I saw the same thing; told my husband it looked like a scene out of Gone With the Wind when Scarlett returned to the farm towards the end of the war and her mother had died and her father wasn't all there... everyone needed her to tell them what to do... this was an echo of that... and sent chills down my spine that this has been allowed to happen 140 years after the Civil War.
Great analogy, they have lost thier ability to act and think on their own. Talk about dehumanizing an entire group of people, breaks my heart.