Marginalize the Margins at Your Own Peril

Today's NYT on the South's irrelevance in presidential politics. Pull quote:

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas. [Ital added]

The issue is ignorance and provincial isolation, and it's not exclusive to the American South. Ignoring it, wherever it is, may not have immediate effects (on presidential politics or anything else), but I'm going out on a limb and saying that such ignorance and isolation -- and its byproduct: nagging, pervasive fear -- is the single biggest source of sickness for the body politic, here and abroad. It breeds fundamentalist ideologies of various and sundry kinds -- We're right and everybody else is not only wrong but evil -- and that attitude has always, since the beginning of time, threatened peace and prosperity in all corners of the globe. Whether it's Vernon, Alabama, or Islamabad, Pakistan. Marginalizing it doesn't work. It didn't work in April of 1861, it didn't work in September of 2001, and it won't work now. Or ever.

The question is how does one fight ignorance and provincialism? Bombs (literal and/or rhetorical) are blunt instruments that tend to make it dig in further. The "combat," I suspect, is more hand-to-hand, and figurative. Invest in the health, education, and overall welfare of the isolated and impoverished. Wherever it is.

Honestly, I have no ingenious ideas regarding the logistics of that. It's an enormous task. But when we do undertake it, I am convinced in my bones we will finally be addressing the root causes of "terrorism" and all the other buzzword-ills we like to wring our hands over these days.