The mist prevented my doing the outdoorsy things I'd planned for the day, but catching up on some reading was a fine substitute. Later in the day, MeeMaw and I went into town to run some errands, browse the antique shoppes, and eat dinner ("lunch" to the Yankees) at the Hob Nob Drive-In (home of the as-yet-unverified ostrich burger).
Last night, MeeMaw and I watched a Diane Sawyer 20/20 special called "A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains." We wouldn't have known about it if Joshi-O hadn't mentioned it in a recent phone call. A Huffington Post article about the show summarizes it fairly well:
NEW YORK — Diane Sawyer felt a personal connection in reporting her
latest documentary on American children living in poverty.
Born in southern Kentucky, raised in Louisville, Sawyer is certain
her ancestors once made it over the hills of central Appalachia. She tells the
often harrowing stories of families in that region trying to make it in
"A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains." It airs Friday
at 10 p.m. EST on ABC.
"It's the accent I love," she said. "It's the music that I grew up
with. It's part of home to me."
Ancestry aside, these Kentucky families may
have had reason to be suspicious of a wealthy New York journalist wanting to
hear their stories. Once you establish you're not there to mock them, that you
recognize the pride in their lineage, people would open up, she said.
The documentary focuses on four stories, including high school
football star Shawn Grim, who lives out of his car and dreams of getting away.
Other children deal with drug-addicted parents and a future of work in dangerous
coal mines.
The stories are a framework to illustrate problems in the community,
from the rise in illegal prescription drug dealing to the widespread use of a
soft drink that is rotting teeth. Children there face few options: work at
Wal-Mart or fast food restaurants, dealing drugs or a life in the mines among
them.
"Very few people make their way up into the hills and the hollows and
the shadows to look at these lives," Sawyer said. "It's not easy to get
there."
Grim's story is depressing. He works hard to develop his football
talent and becomes the first in his family to graduate high school, but he quits
four months into college despite his athletic scholarship. Sawyer said he's now
trying to find work in Tennessee and she hopes someone sees the documentary and takes a chance on him.
When Sawyer did a similar documentary on urban poverty in Camden,
N.J., there was an outpouring of support for the children that were
featured.
She thinks the children in Appalachia face a tougher future than the
ones she met in Camden.
"I think you can argue that the history of the hills and the
isolation of the hills is an added mountain to climb," she said. "As they say,
to go to Cincinnati, it's like going to Istanbul. I think the feeling that they
are not respected or valued - you can introduce them in sitcoms, you can
introduce them as jokes - is also a psychological weight that a lot of people
carry."
Sawyer, who estimates that she and the staff drove some 14,000 miles
in the two years spent to make the documentary, said she likes the outlet
provided by these projects. She's more than 10 years into a gig as "Good Morning
America" host that she initially took on a fill-in basis for a few
months.
Not many people in network TV get the chance to make these kind of
documentaries, she said.
"I consider it a great gift from ABC that I get to
do these," she said, "and there are more coming."
We enjoyed the documentary for the most part, and were naturally drawn to the plight of our people in such circumstances. The segment on the young football player, Grim, was particularly arresting. Two scenes still resonate with me. In one scene, young Grim is newly arrived at college, flush with his football scholarship and dreams of self-improvement. We see him sitting and talking with a black classmate. Grim is now wearing his trademark baseball cap backwards, and is talking to the black boy in nomesayn' jargon about his impoverished background. The black boy is sprawled in a chair - sneering, dismissive, and condescending - as Grim tries to strike common ground. The effort is completely futile, and it is painful to watch this young Southern boy attempt to ingratiate himself with someone who clearly sees him as an amusing loser. I have to wonder if Grim will ever watch a replay of this scene and hear the reproving whispers of his fathers, watching from the past as their progeny panders to a stranger.
The other scene that has remained with me today is one at the very end of Grim's on-screen segment. Back home after dropping out of college, jobless, bitter. Grim feels the bite of winter weather coming, and so he goes to toil for his family in the only way he can. He drives to a berm alongside the interstate highway, climbs the embankment with a pickaxe and five-gallon bucket, and illegally harvests coal from the hillside, filling the bed of his truck with stony black fuel, one bucketful at a time. The despair and resignation in his eyes is truly haunting. But his family will not freeze in the winter.
I also found one of Diane Sawyers comments (in the article above) quite interesting. She notes her "love" for the regional accent spoken by the people she profiled in the story. But she, a daughter of Kentucky, doesn't have the accent. Like so many before her, she likely worked diligently and deliberately to lose the accent that the soulless mainstream media and its lackeys in academia have taught the South's own native speakers to be ashamed of. The pernicious influence of television has flattened out regional accents to the point where the only communities that still retain them are isolated hamlets...like the Appalachian hills. This reminds me of the wonderful lyric in Don Williams' Good Old Boys Like Me about how he escaped the dead-end poverty of his Southern boyhood by learning to talk "like the man on the six o'clock news."
Sawyer's perspective did contain something with which I bitterly agree: "When Sawyer did a similar documentary on urban poverty in Camden, N.J., there was an outpouring of support for the children that were featured. She thinks the children in Appalachia face a tougher future than the ones she met in Camden."
Amen and amen.
And now to end the evening with some music, a number by former Racer X guitarist Paul Gilbert. The song, Spaceship One, has some pretty sophomoric lyrics, the sort of thing Boston's Tom Scholtz would have written if he'd attended, say, New Jersey State instead of M.I.T. But lyrics aside, the tune is a contagious toe-tapper. Instrumentally, it reminds me of an old Rush song. The solo starting at about the 3:02 mark is a textbook example of soloing in mode without histrionics (even if Gilbert does look like a young Gary Oldman in a spacesuit...Sid and Nancy meets Apollo 13?). Also Gilbert's drummer, Marco Minnemann, has a marvelous economy of movement. No flailing and thrashing about unnecessarily. He would be a great martial artist; no excess, just hit the target.
Anyway, here's the clip.
Happy Valentine's Day. And rest well, loved ones.
