COMMENT BY
Tom Paine from Fayetteville, AR
COMMENT ABOUT PLACE
Fayetteville, AR
COMMENT
Low cost of living but strangely conservative
I’ve lived in Fayetteville about four years now and I’m 60. Fayetteville is chiefly a right-wing community with a very conservative state university. You’ll see why I say that. While there are many nice, normal individuals here, I’ve been annoyed and even harassed by literally *hundreds* of people about my brief, unremarkable stint in the military some forty (40) years ago. I was a common sailor with a low-level job, and I got out in 1978. The first couple of years I lived in Fayetteville one or more people either asked me about the military every day, or made a remark about it near me in public. I’ll tell you who’s responsible for this lunacy: doctors and healthcare workers who give out personal information, and Veterans Administration employees. Much of this activity is clearly illegal, and I’ve filed any number of written complaints with the authorities for years now. Many people here seem obsessed with the military, even college students from the University of Arkansas. In contrast, since 2014 only five or ten people in Fayetteville have asked me about the southern college I graduated from in 1982, or what I’ve done since. I moved to Fayetteville from Sarasota, Florida, and the same thing was going on down there, except it was worse. I’m considering moving to an entirely different part of the country.
As you might imagine, healthcare in Fayetteville is subpar and specialists are limited. Good luck getting in to see a urologist here for example. The one and only hospital here, Washington Regional, can be really bad depending on who you see. On one occasion the emergency room doctor was verbally giving me a hard time while I was flat on my back with groin pain. He made a nasty speech about me from the ER nurses station for no apparent reason at all. I filed a written complaint with the medical board. I’d rate healthcare in Fayetteville way below average for the US.