We've long known that there's something cyclical about poverty, chronic drug abuse and other life-defeating circumstances. We in Kern County hear descriptors like "Appalachia of the West" and shrug, often chalking up the conditions that create cultures of pervasive hopelessness to laziness or ignorance or Darwinian selection.
The widespread perception about these ills, particularly common in the poverty-wracked Kern County communities of the Kern River Valley, Oildale and Taft, is that nothing can be done. Squalor will always exist — somewhere.
A growing body of research suggests that something can in fact be done.
The condition known as toxic stress — a continuous, ongoing trauma born of fear, gloom and lack of nurture — literally becomes part of one's DNA and, as such, is passed along to new generations, where the same debilitating environment reinforces it.
The first steps in conquering any disease are defining it, understanding how it spreads and identifying possible paths to a cure. Researchers have now done that.
The hard part is staying on those paths.
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