(Prologue) - In a study released this week by Gallup, Hickory is rated as having the 6th Saddest Population in the United States. This was reported by CBS MoneyWatch in an article authored by Carla Fried. We are defined as being ranked amongst the least contented populaces, in a poll that ranks communities based upon Life Evaluation, Physical Health, Healthy Behavior, Emotions, Work, and Basic Access.
As far as the dynamics of the survey, Life Evaluation is based upon how you feel about your life today and where you see yourself being 5 years from now. Physical health deals with such factors as whether they had any health issues that prevented them from doing any age-appropriate stuff. Healthy Behavior deals with smoking, drinking, working out properly, and eating right. Emotional Questions included such factors as "Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?" Work questions include, "Are you satisfied/dissatisfied with your job?" Basic Access includes Medical-related questions such as had you been to a dentist in the past year, do you have a personal doctor, and/or have health insurance. It also included questions about the general satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the region.
In my opinion, it is easy to see why we are tailor made to rank low in this survey and it goes hand in hand with other surveys that have ranked us low. There are many people here that are living on the edge. How can you be satisfied with your circumstance if you are unemployed or worried about losing your job or if you are worried about losing your business; and how would you feel about your future prospects?
You can look around the community and see all of the people who are overweight and how many people are still practicing bad health habits. You also have to factor in the aging populace of our area and realize that the aged are going to have more than their fair share of health related issues. The Emotion issue ties in directly with the stress level and as I stated their are a lot of people in this community living on the edge. Worried about their job... Worried about losing their house... Worried about the escalating cost of living... People realizing that help isn't coming soon and lowering their expectations to survival mode.
Basic Access is something that many people don't have in this community. It is a function of opportunity. As I have stated time and time again, look at the income levels in this area. Yes our cost of living is lower in comparison to some larger areas, but that is a direct correlation of the cost of labor function, which is the number one cost of most businesses and which has been suppressed in our area for generations. There are also issues of accessibility related to connectivity. And lets be frank, we haven't done very well in making connections and working well with other fellow communities in our region.
We can change all of this by shunning those who will not work well with others. Everyone has the ability to contribute, but you can lead a horse to the recognition that they have a role to play, but you can't force them to play that role. These people will be offered their opportunity to participate, but we are out of time when it comes to begging people to join this process and help turn this community around. You are either in or you are out and those that are in are going to move forward and those that are out Bye-Bye!!!
The 10 Happiest (and Saddest) Cities in the U.S. - By Carla Fried - Mar 17, 2011
Bigger isn’t necessarily best when it comes to quality of life. In a Gallup survey released this week of the U.S. cities rated highest for overall well-being, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago all failed to crack the top 50. By contrast, nine of the top 10 spots in the survey went to mid-size cities, with the Boulder, Colorado metro area grabbing the top overall spot. The only big city that cracked the top 10 was the Washington, D.C. area.
Where to get your happy on:
The 10 Happiest Cities (Overall Ranking)
1. Boulder, CO
2. Lincoln, NE
3. Fort Collins-Loveland, CO
4. Provo-Orem, UT
5. Honolulu, HI
6. Madison, WI
7. Cedar Rapids, IA
8. Gainesville, FL
9. Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT
10. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV
At the other end of the spectrum, among the 188 metropolitan areas Gallup focused on, these regions turned up the least-contented residents:
The 10 Saddest Cities in America
179. Utica-Rome, NY
180. Prescott, AZ
181. Lake Havasu City-Kingman, AZ
182. Spartanburg, SC
183. Hickory-Lenoir- Morganton, NC
184. Fort Smith, AR-OK
185. Redding, CA
186. Beaumont-Port Arthur, TX
187. Youngstown-Warren- Boardman, OH-PA
188. Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH
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Thursday, March 17, 2011
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13 comments:
But don't forget: "Garbage is still getting picked up. Fires are still being put out. And bad guys are still going to jail."
They go to jail, but they don't seem to stay too long since, "everyone deserves a bond." Even waiting for trial on 3 or 4 previous felony charges, you can still bond right out and keep on committing crimes.
I grew up in and still visit one of the happiest regions (Washington DC) frequently. Yes, we have a lot of needs in this MSA, but we also don't have lenghty commutes,unattainable real estate, high personal property taxes, and suburban spread. I know I am happier here-even on a bad day!
Folks, this survey isn't about your personal happiness or your personal anecdotes. It is about the overall welfare of this community, from the top to the bottom. It is about the haves versus the have nots. It is about the ability to have personal growth in this community.
Sure, it's perfect for the person who wants to come here and wind down their life, but what about those who need to earn a living, have a good standard of living, and build a nest egg for retirement.
It is like Harry and I were laughing last year about a slogan that Hickory should push, if they want to remain on this road to nowhere, except retirement.
Hickory, A great place to die.
