If you want something other than the shitshow in the House, here’s a couple of things I’ve been meaning to write about but have been too blazy (busy/lazy – must credit mistermix if you use it) to write about.
First, Damar Hamlin, the 24 year-old Bills player who suffered a cardiac arrest on the field and a second one in hospital is now off the vent and is “neurologically intact,” which puts him miles ahead of the average Republican House member. He’s alive and intact because of the CPR he received on field.
Related to that, have you ever heard the story of how CPR was invented, and the black paramedics in Pittsburgh who were some of the first in the nation to perform the kind of pre-hospital care that saved Hamlin’s life? It is one hell of a story, involving a one-of-a-kind character, Dr. Peter Safar, a charity group that started by delivering vegetables in poor neighborhoods, and a bunch of cops who fought to keep their (terrible) lock on transporting patients in Pittsburgh. The book telling this story is American Sirens by Kevin Hazzard, and his interview on Fresh Air is worth a listen. Hazzard’s first book, A Thousand Naked Strangers, about his years as a paramedic in Atlanta, is also worth a read.
Second, the other day a friend was out of town, the power was out, and it was very cold. He was worried that his pipes would freeze. I told him I’d go over to his house and break a window to get in — his thought was getting a locksmith. I wondered why breaking a window was my first instinct, but then I remembered that I had spent a lot of time in the last year in rural Dakota, where you can’t get any kind of service by tradespeople. Really, it’s crazy how hard you have to work to get someone to your house to do anything (plumbing, heating, fixing locks, etc.) So, of course, my first thought was a “Dakota Doorkey”, i.e., a hammer, because rural poverty can’t support decent services.
Anyway, related to that is a good piece by Kevin Drum about rural poverty. Here’s the nut of it, but the whole thing is worth a read:
Here’s my point: Rural America has problems. These problems aren’t nearly as big as they’re often made out to be, but they do have lower incomes, a declining population, and a less educated community.
But these are almost all caused by their own free choices. They refuse to tax themselves to pay for good schools and the infrastructure needed by business. They hold on tight to their social conservatism, which drives out both the young and the educated. Then they sit around and complain that the urban liberals who support them aren’t supporting them enough.
Being rural is not like being Black or gay or female or Jewish. It’s a choice. And the rural lifestyle is also a choice. They could do the things they need to do to become more prosperous, but they don’t want to. They’re comfortable the way they are.
Open thread to talk about anything but the fools on the House floor.
JoyceH
Open thread? Okay. Other day I realized with all these headlines about “Prince Harry” that I couldn’t remember if he was a Harold Harry or a Henry Harry – had to Google it. (He’s a Henry Harry.)
Baud
Good news about Hamlin.
zhena gogolia
Thanks for the palate cleanser 🛀🧽🧹
Baud
Most the the Republican base are simultaneously victims and perpetrators. It’s sociologically interesting, but I wish we could find a way to overcome it.
UncleEbeneezer
Also can we please keep this thread free of the But It’s Only Football, Who Cares? bullshit that littered other recent threads. Thank you in advance.
Raoul Paste
The old saw is “when things get bad enough, people change”. It seems like things are pretty bad in rural America, and yet…
w3ski
I live in a very small and rural community in Ca. My wife and I are both on social security income. We are a part of the nay-sayers about bonds and the like. We can not afford our property taxes, and the tax at the register, to go up. I agree money is needed, especially for things like our fire departments, and school systems, but we just don’t have it to give. It pains me to see the crying over the needs, but I have nothing to solve their funding problems with. What else can I say? The rich have excess income to tap, the poor don’t have enough now.
w3ski
BC in Illinois
My daughter put on her FBook page, a comment by a Bills fan thanking the Bengal fans for their expressions of love and support for Damar Hamlin. And he went on:
My daughter’s comment:
trollhattan
Very relieved Damar Hamlin is rallying after his horrifying Monday night collapse. Eerily reminiscent of Christian Eriksen’s 2020 cardiac arrest during Euro 2020, except I did not happen to be watching that. He even returned to play, which must have been after some very interesting discussions with many doctors.
Alison Rose
@UncleEbeneezer: I second this emotion.
