The poor, backward, benighted South. It is, according to a recent series of articles in the Washington Post, "a region left behind."
We've heard this story before. Have we ever stopped hearing this story from those who know better?
Concentrating on the plight of several individuals in the Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, the Post stated the region has an "increasingly pervasive and isolating form of extreme poverty."
The newspaper, though, placed the blame not on the liberal social engineers who decided 50 years ago they would declare a "war on poverty" and end such a scourge. Twenty-two trillion dollars later, here we are.
The series didn't question the war's policies that made it easier to not be married and have children, to not work and receive cash assistance, or to not be educated or trained but to expect a good job.
Instead, it doubled down on the lack of government fixes, suggesting governments, especially, in the South, haven't done enough with federal pass-through money. As if the ever-expanding growth of entitlement spending - 20 percent of federal government spending in 1970 and 48.7 percent in 2015, for instance - need only grow larger.
Especially egregious in its rewrite of history was the mention, in an article on the job search of single parent Lauren Scott in the Atlanta area, that "rising real estate prices have pushed the poor out of urban centers and farther from jobs."
Fifty years ago, not rising real estate prices but the same social engineers who'd declared a war on poverty were the ones who demanded that cities empty out what were then called inner-city ghettos and move the poor out to the suburbs where they could find better houses, integrate the communities and attend nicer schools. How dare the cities, it was asked, continue to allow the poor to live in the squalor of its downtowns?
Once ensconced in the suburbs, according to the article involving Scott, "low-income people" grew "more reliant on public transit networks that [in the South] are among the weakest of quality in the country."
Further, back in the good, old days, the Post said, those same poor also received welfare - "cash payments from the government that were available to nearly all in deep poverty, regardless of whether they had a job."
But a bipartisan majority in the mid-1990s agreed the federal government had a fatal spending problem and decided, at the very least, that people who received cash assistance and could work should do so. Welfare rolls decreased by about 50 percent within five years, and child poverty dropped precipitously.
However, in 2012, the Obama administration directed that states could waive the work requirement if they chose to do so.
The article also noted that "the deeply impoverished in the Deep South (like Scott, who is black) are less likely to receive the help of a spouse." At the dawn of the war on poverty, 82 percent of blacks lived in married, two-parent households. Today, 72 percent of black children are raised in a single-parent household. And in the Deep South, 46 percent of those mothers live in poverty, according to Census Bureau data.
Scott, who is not married, did not believe she could get pregnant when she met an old friend. The pregnancy and child complicated her process for getting and keeping a job, and the father is nowhere to be found.
The article does not mention what chances, if any, the single mother had about her education. Neither does it mention the statistics about how much better off people are - regarding poverty, living conditions and chance of family success - if they have some type of post-high school education.
The Post series also lacks details about the myriad jobs available in the South to those who can scrape together the wherewithal to finish a mere post-high school certificate or program, not to mention a two- or four-year degree.
In Tennessee, with a minimum of requirements, students can get a two-year, community-college degree at virtually no cost. Other states in the region offer different forms of assistance.
The bottom line is every word about the individuals and their specific, sad situations in the Post series may not be exaggerated. And it always could be argued that schools or transportation or pay could be better. But the stories don't speak for the South as a whole, which as a region is filled with opportunity, jobs and education for most of those willing to sacrifice, work hard and exhibit personal responsibility.
Since the Civil War, the South has been seen as an unwanted stepchild, the region of which the rest of the country is a little bit ashamed. Yet, it could be argued that no region has come as far, changed as much and has as much to offer.