Reply #22: The United States looks like this. [View All]

[hunter]

Everyone with any money is on a permanent guided tour that hides these places. It's sort of like being a tourist in the old Soviet Union -- your bus always takes a convuluted route that avoids the really bad neighborhoods.

But if you take random samples of places, as an ecologist might, a lot of the United States looks like those pictures.

In my own experience, rural poverty can be much more dangerous. The rules for keeping out of trouble in urban places are pretty much the same everywhere in the United States. But in rural places everything is at the whim of the local drug lords. I try very hard to avoid rural places where the biggest industry is making methamphetimines or growing pot.