Dear US-Americans of Tildes, is West Virginia really that bad?
I am a Russian and recently I started to really like the song “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. I searched for images of things mentioned in the song, like Blue Ridge mountains and Shenandoah river, and they do look pretty. Definitely somewhere I would like to hike. I've also heard that the local BBQ is good, which is relevant to my interests.
At the same time, almost every time I see West Virginia mentioned on e.g. Reddit, there is always someone pointing out that WV is, for lack of a better term, a shithole. I've seen that occurring several times on several different subreddits. What is up with that? Is that just a thing where the people from one US state always feel the need to throw crap at other states? Are there economical reasons? Is it too conservative/racist/what-have-you?
Just in case, I am not trying to start something, I am genuinely curious, how can one place be called “almost heaven” by one group of people and at the same called a “shithole” by another.
I'm not the best suited to answer this question, but I'm not sure anyone on Tildes is from there so I'll try. I didn't grow up in WV, but I was born there and have lived kinda nearby for all my life.
I have been to the northern parts a few times recently on short trips and the view is quite beautiful. The whole area is covered in mountains ( I suppose some people from more mountainous areas would call them hills). When you stand on top of one one, you can see rows of them fading into the distance. These views can be very natural, while the Midwest of the US is more full of flat farmland.
However, this is more of a product of lack of development than environmental protection. If you look at a satellite map of WV, those brown spots in the southern half are strips mines larger than WV's cities. My parent's grew up in the northern panhandle, near Little Blue Run. A creek turned into a lake that is the largest coal ash impound in the US (to be fair, most of it is actually in neighboring Pennsylvania), and it ironically had taken on a vibrant blue color and is now being covered over.
The state's politics is a little different than many other states. Today it is firmly claimed by the Republican Party. It had the greatest percentage of Trump votes and has gone to the republican presidential candidate since 2000, but before that, it was one of the last southern states to switch over the Southern Strategy. Interestingly, it has elected only Democrat governors since then, but (increasingly) conservative ones. The latest being the wealthiest-man-in-the-state, owner-of-a-coal-mining-company, only-a-Democrat-for-the-few-years-around-the-election Jim Justice. Jim Justice is entirely out of line with what the Democratic Party considers itself.
One of Trump's main stances is being in favor of promoting the coal industry, which is particularly important to WV. The state is 3rd in the US for highest unemployment and has a long history of mining coal. It should be noted that coal mining, while well-paying for its low requirements and location, is terrible on the body and deadly. It used to be much worse, but WV used to be home to a very strong labor movement and even was home to the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in the US ever. This helped push along for a lot of worker's rights. Today, right-wing media has called for looser regulations, less taxes, and more promotion of the coal industry to increase employment. Much of WV has bought into it, fueling its strong support for conservative politicians. After all, coal mining is a major employer in the state and brings money in from out of state.
WV also is largely in favor of other right-wing positions (pro-life, guns, etc.) and it culture is largely similar to other rural areas. Despite what many Redditors who disagree with these values will say, Reddit largely disagrees with these values (and rightfully so). WV also has the 5th largest percentage of religious people.
WV also has the 3rd lowest life expectancy(lowest for whites), the greatest age-adjusted-rate-of-death by opiates, was the source of this famous photo depicting the aftermath of two overdoses, and the greatest rate of population decrease (all but 2 other states are growing).
As for Country Road (nice song btw), it came out in 1971. 2021 will see the next presidential inauguration of the US. It will also be the 100th anniversary of The Battle of Blair Mountain. Afterwords Country Roads will be closer to that battle than the present.
For anyone else in the EU who can't access that website: the picture is available here.
is there an article behind this picture? was the kid okay?
The parents are alive (or were at time of article)
Oh right, that was on the Ohio side of the river, sorry. Though the article does say that the vehicle had WV registration, and the East Liverpool area is practically right on top of the triple point between WV, PA, and OH. Appalachia is pretty big, WV just happens to be the only state entirely inside of it.
As a resident of Actual Virginia, I spent a good part of my life making West Virginia yokel jokes. How do you know the tooth brush was invented in West Virginia? If it had been invented anywhere else it'd be called the teeth brush.
The truth is that West Virginia has been exploited by the elite capitalist class since its colonization. It began with the expulsion of the Cherokee, who would eventually join on the Trail of Tears. White settlers moved in to hunt, trap, and farm the land. Then railroads came and kicked a lot of people off their land. Then the mines came and the situation we are seeing today really began.
The mines also kicked people off their land by buying the mineral rights, which were separate from the land rights. Literally buying people's homes out from under them. These displaced people could find work as miners and live in company towns, where the coal companies owned everything from the stores, to the schools, to the churches. Goods in the stores were priced so that miners had no option but to go into debt to live. The schools and churches kept everyone passive, working, and pushed the company line. The company towns used money ('scrips') that was specific to that town. So if a miner did want to leave, anything they managed to save would be worthless.
It wasn't long before unionizers started to talk to the miners and in short order miner unions were some of the biggest in the country. Coal companies didn't like this and hired all kinds of mercenaries, including the Pinkertons, to break the strikes and kill union leaders. There was a lot of tension and eventually precipitated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, where a force of unionists wearing red bandanas around their necks (the origin of the term redneck) was bombed by the US Army and surrendered. Many of the unionists had been soldiers in WWI and didn't want to fight American troops.
From the 1910s to present day, coal companies have focused on breaking the back of unions. Primarily they have done this through automation, creating massive machines that do the work of hundreds of thousands of miners. They pay people pretty well to operate these machines, and there's competition for these jobs because they're basically the only good ones available. This contributes to a lot of the current anti-union sentiment.