UncleEbeneezer
Question for international travelers: what do y’all use for translation on the fly? Google translate? Some other app? We are off to Mexico tomorrow and while I took Spanish in HS that was many, many years ago and I find that I often struggle to remember a particular word/phrase that I used to know. I definitely want to do my own talking (rather than letting the phone speak for me) as much as possible, just trying to figure out the easiest way to do that in regular conversation without slowing myself down too much.
UncleEbeneezer
@Alison Rose: Figured you would ;)
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
I use Google, but I can’t say I’ve actually used it often on my trips.
$8 blue check mistermix
@UncleEbeneezer: We spent a couple of months on Baja last year and the Mexicans in most of the tourist areas speak enough English to interact with tourists. That said, Google Translate works well and allows you to download a spanish/english dictionary for offline use, which I’d recommend.
Also, I used Duolingo to practice my Spanish daily. My Spanish still sucks but Duolingo helped.
Gvg
Um, no i disagree to a point. They cannot guarantee that if they did those things, tax roads education that it would result in more income. It depends. A lot of it depends on where they are and if they have some resource, or are on the way somewhere to make the investment worth it. And first they would have to have the knowledge.
Most of them are descendants of people who moved for prosperity in the past so maybe aren’t so trusting that moving is the answer this time again. The world does not need every rural area to become a new investment center.
A lot stay because of family.
What is toxic is the hate. Teaching hate and bitterness. But you don’t help with your simplistic wrong readings.
Some could do better, others can’t. It depends. None of them are as easy as you say. You are unfair, and any of them who heard you would rightfully want to punch you not listen.
James E Powell
For reasons I do not understand & cannot explain, the rural white people who Kevin Drum is talking about do not see it as a choice. More like destiny or duty, something that God ordained that cannot be changed.
trollhattan
@w3ski: Who is your rep? Get his (my assumption) ass busy getting money from the federal budget. What about your assemblyman and state senator? Sacramento has money for infrastructure and services.
And if they won’t, elect those who will.
Alison Rose
Yesterday, I cleaned out the junk drawer in my kitchen, which I apparently hadn’t done since I moved into this apartment 4+ years ago, because I came across an instruction manual for a handvac I’m pretty sure I ditched before I even moved.
I also found about 7 Allen wrenches, two hole-punchers, and discovered that I didn’t need to buy double-A batteries last month because I had a box of 20 shoved in the back of the drawer.
It was a fun time.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: That’s probably what I’ll do. I know enough to say the root phrases like “We need/want ___, Where is the ___?” etc. I just often need that final word that I’ve mentally misplaced after 30 years. We managed in Vietnam and Cambodia without knowing almost any of the languages so I’m sure it will be fine, but I’m kind of excited to actually use/practice my Spanish.
Pharniel
Hasbro, via Wizards of the Coast (WotC), decided to step on it’s own dick and invite all sorts of legal attention to it’s “Dominant Market Position” with proposed Open Gaming License 1.1.
This of course creates lots of questions about the default contracts on offer that amount to either attempting to defraud the Office of Trademark & Copyright for longer terms via Uber’s model for writers (DM’s Guild contract where you “own” your content, but WotC has an exclusive right forever, exercises editorial control, and can revise it as they see fit – Work for Hire in all but name, with the Life+90 term instead of 90 years) or the Fan Content license/OGL 1.1 where you sign over a non-exclusive, irrevocable, sub-licensable, world-wide, royalty-free, forever license to all of your work that allows WotC to terminate your rights and then keep your stuff. A/K/A an Unjust Enrichment Engine, that Hasbro swears they won’t abuse. Honest.
Details of the proposed license are being confirmed by 3rd parties involved in negotiations, such as Kickstarter confirming they negotiated a 20% vig instead of 25%.
This is in addition to demanding royaltees, preventing people from making Virtual Table Top assets/maps/or custom fallible character sheets – even without rules.
They’re going hard after Critical Role/Dimension 20/Streamers – Under the proposed changes WotC wouldn’t have been able to effectively stop the Critical Role Amazon series, but they would have been able to throw a wrench in negotiations or just create their own CR based Movie/Show because they have rights to do whatever they want for it.
Your story of corporate greed for the day.
UncleEbeneezer
@$8 blue check mistermix: Thanks. I think Yucatan has pretty reliable cellphone reception most places, but the offline option for when we get out in la jungla for cenotes and temples, would be helpful.
brendancalling
ANYTHING?
