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The True Common Folk of America

May 6th, 2007 · No Comments

بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمنِ الرَّحِيمِ

I had an interesting trip this past week for work(April 25-28). I had to audits of some 3rd party facilities my employer uses for warehousing and logistical services. I started in Charlotte, NC, drove to Chester, SC and then to the coast where I finished my work on Friday (~600 miles in all). To see a map click here. Another thing I should mention is when driving through NC/SC there are NOT always highways that are convenient. Often I was driving on county roads for long stretches at a time, simply because it was the fastest most direct route.

For the most part I was driving through a bunch of podunk towns, places where I saw few dozen homes, a bar or two, and one corner store. Occasionally I would find some shack (I mean a shack – looked like it was for storage) and apparently there were people living there since there was a car or two (always a beater) and no house close enough where it seemed reasonable for that shack to be a part of it. Then, every so often, you’d have some MASSIVE home on the lake (when a lake was present) with all the bells and whistles of the rich southern family homes (carriage path, courtyard, croquet, etc.) and across the street it looked like a home didn’t even have electricity or running water.

Utter poverty across from utter wealth. I’m not advocating wealth re-distribution (socialistic/communistic doctrine), but what I saw there was slightly depressing. You had an area that historically was linked to manufacturing and textiles (industries that have moved on) and people who were there to build massive summer/winter homes on extremely cheap, and nice lake front property. Some of the locals felt “stuck” and maybe worked just to get by (also either completely or partially living off of gov. assistance, welfare etc.). The people with the money to build those lake front homes were likely not from the area as there was really not much there in the way of industry.

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