded the problem by deepening staffing shortages at hospitals, creating a cycle of worsening access to care.

It’s the latest example of the deadly coronavirus wreaking more havoc in some communities than others. Covid has also killed Native American, Black, and Hispanic people at disproportionately high rates.

Vaccinations are the most effective way to prevent Covid infections from turning deadly. Roughly 41 percent of rural America was vaccinated as of Sept. 23, compared with about 53 percent of urban America, according to an analysis by the Daily Yonder, a newsroom covering rural America. Limited supplies and low access made shots hard to get in far-flung regions at first, but officials and academics now blame vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, and politics for the low vaccination rates.

In hard-hit southwestern Missouri, for example, 26 percent of Newton County’s residents were fully vaccinated as of Sept. 27. The health department has held raffles and vaccine clinics, advertised in the local newspaper, and even driven the vaccine to those lacking transportation in remote areas, according to department administrator Larry Bergner. But he said interest in the shots typically increases only after someone dies or gets seriously ill within a hesitant person’s social circle.

Additionally, the overload of Covid patients in hospitals has undermined a basic tenet of rural healthcare infrastructure: the capability to transfer patients out of rural hospitals to higher levels of specialty care at regional or urban health centers.

“We literally have email Listservs of rural chief nursing officers or rural CEOs sending up an SOS to the group, saying, ‘We’ve called 60 or 70 hospitals and can’t get this heart attack or stroke patient or surgical patient out, and they’re going to get septic and die if it goes on much longer,’ ” said John Henderson, president and CEO of the Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals.

Morgan said he can’t count how many people have talked to him about the transfer problem. “It’s crazy, just crazy. It’s unacceptable,” he said. “From what I’m seeing, that mortality gap is accelerating.”

Access to medical care has long bedeviled swaths of rural America — since 2005, 181 rural hospitals have closed. A 2020 Kaiser Health News analysis found that more than half of U.S. counties, many of them largely rural, don’t have a hospital with intensive care unit beds.

Pre-pandemic, rural Americans had 20 percent higher overall death rates than those who live in urban areas, due to their lower rates of insurance, higher rates of poverty, and more limited access to healthcare, according to 2019 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

In southeastern Missouri’s Ripley County, the local hospital closed in 2018. As of Sept. 27, only 24 percent of residents were fully vaccinated against Covid. Due to a recent crush of cases, Covid patients are getting sent home from emergency rooms in surrounding counties if they’re not “severely bad,” health department director Tammy Cosgrove said.

The nursing shortage hitting the country is particularly dire in rural areas, which have less money than large hospitals to pay the exorbitant fees travel nursing agencies are demanding. And as nursing temp agencies offer hospital staffers more cash to join their teams, many rural nurses are jumping ship. One of Scoggin’s nurses told him she had to take a travel job — she could pay off all her debt in three months with that kind of money.

And then there’s the burnout of working for over a year and a half through the pandemic. Audrey Snyder, the immediate past president of the Rural Nurse Organization, said she’s lost count of how many nurses have told her they’re quitting. Those resignations feed into a relentless cycle: As travel nurse companies attract more nurses, the nurses left behind shouldering their work become more burned out — and eventually quit. While this is true at hospitals of all types, the effects in hard-to-staff rural hospitals can be especially dire.

Rural health officials fear the staffing shortages could be exacerbated by vaccination mandates promised by President Biden, which they say could cause a wave of resignations the hospitals cannot afford. About half of Scoggin’s staff, for example, is unvaccinated.

Snyder warned that nursing shortages and their high associated costs will become unsustainable for rural hospitals operating on razor-thin margins. She predicted a new wave of rural hospital closures will further drive up the dire mortality numbers.

Staffing shortages already limit how many beds hospitals can use, Scoggin said. He estimated that most hospitals in Texas, including his own, are operating at roughly two-thirds of their bed capacity. His emergency room is so swamped, he’s had to send a few patients home to be monitored daily by an ambulance team.