Ok. If you live in Philadelphia, PA, come by Sutton’s Bar (1706 N. 5th St) tonight around 8 for some of the finest western swing and honky tonk you’ll hear in that fine city, and at that specific location. I think there will be 8 of us tonight. I’m singing and playing upright bass for this arrangement.
I type this from my empty classroom. We had standardized tests today, after which the students went home for asynchronous work that no one expects them to do. I, OTOH, am not allowed to leave til the end of the contract day at 2:34. So here I sit, listening to Freddy Fender, Clint Black, Hank Williams Sr, and more. My door is open to any teachers that want to learn how to two-step, but since most of them don’t like country music, I am relieved of that duty.
Pharniel
@brendancalling:
Adjacent, Amazon Music finally has the Rank Strangers catalog, so if you hanker for some of that torch & twang, I’d start with Let Down Your Hair.
I’ve gotten very lucky, my 16 month old seems to really love Tarbox Ramblers, Rev. Horton heat, Johnny Cash, and Social Distortion.
Bupalos
This kind of take is stupid when it’s a conservative talking about the inner city folk and it’s stupid when it’s a liberal talking about the rural folk. The ills of both are caused by larger economic forces and systemic factors that feed back on themselves and go well beyond the limited (and personalized, and moralized) locus where the self-satisfied well-off want to point. I find it pretty irksome when people like Drum bloviate on this stuff. He’s in no way an expert or even minimally informed or experienced here. He’s offering a take that comforts the comfortable and reinforces our desire to look the other way. It’s really no different than “what are you going to do, those inner city people just choose that life, they prefer crime to work, etc etc.”
TriassicSands
Super Kevin has apparently failed again, but quite a few never-Kevins voted for him. Roy said he would never vote for McCarthy. He did. Perry, a true nut-job did, as well. Gosar, they don’t get any crazier, voted for McCarthy, who may now have more votes than Jeffries.
I wonder if there will now be jockeying to try to be THE vote that puts McCarthy over the top?
UncleEbeneezer
Rural people seem to be most concerned about the fact that they are no longer viewed as Real America, the way they once were. NYTimes diner-fawning aside, most people just don’t see rural parts of America as the end-all, be-all utopia that used to be fairly common at least among white Americans. And people in rural areas seem to resent this more than anything else. They also really hate when anyone points out that they got their land and opportunities to build generational wealth via programs that purposely excluded large swaths of racial and ethnic minorities. That resentment plays out in their politics and their ass-backwards culture of refusing to move past the 1950’s. I have no idea what to do about it. But a large part of the problem has nothing to do with policies and everything to do with identity.
Chetan Murthy
@Bupalos: There’s at least two important differences between the poor inner city folk, and poor rural folk: the poor inner city folk are systematically disenfranchised (voter suppression, gerrymandering, etc) and when they vote, they at least vote for their interests. The poor rural folk: they’re wildly overrepresented, and when they vote, they vote to shaft themselves.
[Having grown up in one of those places] No sympathy.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Chetan Murthy: As someone who grew up in a poor rural area and have spent a lot of time there recently, I agree with this. The fact that most of my peer group voted with our feet to get out of there indicates that many of us did have a choice, and we exercised it.
frosty
@UncleEbeneezer: I tried out my HS French on a family trip in Paris. My son’s reaction? “Dad, you’re just embarrassing yourself.” LOL
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: There’s lots of important differences.
Where there’s no real difference is not between the people living in these places, but between the people who want to bag on these two groups, and pretend the problems are mostly personal and moral in nature. Which helps the self-satisfied defend the idea that nothing should be done. It’s an old story.
Nelle
A CPR story. When we were young, we lived in a remote Alaskan village (about three hours by small plane to the nearest doctor), so we tried to keep current on first aid practices. Later, in the Lower 48, we’d gotten rusty so when a local car dealer offered free CPR classes (a relative of his had been saved by someone who knew it), we signed up and took it.
