I’ll give the author a modicum of credit, I didn’t know wood banks were a thing, so at least I learned something. But gotta lambast them everywhere else.
Rural America knows the truth long before the rest of the country feels it.
Rural America wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them in the ass. This is what they voted for, a silver spoon city slicker who calls functioning institutions “the deep state” before totally destroying them, to their delight.
The article is full of this coddling “woe is they” language.
Rural families don’t get to pretend. … They also know what it means when everything gets privatized except the consequences.
What a load of baloney. Rural voters have been playing pretend my entire life, to the tune of 64% support for Trump in 2024. They’ve been pretending that piss-down economics works since the 80’s. Maybe you mean they can’t afford to pretend, but they’ve been happily running a deficit on that front and won’t stop even if they freeze in the winter.
So I say let them freeze. They can beg for scrap wood and call it charity, because that’s exactly what they wanted.
Firewood banks are a fantastic tool for teaching rural people that socialism is actually fucking great.
Assuming that ALL rural people voted a singular way and have singular beliefs is incredibly prejudiced and dangerous. I live in a northeastern US city that has been solidly blue for my entire life, but I still see plenty of houses and cars with Trump merch. Heck, a lot of rural people have been disenfranchised by voter suppression tactics. A lot of these people are illiterate. They’re victims.
And where do you draw the line? This inevitably leads to “purity testing” all of the “blue” folks to figure out just how “blue” they are, and that’s kind of gross.
These people are my neighbors and fellow humans. Give them their fucking firewood, food stamps, libraries, healthcare, and all of the other material support any reasonable government should in 2025.
The real enemies are the wealthy elites. The fossil fuel magnates, the wealthy elites who own the land and control the lumber. They absolutely love that you’re picking on a bunch of uneducated and powerless poor people and drawing attention away from the people with power who made the system this way.