4 notes · View notes

soldouthaz · 4 years

Note

Do you have any recent fic recs? 🥺 I just finished reading Baby Blue and now I don’t know what to read next. (It was amazing by the way).

hii!!! I'm so happy you liked baby blue! thank you so much for reading and for reaching out! :)))

I don’t have any specifics on what you like to read, so I'm just going to give you a bit of everything - I hope that’s alright! if you want more you always know where to find me ;)

recently read fics (July 2020) -

✰ sleeping on our problems (E, 67k, bL) by @risthebrave / falsegoodnight

Louis sleeps with Harry and they have more than just catching feelings to worry about.

✰ tell it like an old song (E, 26k, bL) by @outropeace

where Harry is a bit lost (just like his memories), his best friend is hiding something, the love of his life is gone and love... love is like flowers.

✰ soaked in the blood of angels (E, 40k, bL) by @crazyupsetter / whoknows

The boy looks drugged, caught between a man who’s almost twice his size and a girl who looks like she wouldn’t even break a sweat snapping him in half despite her small stature, eyes closed and mouth open as he pants, arching up between them almost as if he’s trying to escape.

Normally, Harry would ignore it and continue on his search for someone to drink from, someone who wouldn’t mind his sharp teeth and rough hands. He’s seen plenty of boys like this one, ones who picked the wrong playmates, and if he stopped to rescue every single one of them he would have died from thirst a long time ago.

This one, though. There’s something about this one, the sheen of his bright blue eyes as he blinks slowly, looks around as though he doesn’t know where he is, the weakness of his hands as he tries to push the girl off of him and make his escape.

✰ like the earth around the sun (E, 23k, bL) by astrangepurplefairy

the one where Harry bursts in on Louis in heat and things only get more complicated from there.

(*personal note* if anyone happens to know if this author has a Tumblr please let me know!)

✰ we both got nothing to hide (E, 43k, bL) by lovelarry10 / @chloehl10

Omega Louis has a secret nest. Alpha Harry keeps losing his clothes.

✰ move so pretty (you’re all I see) (E, 10k, bL) by @risthebrave / falsegoodnight

Harry’s pretty content with his life. He loves his job- a veterinarian at a local clinic who’s already built up a name for himself despite his young age. He loves his gorgeous flat with its wide, open space and minimalistic, yet still homey feel. He loves his family who he talks to and visits as much as possible, not bothered by the long hours of driving to Holmes Chapel from London he endures multiple times a month. He loves his friends and his coworkers and his neighbors- especially Allison, the little old lady next door who brings him and Louis cookies on holidays and who always comments on how “strong and handsome you are, Mr. Styles,” everytime he sees her.

And most importantly, he loves Louis, just- maybe in a slightly different way.

✰ maybe, baby (M, 16k, omega!L) by @thoughtsickles

Louis runs away. Harry finds him.

✰ when tomorrow comes (E, 11k, bL) by @jacaranda-bloom

the one where Louis is an Omega who has been keeping himself pure for his Alpha, Harry is a traditional Alpha focusing on his studies while he waits to find his bondmate, and Niall is a sneaky bastard who keeps borrowing Louis’ clothes and never returning them.

✰ in a world alone (E, 50k, bL) by @risthebrave / falsegoodnight

Harry’s breath catches as the glow grows bigger and bigger until he’s squinting his eyes and blinking at the sudden intense brightness. He closes his eyes, rubbing at them helplessly. When his eyes open again- he gasps, grip loosening on his bow as he gawks at the sight before him.

Because the swan is gone.

And in its place is the prettiest omega Harry has ever seen.

A Swan Lake AU

re-reads -

✰ like a siren in the night (E, 24k, bL) by @crazyupsetter / whoknows

“There is an infestation in my home,” Louis hisses, righting himself quickly and pushing his way past Harry, heading directly for the kitchen. He’s rather haphazardly dressed himself, a coat thrown on over a loose flannel shirt and black pants, slippers on his feet.

Harry resists the urge to sigh, closing the door and trailing behind him slowly. “What kind of infestation?”

For all he knows, Louis is going to claim that there’s a ghost infestation. Harry has no idea what the end game is here – all he knows is that Louis has found at least three complaints a week to bring up since he’s been living on Harry’s property, and he’s been living here for six months.

