How did Middle America end up so fucked up? Do other countries have such a stark urban-rural divide?

Like other anons said, deindustrialization coupled with some shitty cultural elements and topped all off with drugs. The best case study I can think of is the town of Hurley, Virginia.

Hurley is a coal mining town about as deep into the mountains of Virginia as you can get. The town had a boom of coal mining in recent decades, back when coal mining meant sending hundreds of men into a mountain to pull out just the ~4 ft seam of coal and nothing else. But the coal moved on, taking jobs with it, and newer coal mines hire fewer people thanks to the current preference for strip mining, so even if coal somehow came back, the jobs wouldn't.

So you're left with an impoverished community whose lifeblood was coal back in a time before environmental regulations were really a thing. So to the surprise of literally nobody, just about everyone there has some kind of coal-related health issue. A huge percentage of the population is on some kind of welfare (IIRC at least half) because many of them can't work and many more can't find work, because the nearest "real" town is a 40 minute drive over the mountain.

Now turns out living in the mountains with nothing to do gets boring after a while, so people tend to turn to two things - fucking and drugs. Fucking eachother inevitably pops out butt tons of kids, because birth control is expensive and many of these people subscribe to fundementalist interpretations of Christianity. Meanwhile, many people turn to drugs, either just to have something to do or often times to make money. Dealers often end up getting hooked on their own supply because they feel the need to test batches to make sure they're safe, and surprise - they get addicted.

And then there's the culture. You've got the fundementalist christianity, but even the atheists don't take kindly to insults, especially to family.

If anyone's interested, I can give some individual cases of people I know down there to give a better idea of how fucked things can be.

Middle America is the best part of the country. Lax gun laws, clean air and no semites or nonwhitees. Tis all the true Aryan requires.

>no non-whites
its like you've never been to middle America before

I live here. There are almost none unless you drive 200 miles to an Indian Reservation.

I think that because it was so hard to get to Middle America that kept a lot of the outside world out. You could argue that by that logic the West should be pretty weird as well but going West was more desirable then staying on the plans which was pretty much impossible at the time.

>tfw no country qt to ride in pickup trucks and play acoustic guitar and read my King James Bible with
why even live?

Also rampant poverty and a consistent drain on federal funds.

Slavs are many things but lazy is hardly the adjective I'd describe them with.

You're confusing middle America with Dixie.

lol dixie is pretty fucked up but you could chalk that up to all niggers and peckerwoods that live there

>rampant poverty
>money drain
Do you even know what middle America is? States like Minnesota, Nebraska and Illinois, not West Virginia and Alabama.

Yes please user.

Can you tell me what sort of violence, if any, arises from the drug trade in Hurley?

>Chicago
>Detroit
>Cleveland
>St. Louis
>Cincinnati
>Milwaukee
Middle American cities are the most nigged up in the nation.

user pls you can't blueball me like this

>urban = automatically good

Those idiots in San Francisco are more worried about their pet projects than the realities facing the state but have enough population power to trample over everyone else's concerns. This is not an ideal situation.

Huh.

I thought "Middle America" meant the suburban middle class.

Learn something new every thread!

I cannot begin to describe the seething hatred I have for San Francisco and LA liberals, Central and Northern California pay for their bullshit policies and pet projects.

India's got a literal caste system so yeah I feel op might have overlooked it a little

Being lazy is different than being impossible to motivate. I have the perfect WebM to illustrate that point but it's on my PC, I'll return with it later

Rural America is unironically the best part of America

presumably that user was referring to rural areas when talking about middle america.

In America, the urban-rural divide is exacerbated by race.

Look at how the media even describes black criminals as "urban teens" yet everyone knows exactly who they mean.

Middle America isn't fucked up though.

>De-industrialization.

That effects cities far more than it does rural places. If anything rural areas have become more industrialized due to the protectionism the US government gives it's agribusiness industries.

Illinois isn't "middle america", it's in the same category as New York, Massachusetts and California.

It does, OP got it wrong.

That's the urban-suburban divide.

Middle America (if you're referring to the midwest.)
Is the best part of the US

>fucked up

how is it fucked up? Urban america is the fucked up place. EVERY urban area of america is a post-apocalyptic shithole of minority violence, incompetent police, corrupted democratic politicians, and hordes of mindless and culturless retarded citizens who thinks its great as they chug down another shitty meme beer, shoot up heroin, and then eventually kill themselves because of how soul crushingly depressed they are.

There's nothing to do here but meth and go to church.
t. Midwest

She's cute

drink with people? sport? party? outdoor? it's not like big cities offers anything particulary good, they just have lot of people

I said Illinois, not Chicago.

>overwhelmingly white
>lowest crime
>highest IQ
Rural America isn't fucked up. It's shit holes like urban California and Texas that are.

You meant to say New England is the best part of the US. Right?

It is if you exclude Assachusetts and Connectishit.

MA is the best state. Bub.

You mean Maine and NH are the best. Mass is just a libtard shithole full of cucks and Boston is San Francisco east with terminal inferiority complex towards NYC.

