I, too, sing America

[mme_hardy]

(warning: this is personal in the extreme.)

After the election, I've seen a lot of hand-wringing about how the urban elites just don't understand rural America -- often, regrettably, phrased as "the real America", buttressed by zillions of interviews with small-town Trump voters expressing their rage and frustration with the people in the cities, especially the coastal cities.

Some of this is by conservative elites wanting to punish liberals; others are by earnest liberals wanting to know Where We Went Wrong.

Here's the thing. A lot of us city people got there after growing up rural. A lot of us know quite well what small-town and rural life is, and we rejected it. A lot of rural communities are hollowed out because the kids don't stay. Sometimes it's no jobs; other times it's "how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm."

Four out of five Americans live in urbanized areas. 80% of us. That sounds pretty damn real to me.

The urban elite reporters ought to be doing a few stories about "I interviewed N people in a working-class neighborhood of a city, and here's what they had to say about how they voted." That's just as representative of "ordinary Americans" as the people in a hollowed-out coal town.

Comments

[garpu]

Yes. God, I understand middle America just fine. I was born in St. Cloud, MN and grew up northwest of Chicago to a working-class family in a shitty suburb that was way below the state's poverty line. (Most kids in my classes got free lunches.) Most of my dad's family is living in rural Minnesota. I know just how damn insular that part of the country is and how it refuses to understand anything outside of its narrow borders. I also understand that my dad moved the hell away from rural Minnesota to give me a shot of growing up without some of the shit he did. (And to have more opportunities.)

But what do I know? I'm just a liberal elite with a "useless" Ph.D. (Not saying you're saying this. It's the attitude of a lot "back home." No way could I ever move back there, even if the cost of living is way cheaper than what we're paying now.)

[mme_hardy]

I got my hair done to prepare for high-school graduation. The hairdresser asked what I was doing, and I said I was going to Dartmouth College. (I was way proud of this because Ivy.) "Where's that?" (I was way used to answering that, too. ) "New Hampshire."

"Why would you ever go so far from home?"

Questions like that are part of it, lady.

[garpu]

Yup. Even in my suburb-of-origin, so many people never went further than the next town over for community college. And it's not *that* small of a suburb, either.

Dartmouth's a good school, too.

[mme_hardy]

It's a very, very weird good school. I was happy there, found my vocation there, and met my husband there, so.

[recessional]

...see at least everyone in FSJ understood that certain people were going to run away as fast as they possibly could. They might or might not understand why, but it was a very established phenomenon!

(I have often posited that this phenomenon is why the arts communities in Vancouver are so very . . . not hostile/competitive/elitist? So many of us literally fled towns we didn't fit in the moment we could and we get here and we're just SO PLEASED to be in a place where we don't feel like ALIENS, omg?! that it's like "I totes don't care what kind of art you do YOU ALSO LIKE ART! YAY! I'M HOME!")

[thatyourefuse]

"I'd wonder... you know, if I were a king... I'd wonder why people were happier living in squalor in Ankh-Morpork than staying back home."

(Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)

[movingfinger]

It's part of that myth of America as a nation of Jeffersonian farmers. I don't think it's been true for a century and a half.

[ellen_fremedon]

I keep meaning to read Hollowing Out the Middle; the researchers focused on a town very near mine, in my high school's athletic conference.

Apparently halfway through their year in residence, they went to the high school administration and said "OMG! We just realized--by focusing all of your effort on getting the highest achievers into college and out of Iowa forever, you've been ensuring your town's slow death!" and the administrators just blinked at them like "...that's our job?"

No one wants their kids to stay. Even the people who themselves want to stay don't want their own kids to stay--but that means they need someone else's kids to stay, to take care of them. So everyone wants to turn off the entire educational system the moment their own kids are out of college, and as the population ages the resentment for the schools and universities grows, and the lifeboat mentality among teachers and administrators gets more entrenched.

[rinue]

This is fascinating. It would never have occurred to me.

[oursin]

Possibly it is not dissimilar to the whole British - or perhaps specifically English - pastoral mythmaking, which really only gets going when the majority of the population is living in towns and has had the Industrial Revolution. The Lost Golden Age - that never was, somehow More Real than how people now actually live.

[emceeaich]

Valorizing rural bigots got us into this situation. So very much YES.

[kernezelda]

This is it, exactly. Both of my parents came from a town so small it had only one stoplight, one private school (for whites only), and where no white child of any good family went to the public school (with black students). This little town still doesn't have its own grocery store. Mom and Dad moved away from their families to a coastal town in a different state to get better jobs. They lived here their entire adult lives, and I had the exposure/benefit of going to public school with all kinds of children from a slightly more diverse background, and to college with even more exposure to people and ideas. And then I found LJ, and an even more diverse community, and I can attest to how hard it is to unlearn so many things I learned about the world--unknowingly at my parents'/community's knees.

[dejla]

Very true. I left behind me several small towns, and a larger Plains State city to end up in NYC and I have never looked back.

But I may find myself forced out of NYC once I retire -- I'm not wealthy and this city is no longer interested in the middle-class.

[mme_hardy]

My husband and I know we can't possibly afford to retire in the Bay Area.

[dejla]

And that just sucks, doesn't it? Having to find someplace you can afford where you won't have the things you're used to and where you may not have any friends close either.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, this is a thing I don't understand, and it's the same thing in Canada. Most of us live in cities but there's this disproportionate emphasis on glorifying the rural.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I grew up there. City is better.

[madrobins]

Thank you.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

I grew up in a town ,migrated to city,then rural and back to city and now in town again.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've bounced around a lot too. My family seems to be born with a wandering foot -- my parents do genealogy, and very few of my forebears are buried where they were born.

I've read that this is one of the weird things about Americans by European standards, and especially the willingness to move vast distances for a job.