I grew up in a suburban area so I am out of touch with the rural experience.
Because the article is comparing the past with the present, I am curious what parents were doing in the 90s in your area? And, what are parents doing nowadays?
I'm assuming, either car or bus. And I can't imagine that would have changed since the 90s unless there used to be a school much closer.
> Many of the immigrant workers used on farms are treated like slaves, locked up when they aren't in the fields or kept in overcrowded housing without basic utilities.
While conditions aren't what most people consider comfortable, this is at best a major exaggeration. No, there aren't portable toilets out there (some farms do have them) - we'd go off to the side of the field, do our business, and get back to work. No one actively relieved themselves on any product. Most of us kept a damp towel around our necks for cleaning and heat relief, so that's what we would use. Every farm I worked on that supplied to grocers or sold independently had a washing/sanitizing system as part of the operation. So while it's not operating room clean, it's pretty damn clean by the time it got to the consumer. Also, all the mistreatment of migrant workers I experienced was only ever by other migrant workers.
I did realize something interesting when there and it speaks to my previous point: most of the abuse was amongst the workers themselves. A lot of times a farmer/producer will hire "a guy" to do a job, one that acts as a contractor. Almost all the time they were migrants. Most times they were legal, but sometimes not. It was up to them to do the actual resourcing - the farmer/producer has no time for that. It would be that contracted resource doing most of the maltreatment/underpaying/mismanagement, and they would almost always treat the entire group badly. I was lucky in that I was there as a family member to the farmer just trying to make summer cash.
You're never going to not have some population of people with influence and resources attempt to take advantage of people without those things - that is a story that's as old as time. But statistically these that you have listed are all one-offs - that doesn't mean that we shouldn't care - but it does mean that the tone of your first post is very much over-stated.
I started to downvote this comment but when you finished with
> There is no longer any cultural center to even deviate from when everyone lives in a personalized media landscape.
I realized you hit the nail no the head. Everyone needs to feel special in their own little world. As far as I can tell this is not turning out to be a good thing. Humans are social creatures: we must learn to cohabitate without denigrating one another. The personalized media landscape has done nothing but lead to fracturing.