It’s way too many fucking complaints, is what Harry is saying. Especially when most of them are ridiculous to start with.

✰ ours are the moments I play in the dark (E, 20k, bL) by @holdingthornsandroses / edensrose

Jane Austen's Persuasion AU. Nine years ago Louis Tomlinson was persuaded to break off his engagement to Harry Styles, a poor sailor. Since then Louis has come to regret being so easily convinced to give up his one chance of happiness. Now Louis' family is in debt and his childhood home is being sold. In a complete reversal of fortune, Harry has returned to England a wealthy bachelor looking to settle down. Events conspire to bring them together once more though Louis is- must surely be- the last man on earth that Captain Styles would think of now.

✰ pretty please (with sugar on top) (E, 113k, bH) by @angelichl

Harry is a sugar baby omega who cons rich alphas for a living. Louis is a rich alpha with too much self-control.

✰ dance like warriors on a battlefield (E, 20k, bL) by @crazyupsetter / whoknows

Down in the arena, the triumphant gladiator places his foot on the back of the loser, holding him there as he waits for instruction on his next move. Kill or let live. It’s barbaric, really, the bloodlust involved in this sport. Louis is pretty sure that if it wasn’t for his distaste for the killing there would be a lot more blood soaking that sand.

As it is, his father rarely gives the kill order anymore. He gives the order to let the loser live. Louis rolls his eyes, turning away. He doesn’t miss the way the gladiator’s eyes linger on him.

fics on my list to read soon -

✰ until (E, 38k, bL) by @allwaswell16

Rural Eagle County, Colorado wasn’t the type of place to find a famous musician or actor. At least not until songwriter Louis Tomlinson showed up with pop star Niall Horan to visit his uncle’s horse ranch, and they just happened to find themselves next door to a reclusive former movie star.

(*personal note*- I'd put off reading this until I finished my own cowboy fic so that I wouldn’t subconsciously copy anything but I’m so so excited about this one!)

✰ smells like omega spirit (NR, 11k, omega!Louis) by @lululawrence

Louis is an omega doing a test run on neutralizers for a class project. Every time he talks to Harry he smells completely different.

Harry is an alpha who can't figure out if he's going crazy or his sense of smell is broken, but all he wants to figure out what Louis' real scent is.

Somehow they figure it out.

✰ ever since I tried your way (E, 25k, bH) by anonymous

In 1949 Harry left his bride at the altar, running away from the only life he'd known. When a kindhearted farmer offers him a ride in his truck and a place to sleep the two find themselves inexplicably drawn together. Isolated on Louis' farm with nobody but a field of dairy cows to intrude, the men are finally able to explore the parts of themselves they've spent their lives hiding away.

✰ was in no hurry, had no worries (E, 21k, bL) by @larrywmi / defencelouis

The year is 1999 and Harry can’t stop dedicating songs to Louis on the radio. Or the one where Harry hits Louis with his car.

✰ the murmur of yearning (E, 93k) by @mediawhorefics

Four years ago, Harry Styles was forced into a marriage of convenience to enrich and ally both his and his promised's families. The sudden, and slightly suspicious, death of the Marquess of Haxshire, however, brings great disturbance to Crescentfield Hall and, as his late's husband's closest male relative, Harry unexpectedly finds himself the head of a family he never felt he belonged to. Between a meddling distant cousin hellbent on inserting himself in Harry’s life, his wicked and mistrustful mother-in-law and his late husband’s advisors refusing to help or take him seriously, Harry struggles in the fight to keep what he’s earned and make the Estate finally feel like home.

Luckily, he doesn’t stand completely alone and finds himself an unlikely ally in Mr Tomlinson, the elusive Land Stewart who has been taking care of the property in the shadows for years. Louis Tomlinson is caring, patient, and unlike everyone else, he doesn’t seem to think Harry committed a murder.

as always, please let me know if I tagged anything incorrectly etc. and I hope this helps you a bit!! I hope you’re well and happy reading! :)

#fic recs

126 notes · View notes