West Virginia, Hate Crimes, and the Perceptions of the Rest of America to the Isolation of Rural Appalachia

I'm listening to the radio one morning and I hear a story about a young woman being brutally assaulted, raped, tortured, you name it, occurring in the suburbs of Charleston, WV. Given that I live out in Chesapeake, VA I figured it was worth listening to because it took the disc jockeys about 5 minutes to tell the story. I thought back to my own experiences with West Virginia, visiting and having lived there for a year. It was a weird yet different type of experience; I stayed to myself, living in a small town close to the Virginia state line and commuting an hour to work. West Virginia is more or less on the East Coast, next to Virginia, which has made a fortune through government contracts and real estate recently as of the last few decades where the suburbs of Washington DC grew from small towns with a rural atmosphere into large wealthy suburbs where some of the richest Americans live. So much so that parts of Virginia that were Washington DC at one time have been turned back over to the Commonwealth; the Northern part of the state which has been transformed into a post-urban oasis of 12 lane highways, subway routes and tall glass office towers that can be viewed from the interstate.