The View From Flyover Country Quotes

“The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that problem exists. Telling people not to complain is a way of keeping social issues from being addressed. It trivializes the grievances of the vulnerable, making the burdened feel like burdens. Telling people not to complain is an act of power, a way of asserting that one's position is more important than another one's pain. People who say "stop complaining" always have the right to stop listening. But those who complain have often been denied the right to speak.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems must matter -- for they structure the limitations of their lives -- are locked out of the discussion.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Charity, as a supplement to justice, should be applauded. But charity as a substitute for justice is neither charity nor justice. It is cruelty.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Americans should not fear riots. They should fear apathy. They should fear acquiescence. They should not fear each other. But it is understandable, now, that they do.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Poverty is a sentence for the crime of existing. Poverty is a denial of rights sold as a character flaw.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“It is easy, when people feel frightened and abandoned, for a demagogue to exploit those feelings of despair for political gain. It is easy for that demagogue to translate fear into fanaticism, to shift extremism into the mainstream and market it under the guise of populism. By the time buyer's remorse hits, a new and more brutal political culture has arisen. A gaslit nation becomes engulfed in flames.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“All social movements are dismissed at some point as complaining. Over time, they are recognized as speaking truth to power.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“I think right-wing populists hate the `liberal elite` more than economic elites because they've grabbed all the jobs where you get paid to do something that isn't just for the money - the pursuit of art, or truth, or charity", notes David Graeber, an anthropologist whose ideas helped shape the Occupy movement. "All they can do if they want to do something bigger than themselves and still get paid is join the army.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“College is a purchased loyalty oath to an imagined employer.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“The Iraq war is notable not only for journalistic weakness, but for journalistic futility: the futility of fact itself. Fact could not match the fabrications of power. Eventually, our reality shifted to become what they conceived. “I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me,” wrote Bush speechwriter David Frum. That was the message of the Iraq war: there is no point in speaking truth to power when power is the only truth.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Paranoia is aggression masked as defense. It was paranoia (and hubris, and greed) that caused the run-up to the Iraq War; it is paranoia that leads to thousands of innocent Muslims being profiled in New York; it is paranoia that led to Trayvon Martin being shot to death on the street. In Congress, paranoia is less a style than a sickness, employed less with flourish than with fear. Paranoia is the refusal to recognize others except as filtered through ourselves—and how do Americans see themselves? Afraid, afraid, afraid.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Mistaking wealth for virtue is a cruelty of our time. By treating poverty as inevitable for parts of the population, and giving impoverished workers no means to rise out of it, America deprives not only them but society as a whole. Talented and hardworking people are denied the ability to contribute, and society is denied the benefits of their gifts. Poverty is not a character flaw. Poverty is not emblematic of intelligence. Poverty is lost potential, unheard contributions, silenced voices.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Dependence may be the primary trait of the millennial generation, but it is a structural dependence, caused not by "laziness" or "narcissism" but by a lack of options or social mobility.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Charity, as a supplement to justice, should be applauded. But charity as a substitute for justice is neither charity nor justice. It is cruelty. The”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Teaching, nursing, social work, child care, and other “pink collar” professions do not pay poorly because, as Slate’s Hanna Rosin argues, women “flock to less prestigious jobs,” but because jobs are considered less prestigious when they are worked by women. The jobs are not worth less—but the people who work them are supposed to be.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“The condemnation of digital media has two sides. There is a legitimate claim that digital media has given old viciousness new visibility. . .. Certain facets of social media—speed, anonymity, the ability to "dox"—have changed the nature of harassment, making it easier to accomplish and less likely to be redressed.

But are the mainstream media any different in their biases and cruelty? They do not appear to be. Mainstream media cruelty is actually more dangerous, for it incorporates language that, were it blogged by an unknown, would likely be written off as the irrelevant ramblings of a sociopath.

Instead, the prestige of old media gives bigoted ranting respectability. Even in the digital age, old media define and shape the culture, repositioning the lunatic fringe as the voice of reason.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“The internet would seem an antidote to conspiracy theories and state secrecy, but it has only amplified both.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“It could always be worse, they say. They don't like to say that it could always be better, because that would require redress. Ranking”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Exponential increases in university tuition have erased the possibility of education as a path out of poverty. These are not revelations - these are hard limitations faced by most Americans.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“You are not your job. But you are how you treat people. So what can you do? You can work your hardest and do your best. You can organize and push for collective change. You can hustle and scrounge and play the odds. But when you fall, know that millions are falling with you. Know that it is, to a large extent, out of your hands. And when you see someone else falling, reach out your hands to catch them. --Originally”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Poverty is a sentence for the crime of existing. Poverty”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Changing your major will not change a broken economy.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Most of the middle-class ‘liberal’ parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society,” he writes. The plight of the McDonald’s worker, like McDonald’s itself, is seen as outside their purview.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“The absence of complaining should be taken as a sign that something is rotting in a society. Complaining is beautiful. Complaining should be encouraged. Complaining means you have a chance.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“When the bubbles popped, and the jobs disappeared, and the debt soared, and the desperation hit, Americans were told to stay positive. Stop complaining—things will not be like this forever. Stop complaining—this is the way things have always been. Complainers suffer the cruel imperatives of optimism: lighten up, suck it up, chin up, buck up. In other words: shut up.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Who are the telegenically dead? The telegenically dead are the dead, plain and simple. That we see them is the novelty, that we grieve them is human, and to be human, today, is a hostile act. To grieve is to acknowledge loss, to acknowledge loss is to affirm life, to affirm life is to contemplate how it was taken.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Free speech means not only the right to offend, but the right to defend.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“You begin to have nostalgia for disappointment,because at least that means you had expectations”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Ability is discounted without credentials, but the ability to purchase credentials rests, more often than not, on family wealth.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior