Monday, August 05, 2013

SCHOHARIE, NY, LAND OF MISFORTUNE

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Recently I was in upstate New York, where I drove through the areas of Schoharie County and Sharon Springs in particular. The area is a sleepy little place just outside from Cooperstown and about 50 miles west of Albany. If you take Rte 20 to Rte 80 and go south, you come to Cooperstown in about 20 to 30 minutes. Cooperstown prospers from the museum and the businesses at least in the summer do well both on Main Street and the surrounding area. With motels and golf courses, beaches and ancillary businesses that feed off of the main attraction, life seems good.

When I got to Sharon Springs, driving through the most beautiful country one can imagine, I wasn’t paying too much attention to the homes and businesses that surround the waysides and farms of endless cornrows. Farming seems to be an important industry and occasional large buildings that must employ people were prevalent. However I took a closer look as we left to go home.

Taking a twisting scenic route through the farms and main streets of the area, I was appalled by what I saw my fellow Americans living in. Poverty! Pure and simple rank poverty. It seems without embellishment, without exaggeration, simple growing poverty. Homes that are easy over 70 years of age, are starting to disintegrate, the structures leaning, the roofs caving, some with metal rusting coverings, not even shingles on the roofs, paint peeling or peeled away, windows shattered and grass overgrown from what seems is despair.  Driving down the main thoroughfares the stores vacant and boarded up, businesses losing their grip on customers who in turn are losing grip with all hope.

There sat a grave yard, with an abandoned church, of what faith I do not know, the stain glass shattered and missing, the entrance boarded, giving off a spooky feeling and sad sense of doom even in the morning sun as you stare into the darken forbidden interior.

One morning I looked for a place for breakfast, and located a diner off of a main highway. Stopping in I was immediately greeted by the dingy feeling one has of going into an old place, one that has lost its edge, failing. The customers: mostly older people, some farmers, crippled, hobbling to the tables and chairs, in baseball caps and suspendered jeans and coveralls. The phrase: ‘simple folk’ came to mind eating with wives that I’m sure share the physical burdens of a farm or business, in need of doctoring and medications to relieve them of their miseries. These were not the same people that populated Cooperstown: there was no life in their step, no hope in their tomorrows, all drowning in poverty and sadness. Nor was there one child that I spotted, or a young parent to guide it. It seems that the young people are gone!

That night, before I went to bed, I along with my nephew decided to visit a sports bar, have a few beers and watch the Mets on their TV. The building was a stone and wooden structure, that looked good on the outside, the brick hiding the sins of age and poverty, and was divided into two areas as you entered. To the right was a restaurant that seated my guess is about 50 to 60 people, with one long table occupied by about 6 or 7 ladies having dinner, the other side to the left was the sports bar. It was empty except for a woman sitting at the bar having a beer. There was very little to make one feel good to be there. Aside for some NY Giants logos strung along a pole-to-pole alignment, it was a bar with two flat-screen TV’s hanging from the ceiling on each side of the bar. It was a dingy and sparsely furnished area with a few tables and a pool table in the middle of the floor.

The barkeeper was a young lady who seemed bored and disinterested who was speaking to the lady drinking. Wearing tight, short shorts, she came over to us and took our order and came back with the beers. A sports bar with no customers, no life, and seems like once it had just that. The young lady looking for a better life I’m sure, instead of the dead-end job she had.

This whole scene is appalling, it should anger all Americans and it speaks to the leadership in this country. I’m not talking to just the current leadership, but the past leadership too. To allow people to suffer the damnation of poverty so wide spread as it is, to do nothing about it, and to have allowed it in the past is very troubling. These are the people that you and I vote for: who take on the glamour jobs and forget the little guy and the suffering!

When I think of how much money we are throwing away in foreign aid, in military spending, of people in authority working for the government who abuse their positions and steal from us, that money should be making itself useful in places like Sharon Springs, not in Washington D.C. where the rich have it all.

And where are the big businesses, the ones that could take some of that excess profit and pass it along? Where is their shame?

Every time I hear those words: “God bless America” I wonder now, which Americans they are talking about.

Natural gas companies are discovering Sharon’s location on the edges of the Marcellus Shale Formation. Recently developed advances in horizontal drilling or hydraulic fracturing first developed in the Burnett Shale fields of Texas now make drilling in the Northeast possible, and perhaps will lift the area somewhat. But what will IT do to the area’s natural beauty?

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