You're not wrong James. But the pretty to look at, rotten in the core that is the Hickory Metro, didn't just start. The conditions that currently exist are the fruit of the seeds sewn decades ago. The entire area was controlled, outside growth discouraged through outrageous real estate prices, and existed for one reason; to take advantage of an unskilled or semi-skilled labor force that was, for the most part, lacking in education and any sort of trade skill, beyond a few simple tasks to knot some thread together or screw wood together to make a piece of furniture. Despite the illusion projected otherwise, this was the propaganda of the corporations that 'built' this valley, as they kept wages low, and grew themselves then, when the time was ripe, moved to China, or sold to another larger corporation that moved them to China, for the next act in the play. With the single sentence never too far from the mind as a plausible reason for what they'd done; "That's just good business." And the people, the people to whom this was done, paid homage to these robber barons, are left to scrape by the best they can. Doubt the veracity of that statement? Look in the Hickory Daily Record at the number of foreclosure notices. Is that true of all? No, but it is true of most. This region failed due to the singular lack of foresight to diversify and expand. Now people have the ability to see outside this little slice of heaven and know that what they've been sold is a lie. Not everyone knows that though. And what holds for the future? Well if you look at the Catawba County EDC, you will learn its working very hard to bring technology into this region. Technology that has no labor base to support it, I might add. Kinda makes you wonder with so many people in this region out of work exactly what the end goal is with that sort of emphasis, doesn't it? And if some other industry does come into the region that fits the skills of the local labor force, well, that promise of non-unionized low wage labor is dangled as a carrot. The key to a happy corporation is a controllable and docile labor force, after all. Then if you dare decry what you see as injustice, you are described as hostile, or a socialist, or a liberal, or any one of probably six or seven equally vile terms, simply because you don't agree with 'their' values, which in truth is, the antebellum values of the Confederate South. You have the wealthy landed gentry, and you have everyone else. The notion of a middle class exists as a delusion to proliferate the haves.
Anonymous above,
there isn't a person alive who wouldn't say that I am a socialist and I pretty much agree with most everything that you state above. The geniuses that want to tell you that you are a socialist for espousing a critical thinking point of view need to explain how we are ranked dead last amongst metro areas in the State of NC in per capita income and that is by a couple of thousand dollars less than the next lowest area.
We don't only rank at the bottom of this survey, we rank at the bottom of every social and economic survey that has come out over the last SEVERAL years.
I do believe that technology is the way out. When I point to our issues, I am not here just to complain. I am here for solutions and technology and technological manufacturing is very important to move this area towards a renaissance.
You point towards the working class people in this community and I agree with you that they have gotten a bad deal, but what about their ambivalence and how it has contributed towards the degradation of their personal quality of life. They don't have to smoke, they don't have to overconsume alcohol and food. These are personal poor decisions that they have made.
As far as people such as ourselves, it is incumbent that we wake these people up and point them towards a better way, while leading by example. That is what the prosperous people of this community should be doing. Not gorging at the public trough. Public and Corporate Welfare is worse, in my opinion, than social welfare. Social Welfare is designed to create a safety net. Richy Rich welfare is designed to create a social club for those who pretend to be elite.
Technology is the way to grow. Diversity is crucial to an established economic base. But it can't be all one thing at the expense of another. At one time, this area was the world leader in fiber optic cable production, in the declining wake of furniture and textiles. That peaked in less than 2 decades.
I too agree that people can be their own worst enemy. No, they don't have to engage in those behaviors, but when you've seen 3 and 4 generations of relatives engage in the same behavior, and the words, "this life was good enough for me..." echo daily in your ears as you grow up, what hope do you have for a better life? So in homes where meat was all fried and bread and potatoes were staples because they were cheap, you ate as much as you wanted because you had fields to plow. For those that accepted factory work, there were still fields to work when that was done. Primarily because one couldn't subsist on one of those things alone; it took revenue from both to survive. If you were a child growing up in that environment, education became secondary to scratching out a means to survive, so education fell by the wayside. That happened generation after generation and it exists to an extent today. People supersize meals to maximize their spending choices. They aren't working, but they still want as much as they can get for the smallest amount paid. Look at what a bag of potatoes cost as opposed to the cost of enough fresh vegetables for a salad. Sure, the potatoes are empty calories, but you get quite a few meals out of that bag of potatoes. You get one meal from the fresh vegetables.
The final aspect is leadership. As long as the leaders in this area avail themselves with a particular dogma that promotes the sole interest of business over the people, things will not change. As long as those people are hoodwinked into walking into the polls and voting a straight party ticket, their situation will not improve. But the question is, how do you communicate, "look stupid, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face" without saying those words and offending those people? I believe they aren't stupid, but they've played for so long with a fixed deck, they believe everything the dealer says and reject what their own eyes see. And the truth is in what is done by those elected officials, not in what they say. Getting people to open their eyes and see what is going on, and not listen to the rhetoric, that is how to turn this around. Now, if I only knew HOW to do that.
I guess I should say I'm not anti business, even though it might sound like it. It takes both business and labor working together to make things work. When the one has an unfair and disproportionate advantage, then you have a ruling class and serfs. Not free men and women who can make choices to better themselves and their community, but instead make choices just to survive.