Not long after, my 14 year old daughter was driving us (her, my son, age 8, and me) to his soccer game on a Saturday morning. It was her first time driving on the street since she had qualified for her restricted license. We were on a four lane parkway, divided in the middle when all traffic in our direction came to a complete stop. We were not far behind a dump truck and couldn’t see why. A man came running down the divided strip, screaming for anyone who could do CPR. I just went into automatic and jumped out, running forward on the grassy median. About ten cars ahead, there was a man, on his back, with a small group of people around him, but no one was touching him. As I ran up, they all stood back and I remember thinking, “Great, no one else knows how to do this?!?”
I checked for pulse and breathing. Nothing. I began chest compressions, thinking “Big barrel chest, like Dad” (my dad had died the previous year); I’m going to have to break ribs to get pressure on the heart. It felt brutal but I knew I had to do it. I could hear cracking. I sealed his mouth, gave the breaths, went back to the chest. At some point, a policeman appeared and said he would take over the breathing, so I focused on the chest.
One lane of traffic started moving slowly. I looked up and said, “My daughter is a beginning driver. Someone move the car for her.” A little later, I looked up to see my car, parked in front of the car of the guy I was working on (he’d had a heart attack while driving and drifted to a stop against the curb). I could see my small son’s face, staring, eyes huge. My daughter, meanwhile, was walking up the median towards us. She had just hopped out when a woman came and said, “Are you the new driver?” She responded, “That would be me” and turned the car and her brother over to the stranger.
Meanwhile, my son’s soccer team was among the passing cars and people I knew called out encouragement. One took my son on to the soccer fields.
We were at least ten minutes in and I was exhausted when the fire trucks came, against traffic. I was so relieved that I started to sit back. They said, “No, keep going. We have to set up” as they got the defibrillator. Finally, they took over, I moved away, then found my daughter and we drove off.
When I got to the soccer field, someone said, “Well, you dressed appropriately.” I was confused, not even remembering what I had on. I looked down to see that I was wearing a Red Cross blood donor T-shirt that said “Hometown Hero.” I later thought that others saw that red cross symbol and just back off to let someone experienced handle it. If they only knew.
On Monday, I called the hospital to see what had happened to him. Of course, no information, but when I told them my connection, they put me through to the doctor who worked on him. She said that what I did, allowed them to revive him. His whole family made it there to be with him. Then late that night, he had another massive heart attack and did not survive that one. I never knew his name.
Later, I was asked how I decided that morning to get involved. My reply was that I decided when I took the training. No decision needed at that moment.
eclare
@Alison Rose: Two hole punchers? Wow.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: The US also has a large number of Black rural folk, in certain areas of the country, and they don’t vote to shaft themselves. They just get outvoted/gerrymandered/suppressed by the whites.
Native Americans, increasingly same.
Bupalos
@$8 blue check mistermix: Ah, the fact that my best friend from grade school who was bussed up from the Hough area of Cleveland and now lives in a multimillion dollar mansion in Atlanta proves that those folks still down in Hough had a choice!
Alison Rose
@frosty: To be fair, most Parisians will pretend they can’t understand any non-French person speaking French no matter how well you speak it.
Alison Rose
@eclare: I found one and was like, oh okay, don’t need this, but cool, I guess. Then I found the second and was like, why the fuck did I buy hole punchers on two separate occasions.
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: Henry Harrys seem to be more of a British thing.
Like Edward Teds (who are not Kennedys).
Chetan Murthy
@$8 blue check mistermix: There *are* things that could have been done to improve the economic prospects for rural areas, like:
The upshot of these measures would be to increase the cost of food and decrease the profits of all nonlocal businesses that serviced these areas. E.g. basically outlawing Wal-mart/Amazon would have kept Main Street alive. How much of this would these rural populations support? Precisely zero. Either give up the village grocery, or give up fresh blueberries in January (and Clement Faugier Creme de Marrons Vanillee). And of course, the local bigwig doesn’t get to buy up ten family farms.
But of course, all of this is anathema to these rural populations.
Hoodie
@Chetan Murthy: Rural folk include millions of poor black folks in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, etc., and a lot of the “rural” voters you’re bitching about are actually affluent whites in exurban areas and medium-sized towns. This distinction is overdrawn and simplistic, like those stupid debates about whether the South should be cast out of the Union. It’s about what you’d expect from an armchair pundit like Drum.
Matt McIrvin
@Alison Rose: My experience in Paris was that if you opened in your bad school French they’d respond in English to one-up you, and then the conversation would be on terms they found appealing, whereas starting with English off the bat would (understandably) come across as an imposition. So speaking some French still helped.
