I don’t give two shits about either candidate or anyone’s political views, but my mom was born and raised outside of Jackson, MS, born in a house with a literal dirt floor. I visited it with her once after my grandpa died and she had a meltdown remembering how she grew up. I’ve visited the state several times and saw first hand how outrageously backwards it is. It’s literally 40 years behind every other state. That place is absolutely the poorest place in the nation, and racism is crazy both ways, white and black. Mom only went to elementary school before quitting and I saw the class pictures. She was one of three white kids in a class of I’m guessing 25 black kids. She told me about seeing her little brother get beat up because he was white, and the racism went both ways. They were brought up to hate each other. It’s just the absolute most backwards place you could ever imagine and there’s no way to understand it without visiting the rural areas. You step back in time a half century when you cross the border.
My parents always told the story of how when they went to get married up north here how they couldn’t because my mom had no birth certificate and no social security card. She simply didn’t exist in the eyes of the government because she was born in a goddamn house and no one ever told anyone the kid existed. They just didn’t do that, they had kids and went about their lives. All her 11 siblings were the same way and my mom (who was 18) didn’t even know what a SSN was when they went to get married.
Bottom line, anyone who bitches about Mississippi being a welfare state can eff right off. They need three times the funds they get. That place is still feeling the shitty effects of reconstruction 150 years later, and those rural Mississippians come from generation after generation after generation of uneducated poor people who don’t even know there’s anything else than being poor and having babies...even in 2020. They quite literally don’t know any better, white, black, or otherwise. I understand the concept of wanting people to pull themselves by their bootstraps and I believe in it, but how do you expect someone to do it if they don’t even know the bootstraps exist?