“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Locally, there were some general beliefs held: The Elmira region was economically depressed and considered to be in a backwash area of the state of New York, yet the condition was not bad enough for crisis aid. Industry had been moving away. People were out of work; the old routines of livelihood had been uprooted. There was no inspiring local leadership, and a variety of different kinds of individuals felt ill at ease, depressed and forced to the wall.

Urban renewal projects ripped up the homes of the poor and destroyed older established neighborhoods. This often involved social divisions, for the impoverished were a mixture of blacks and “lower-class” whites. The better off sat at city councils, however, and the displaced poor were not able to afford the new structures. Through various manipulations, all underground, they were kept out of the “better” neighborhoods.

(However, we think a thorough search for relationships between emotional states and the weather in our county would be most interesting. Questions of geographical limits, time, and money enter in, of course; but if the study was at all illuminating, it could be expanded to include the state of New York, for instance, then Pennsylvania — and finally the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. For Tropical Storm Agnes, which had led to the flooding, had been mammoth indeed.