From the people I personally have met who dealt drugs, the violence seemed to be more passingly related to the drugs - getting into fights and not willing to go to the police about things - rather than something like a drug war.

Guy 1:
>expelled from school in 3rd grade
>dealt drugs he mentioned pills, probably weed as well)
>been shot twice for unknowingly sleeping with some guys wife
>instead of running while being shot at he turns around and throws rocks
>gets stabbed in the gut in a barfight and has to hold his guts in on the way to the hospital
>ends up going to jail for a year for drug charges after refusing to cooperate with an investigation
He says he'd gone up north to talk to some bigger drug dealer at one point who offered him a job selling up there, but he felt it was too dangerous. From what he explained, the drug trade in Hurley was more individuals doing their own thing relatively unmolested as opposed to more organized drug trade like you'd see in cities. He also claimed that by the end of things he was dealing to provide for his family. He used to work as a powerline worker, but he quit after having to recover a guy who got electrocuted on the wires. He also worked in the mines, but he got crushed by a mine machine and eventually had seizures that made it impossible for him to work in the mines anymore, so there really wasn't anything he could do but sell drugs.

>cont

Guy 2:
>has a kid with his then-girlfriend
>can't find any work anywhere
>decides to start cooking meth with his friend
>after a bad batch nearly kills a guy, they decide to test every batch before selling
>gets addicted
>girlfriend gives ultimatum to quit or she'll leave with the kid
>as he's going to the meth house to start getting rid of the meth the cops show up
>goes to jail for a year or so
>girlfriend leaves him
He's out now and doing a lot better. I met the guy one year working on a mission trip. He works construction now, and he's now dating (effectively married to) another girl I knew down there who also got into meth. She had 2 kids from previous relationships, and he and the girl had a new kid. It's honestly pretty sad to see - the girl's my age and the first time I met her was when she was only 15. She use to be really pretty and have a lot of potential, but every time I'd come back she'd look worse and worse.

The real unfortunate thing with Hurley is that everyone who can afford to leave does. Unlike previous generations, where you had an "upper class" that could afford to really help the community, the younger generation either moves out while they still can or gets stuck in poverty and struggles to support themselves.

>Do other countries have such a stark urban-rural divide?
Generally yes. It's less noticeable in Europe because you literally have fields surrounded by miles of cities rather than cities surrounded by miles of fields, but even there you have people complaining about fucking hicks and fucking city boys.

No. The birthplace of the revolution had totally forgotten the ideals it once stood for and is streaking headlong for nanny state bulkshit. Doesn't help that there's six shitzillion liberal arts students and their ivory tower universities. I respect the idealism of the youth but they're so deep in a bubble they can't begin to see what's worth fighting for or worrying about, or else they have the right ideas but go about pursuing them in all the wrong ways.

t. Walthamite

Thanks for painting a picture of the situation.

There is only a divide because the bourgeoisie encourages that. I live in a rural area. My friends and most people I talk to who aren't my neighbours live in the city.

If you seriously have problems with either things then you are an idiot. It's like fighting with blacks or Mexicans or something and not realising we're all in this together against porky.

That said, I do hate the suburbs and people that live there seem to be giant cunts. From what I've seen anyway. I think they're just shitty people and the suburbs look like shit worse than what people make fun of with "commie blocs."

the rural parts of America has been shielded from a lot of the negative aspects of American culture especially the Mormons from what I've seen, i live in an urban area and I get reminded everyday what Frederick Nietzsche meant by transvalue values the big cities are an example of culture you just don't want to contribute to especially if you're an person with healthy habits.

Agrarian societies are usually undereducated.

That's tempered a little in places like the South, where ports and river traffic allow an introduction of new people and ideas...but places like Nebraska are just wide swaths of one kind of people.

No new people, no new ideas.

So now you have a huge region region of the country that thinks rock and roll is the devil and filling a bowl with whipped cream and orange slices counts as a "light dessert"

What's life like in 1975?

>wanting to resource curse your own country by sending your own good people into literal fucking Siberia to work in mines

There are dozens of papers on why this isn't a good idea.

Middle America is fine. The definitions are totally mixed up here, people think that the South and any rural area counts as 'Middle America', but in reality it is just the states in the middle of the country, like Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, etc.

All of these states are fine, in fact are generally wealthier, and safer, than other states.

? What the fuck are you talking about? Living in the city is fucking great. Lots of job opportunities, good pay, highly diversified shops, ethnic and fine dining restaurants, attractions, beautified parks. American cities have been experiencing rapid gentrification since the early 2000s. The marginalized nigger areas are still shit but thats because you can't tear down housing projects. Its weird to walk from total nigger territory into a neighborhood ten blocks away with a Trader Joe's and Equinox.

>How did Middle America end up so fucked up?

>provide shit tons of food
>nice wilderness and parks
]>kind people
as opposed to living in New York and getting jumped by niggers.

There's also a divide when it comes to government and laws.

What is best for an urban area is not always best for a rural area and the other way around as well.

dude, if you think USA has a 'stark urban-rural divide' youve got no clue