Category: History (Page 4 of 15)

I like this meme because it captures something shocking that I learned here in West Virginia years ago. I learned a couple of shocking things, to me, anyway. Please pardon the generalizations I’m making here. Clearly, not every single West Virginian is like this. Note that this was before Trump ran for president.

I learned that in the years before the mortgage crisis / crash of 2008, West Virginians were victimized by unscrupulous lenders who convinced people to refinance, get cash out, and end up with a mortgage they ultimately couldn’t carry. Some of these mortgage salesmen came from out of state, which is illegal, but they did it anyway. I doubt any were ever prosecuted. West Virginians fell for this by the thousands and I wondered why they were such easy marks.

I learned that average West Virginians see anyone wearing a suit and driving a nice car as trustworthy and smart. They also assume that anyone who’s rich must be smart or they wouldn’t be rich. (Research shows that this is false. There’s no correlation between IQ and wealth. It’s random chance.)

So, I made it a point when out on the street, at the library, etc., to strike up conversations with random people and nudge the conversation over to this topic and a discussion of being rich. Naturally, everyone I spoke with wished they were rich. Don’t we all? The shocker to me was then asking why they wanted to be rich. Nice house? Nice car? Nice clothes? No. The answer was usually some form of, “So I can f*ck with people and do what I want.”  Of course, this doesn’t square with rich people being smart and trustworthy, but the cognitive dissonance is okay, I guess.

Now we come to Trump running for president and support for him here in West Virginia was virtually 100 percent, and is still heavily supportive of Trump. It all adds up in a sick kind of way, doesn’t it?