The coal companies also have political dominance in West Virginia and have made it purposely isolated. I don't want to get too into the weeds here but even insurance has weird rules in West Virginia and that leads a lot of companies to not do business in the state at all. Insurance is the backbone of a business and so it is inordinately difficult and expensive to just start a business there. The coal companies have worked hard to make sure they are the only game in town.
They continue to exploit local populations with what is called Mountaintop Removal Mining. They basically dynamite a mountain top off, push the debris into the surrounding valleys, then set to work with massive machines to tear it apart. To date they have killed about a dozen mountains, I believe. At the end, the companies 'remediate' the land by putting new sod over top of everything so that a prison, or Walmart, or pill mill can be built on top.
So yes, West Virginia has a lot of issues. Those issues have primarily been imposed upon the residents by the coal companies, their lobbyists, and the politicians they've bought. There's a lot of naked propaganda - drive through Appalachia and you'll see plenty of anti-environmentalist billboards.
E: added some links for further reading. I highly, highly recommend this talk by an artist/activist group known as The Beehive Collective. They partnered with Appalachian groups to tell the story of coal and exploitation in the region. They created an art piece that they use as a guide through the talk. It is 80 minutes long but, IMO, very worthwhile to understand the historic context.
The country-side the is gorgeous, and there's a couple nice towns. But it's almost entirely poor coal miners so everything is very old and very run down. Like most states nowadays, WV has a nasty drug abuse problem so all the sketchy shit that comes with that is present.
Note that i've never lived there. I just drove through the state a couple dozen times driving between ohio and north carolina. And i'd always time my refuels so that i didn't have to stop in WV. This is a personal anecdote, but the few times I was forced to stop I felt like everything man made was just sorta rotting away.
Oh and one time I was refueling and the lady refueling next to me was smoking a lit cigarette. So there's that.
My mother was from West Virginia, and I've done time there myself.
It is a very pretty state, unless you're within five miles of humans. Then it's just sad in a "off-off-Broadway performance of Deliverance" sort of way.
I'm not from West Virginia, nor have I spent any significant amount of time in it, so I can't necessarily offer any new information about it. I might be able to provide insight into why some people on Reddit talk about it that way though.
Depending on the subreddit, on Reddit you're probably more likely to encounter liberal viewpoints than conservative ones. In America (and elsewhere, I would expect), there's a pretty sharp divide between urban vs rural political leanings, with people from urban areas leaning more to the liberal side of things and people from rural areas to the conservative side. WV is one of the more rural states, at least as far as I'm aware (I couldn't think of any major cities in the state off the top of my head, and when I googled it I barely recognized any of the names in the top 20 list), and it has historically voted more to the conservative side, though not as strongly as some other states. So there's one reason right off the bat that people on Reddit may not like it very much.
Another reason has to do with economics and geography. West Virginia is mostly in the Appalachian Mountains, and to my knowledge, Appalachia is generally a sparsely populated and fairly poor region. I'm from Ohio and the southeast corner of our state is sort of in Appalachia, and the sentiment about that area is similar. From what I know, it's mostly small coal mining towns that have since been almost entirely abandoned after the coal boom, leaving a lot of people out of work. Because of the mountains, these towns are also often pretty isolated, which is probably where the jokes about people from the region being inbreds come from. The Appalachian Mountains aren't all that big as far as mountain ranges go, but I have driven through them several times and when you're on the highways you pass many small, dingy-looking towns that sometimes look like they're stuck in the mid-1900s. In general, it seems to me like these are places you drive through, and they don't offer much of a reason to stop. This passing view of the towns likely also contributes to the negative stigma surrounding the region.
You specifically ask about how West Virginia is simultaneously referred to as "almost heaven" and a "shithole." This happens because people talk about different aspects of the state for different reasons. People describing it as almost heaven are probably talking about vacation opportunities, while people describing it as a shithole are usually referring more to the communities there. I'm not going to confirm or deny that either description is accurate, but that's my interpretation of them as someone who lives relatively nearby and has at least a passing familiarity with the area.
TL;DR: The region is generally poor, as well as geographically and ideologically (or so I've heard) isolated.
Pretty much EVERY state (and by extension, Reddit) likes to shit on the other states for various reasons.
Shitting on the Deep South is very popular by pretty much every other state, as they're often seen as backwards and/or ludicrously conservative.
Shitting on states with "crazy" populations is popular too, especially Florida, New Jersey, and Alaska. Even if they're absolutely beautiful or nice places to live, the type of people who live there are stereotypically bonkers.
Then they're are the state-on-state rivalries. California and Arizona. Michigan and Ohio. Kansas and Missouri. Utah and Idaho. Pretty much every state in the union has a grudge against at least one neighbor for some historic reason or another.
So to answer your question about West Virginia specifically, it's probably a geographically beautiful state, and if you're the more rural, country type, it's probably a half-decent place to live. But to the rest of America, and Reddit in particular, it's a backwards rural conservative backwater of a state, and perfect fodder for random mockery.
I can understand Florida and New Jersey, but does Alaska really have a reputation of a “crazy” state?
After Sarah Palin and her family, yes.
However, I’m in Texas so glass houses and such
A little. Not always, but Sarah Palin and shows like Alaskan Bush People haven't helped the image.
As it happens, I ran across this article today:
https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/stirring-the-waters-in-southern-wv-days-without-water-are/article_a1f7e3fd-d98f-5684-9fc5-d0c8b0a18713.html