And I can totally see your point of view and think it’s necessary because compassion doesn’t really work on people like that. I think a lot of the way I feel comes from the fact that the only reason that’s not me is largely due to luck. I made the decision to leave at 18 which gave me a wider view of the world. I went back years later and the town was too small to hold me.
For years I heard dumb shit like we can’t fix up our park or turn it into a skate park because we were exactly between the east and west coasts so the gangs (code for black people though I didn’t know it at the time) there would come and shoot us all up. The only shooting that wasn’t painted as meth addicts killing each other we had was painted as an undocumented immigrant (I still don’t know if that was true, but my guess would be no) with la raza ties. Someone (I wasn’t clear on who except that they weren’t white, either gangs or cartels) was going to come to our shitty little town and kidnap blonde haired blue eyed girls and sell them into sex slavery. A lot of this shit was on the local news because that’s what local politicians were saying. “Local politicians are concerned that” and then make everything after it seem like it’s a fact if you tuned in 3 seconds too late.
I’ll say I understand what led a lot of them there and it was fucking insidious. I don’t condone the way they act or the way they vote. And most of them will never understand exactly how they were manipulated into it.