Ya know, it's not uninteresting... [View all]

[PCIntern]

many years ago I went up to the Williamsport, PA "suburbs" (read: Appalachia) to visit a friend of mine, also a dentist. He lived at the time in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road where there were 'houses' every 200-500 yards. He was expecting me at about 8 PM, but I got there at about 10, so I was pretty late and there were no cellular phones in those days. I knocked on his kitchen door, and he answered the door HOLDING A SHOTGUN BARREL DOWN. He greeted me warmly and I almost immediately asked him why he was armed. He told me that you never know in the "country" and it didn't do any harm to protect oneself, and that most of the folk approached knocks on the door the same way out there.

I have no idea if that was true or false, but he went on to tell me that "self-protection" was so ingrained up there that although the area was quite depressed what with the closure of Bethlehem Steel and the Sylvania plant, as well as most of the other industry, if someone ran for office and promised that they could obtain for the region new roads, improved infrastructure, industry, jobs for everyone who wanted one, new schools, adequate cable TV (almost absent in those days up there), and general economic improvement, BUT they wanted to ban private ownership of bazookas and anti-tank weapons, they'd lose in a landslide. And he wasn't kidding.

This is in fact, what's going on.