On Thursday September 26, Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region. It soon carved a path of destruction through Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, and it has claimed over 250 American lives, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland United States since Katrina in 2005.

While the news cycle has since moved on, the hardest-hit communities have not. They will spend years picking up the pieces—especially those in western North Carolina, where significant parts of Asheville, Chimney Rock, Swannanoa, Montreat, and Biltmore Village were wiped off the map by floods. In many places, essential infrastructure like roads, bridges, power, water, and internet will need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

One of the more concerning revelations in the response to Hurricane Helene was Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas’ warning that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “does not have the funds to make it through the season” or address the “imminent” needs of Americans hit by the hurricane. This, despite Mayorkas assuring Americans as recently as June that the agency was “tremendously prepared” for the upcoming hurricane season.

According to the New York Post, since 2022, FEMA has spent $1.4 billion in taxpayer funds—not on the taxpayers who need them, but on taking care of migrants. The Department of Homeland Security has since clarified that Congress never authorized those funds to go to American citizens. However, the question remains why the federal government has allocated so much funding to non-citizens while thousands of Americans are languishing in the aftermath of Helene.

Adding to the concerning picture were widespread reports from North Carolina residents of an inadequately slow response by the federal government, as well as claims by Elon Musk and others that private citizens who stepped up to help with food and supply were obstructed by government officials.

Moreover, according to independent reporting, 26 out of the 28 counties in North Carolina hardest hit by Helene voted for Trump in 2020—supplying 527,000 votes for Trump versus 113,000 for Biden—and may now face major obstacles accessing the ballot box on November 5.

Hurricane Helene presents us with a sobering microcosm of modern American politics. It is not the story you will read about in the national newspapers or watch on cable news. It is a portrait of the forgotten Americans—those overlooked in today’s political conversations and neglected by the government that ostensibly represents them.

Before the arrival of Helene, the Appalachian towns of North Carolina had already faced a hurricane of social and economic havoc over many decades.

Once a hub for American manufacturing—furniture, textiles, and paper mills in particular—the state’s far western region has undergone rapid economic contraction since the 1970s, with globalization in general and federal agreements like NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), in particular, taking many such jobs offshore. As the population declined, workers who chose to stay were forced to take low-wage jobs in retail, tourism, or healthcare.

The opioid crisis has hit North Carolina with particular force. According to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, more than 36,000 North Carolinians lost their lives to drug overdoses between 2000 and 2022.

Waves of cheap immigrant labor have also threatened the job security of locals in the state. While region-specific numbers are somewhat elusive, the American Immigration Council estimates the immigrant population of North Carolina on the whole at almost 9 percent, over a third of whom are illegal aliens. The vast majority of these approximately 314,000 unlawful entrants are of working age.

In addition to these challenges, the geographic isolation and mountainous terrain of western North Carolina makes roads and communication infrastructure expensive to build and maintain. And it goes without saying that the region is sorely lacking in political clout.

Perhaps the silver lining that accompanied Hurricane Helene’s dark clouds is that a region long forgotten by the federal government is back on the radar.

Not everyone in Washington is listening to the concerns of remote Appalachians. But some have heard their distressed calls and are now awake to the decades-long decline of such regions.

Maybe there is still some hope for the forgotten Americans. But ultimately, it’s perhaps a reminder for each of us to look after our neighbors and fellow citizens, long before and after disaster strikes. And long before or after any government cares.

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Image credit: public domain