People in this MSA are sorely lacking in self-determination abilities. Yes, I do know these are correlated with education and jobs and happiness. But moving on from the chicken or egg argument, education is now and has always been the fast track out of poverty. Entrepreneurial pursuits are now and have always been the fastest way to create jobs. We spend too much time complaining in this region about our incompetent politicians, our misguided economic developers and our overpaid leaders. Aspire to be a self-determined human: set a goal, get an education, talk to people about possibilities, evaluate your options, create a job for yourself, and mentor someone else.
Agreed!
How simple!!! While you provide a glimpse of how things should be in a vacuum, it is not illustrative of how things are. Perhaps with time that 10:1 ratio of enterpreneurial starts:successes can improve itself, but not without the other changes voiced in this post to make an environment of success remotely possible. I wrote those two previous long winded posts, I am educated, and I have worked long and hard for many years and enjoyed a modicum of success. I also know that is happening now, what has went on the past, isn't about me, singular, in the abstract. It's about us. An entire group of people that want to work, make a living, raise their children, and not be in want. You try to spin this situation to individual choice and determination. To make those choices, they have to be available for you to make. Life and circumstance often dictate otherwise. Still not convinced? Take a look at what is presently happening. Our local legislators are sponsoring the increase of magnet schools in the state. Going to lift the cap. That is step one. The next phase to come about will be vouchers to help the elites pay for their child's private education at the expense of all the others. If these measures are passed, and they will be, only the ruling class will be educated, and that will leave everyone else. It's hard to eat caviar on a tuna income. It's hard to get an education when the teachers and resources are being siphoned off to fund those 'with the best chance of success.' That's called a wise investment in the language of those in charge and good business.
Number 8 comment anonymous - this is just my opinion, but that is a bunch of gobblety-gook... "sorely lacking in self-determination abilities" -- are you saying that people aren't motivated, that they don't have the gumption to make things happen?
I know so many people in this area from the educated class that can't find a decent job in this area, because there aren't any available. They bust their buns in jobs with no meaning just trying to make ends meet. Do you understand how that hurts the psyche?
I also know people who don't have expertise in the field they are practicing, but because Daddy or Mommy is one of the Knob-Hobbers in the community they are able to walk right into the family business or friend's business and take up a space and get a good paycheck.
Now don't get me wrong, because I believe in family loyalty and taking care of friends, but what I am pointing to is the broken Economic model in this area. You say that we shouldn't complain about the powers that be in this area. Are you espousing that even through corruption that we should stick our noses to the grindstone and forge ahead, while the fatcats scrape the cream off the top and pass it along to their cronies?
You see, the wealthy in this community have rigged the game. They aren't going to play by the rules or the mentality that you describe above. They have their Boss Hogg shuffleboard tournament going on and the rest of us aren't invited. For the most part, they aren't crazy dangerous, because they are so bumbling, bungling, and incompetent; but they are harmful because they are forcing upon us a status quo that maintains their big fish in a small pond attitudes at the expense of potential growth for the entire community.
I know I put more work into mentoring, working, and living a modern day 21st century renaissance lifestyle than 99.9% of this community. The only people who support me are those who know me and talk to me and understand what the mission is. The Status Quoers don't understand it, because they lead a lifestyle rooted (more like rutted) in a routine that was set long ago and they aren't going to change until they get whambazzled off of their moorings. Anything outside of their routine is foreign to them and they are scared to death of change.
I don't want people to worry, because there are those of us that are working to flip this place upside down. The other day I was at a meeting where we talked about capital. There are two ways that you can raise capital. You either get it from people inside the area or outside of the area, We need someone with enough money or authority to come in here and take over the game -- And we can do that. That would get people singing a different tune quick.
The other thing we have to do is take things away from communities that will not cooperate and place them in communities that are progressive and do care about EVERYONE in their community and not just the CLUB.
That is what it is going to take to change the momentum around here. It isn't about what I say or what the local Status Quo people say. It is the fact that all of these studies have consistently ranked us (Hickory) at the BOTTOM!!! They aren't picking on us. There is a reason for that and it is going to take a shift of mindsets towards real community development and accountability directed towards that to change. As I said, You are either for that or against that and if you are against these positive, goal oriented, impactful changes, then Bye-Bye!!!
Silence DoGood does understand the lifestyle of the horse-blindered simple lifestyle of the "Elites" in our area.
What is funny is they want you to be an Entrepreneur, but they also want to tell you how to run it. And then to try to make it successful, it is going to have to be gravitationally pulled and located in an area of their choosing, which is most likely by ranking 1)Downtown 2) Northwest Hickory near Downtown or 3) Out by the Mall.
How about this choice ---- Nowhere near Hickory!!! - bwahahahaha!!!
I wouldn't sell myself short James. Right now, you are probably viewed as being an annoyance. If you ever rise to the level of threat, there will be an attempt to convert you or ostrasize you. And their resources are boundless in that regard. Which is why I remain in relative obscurity. I like being irritating to those who maintain that status quo and consume resources for all in the perpetuation of self. It's very hard to attack what you can't pinpoint.
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