Reply #18: What to do about it?

[blindpig]

Talk to people. Better,listen to them. Give people their space, give them the respect you'd expect. When you get past all of the bullshit people want pretty much the same things, a living wage, security, privacy, respect. Don't expect them to adopt the superficialities of the urban/suburban culture, they have their own ways and they like them just fine. Stick to the important stuff.

Here's part of a description of the book from Amazon:

A raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary, Deer Hunting with Jesus is Bageant’s report on what he learned by coming home. He writes of his childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced; the mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt, i.e., “white trashonomics”; the ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’t get it; Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England; and the blinkered “magical thinking” of the Christian right. (Bageant’s brother is a Baptist pastor who casts out demons.) What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.”