"I can say with some authority that the strange, woebegone place called Appalachia and the hillbillies who inhabit it are a myth -- one devised a century ago to justify outsiders' condescension and exploitation."(O'Brian, 2003)
I am really shocked that people still look at people from West Virginia as being "Hillbillies". I have lived in West Virginia most of my life and do not feel like we are any different than any other state. Every state has some has poverty and people that seem a little "off their rocker" so I don't understand why our beautiful state has been targeted for the ridicule. When "outsiders" came to West Virginia they saw a living that was out of the ordinary, they were quick to judge the life style rather than to learn more. Just because the mountaineers had horrible hygiene because they worked hard for a living, did not mean that they were violent and uneducated as proclaimed. In the article, I find it funny that people from Kentucky said "[We]are so accustomed to murder that they do not look upon it with the horror with which it is regarded in civilized communities." I did a little research to compare the murder rate of West Virginia to other more "civilized communities". In 1960,United States: Uniform Crime Report -- State Murder Statistics shows that the state of California had 616, Texas had 824, and Virginia had 487 murders that year. The state of West Virginia had a whopping 81 murders in the year 1960. I do not think people should be worried about what is going on in our mountains and worry more about what is going on in their own state.
Resources:
O'Brien, J. (2003). Tall tales of Appalachia. The New York Times, Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/10/opinion/tall-tales-of-appalachia.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm.
United states: uniform crime report -- state statistics from 1960 - 2009. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/
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