Kentucky

I have lived in Kentucky for almost a year now. It is a beautiful state with much creation to admire. However, the longer I live here, the more resentment I here from the 'natives.' That is, those who have been born and raised here. This is a picture I took about a mile from our house. This is also the former Kentucky. Untill the late 1990s, Kentucky was one of the Nation's largest tobacco producers. Then big tobacco was finally forced to admit that their products kill people, and they had to pay billions in payouts. This meant that thy didn't buy as much tobacco from the local farmers, including thousands of Kentuckians. So the government made an arrangement to pay for all the surplus tobacco so that many farmers would not fall into poverty. The only problem was that this payout didn't cover farms less than 200 acres, which left a lot of people out. I have several members in my church who are in this group of people who, because they did not have large commercial farms, were left out of the settlement. Many of these people had to either quit farming all together or plant something new (many have gone to corn). Big tobacco still makes big money, at the expense of small time farmers, and alot of distrust and resentment has been bred into future generations because of it. Sorry to be depressing, just an observation of events below the surface.