Wapiti
@w3ski: Amen. Here in WA State we have no income tax, and some of the richest people in the US.
One of the things we do have is a property tax law that allows seniors and others below the median income (not sure how far, but it applies for my dad) to get reduction in the property tax bill.
Chetan Murthy
@frosty: I’m glad you did. I arrived in Paris in August 1991 literally not knowing how to ask where the toilet was. Took an intensive French course for a month, and during the afternoons would wander around the city with my dictionary. When I went into shops, I would always start in French, peter out after a sentence-or-two, and then ask in my nicest tone (in *French*) if they spoke English, b/c I was learning French, and I wasn’t so good at it yet.
The shopkeepers were *always* helpful and *always* knew much more English than I knew French. It’s important to be humble in approaching people in a foreign country: they have their pride, too.
OzarkHillbilly
@UncleEbeneezer: Back in the day when I was spending a lot of time in the mountains and what not, I found that sitting in the square and reading the local newspaper helped a lot. It always surprised me how much I could work out from the written word.
Suzanne
@UncleEbeneezer:
I think this is closer to the right take.
There’s a strange mindset some people have about wanting to be envied, or at least esteemed. (Note that I am not using the term respect. Respect is a recognition of equality.) A lot of the people I’ve interacted with who have made statements about rural Americans being disrespected really mean that rural lifestyles aren’t aspirational.
In all honesty, most urbanites really don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut about rural people. They’re just busy doing their thing. But they don’t want a rural lifestyle and they raise their children, in general, to also live that kind of urban/suburban life.
Chetan Murthy
@Bupalos:
Oh tosh! Every Dem adminstration has tried to help rural areas. Every damn one! It’s the people in those areas who don’t want to be helped. And why? B/c if they get help then those people will also get help, and that cannot be allowed.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Bupalos: In the Dakotas, there has been a constant drain of young people moving from the small towns to bigger towns, and often out of state. I would say 2/3 of my HS grad class, middle-class to poor, live in a larger town today. The choice is between basically nothing (no decent jobs) and a chance to make a living wage. Maybe other areas are different, but if you look at population trends for large (in area) rural plains/mountain west states you see that most of it is now concentrated in the larger towns, and rural population is way down. It’s pretty hard to argue that the population trends reflect anything else but people exercising a choice to get out.
Matt McIrvin
(It is humbling how incomprehensible rapid colloquial French is to someone with many years of academic background in the language, though. The main thing is that so many syllables and entire words just get dropped–formal French tends to be relatively wordy but in conversation they heavily compensate.)
Betty Cracker
@Nelle: Wow, what an amazing story. It’s sad that the man you helped didn’t make it through the night, but some of his loved ones got a chance to say their goodbyes, and that’s so important. Also, you set such an excellent example for your kids. Well done!
narya
A friend’s family has a farm that friend’s grandfather acquired. There are five living co-owners (one is a widow of a sibling, rest are sibs) who now share the property. They mostly do not farm the land themselves, though they do hunt and maintain it, and rent it out to someone who does farm it; they have to farm it or it gets taxed as “recreational” rather than “agricultural,” even though there’s no actual recreation anywhere nearby. It’s not great soil (lots of sand), and no indoor plumbing in the old house or any other building on the property. It’s a conundrum: they’re all in their 70s, and all but one (friend’s mother) live near that property; they would not do well in a city, especially at this stage. None of their kids are particularly interested in the property–friend is probably most interested, but he recognizes that it’s a lot of work and, being in his 60s himself, is not about to take it on, even if the multitude of members of his generation were willing. They all have emotional ties to the land–including my friend–and have spent their lives there. But what’s to happen to that property? And I suspect that is a complex situation that is being recreated all across the country. I don’t think there are easy answers.
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: I’m sorry, that’s absolutely not true. When I moved to Paris in 1991 I wore cargo shorts and loud pink shirts. I was the quintessential American (when a friend came to visit, he didn’t know my street number, so he just asked where “the American” lived, and everybody on the street knew). As I wrote elsethread, when I started in French, even terrible beginner French, every shopkeeper was helpful and kind and magically knew “a little” English.
Kelly
Rural Oregon was prosperous for generations while state and federal policy supported intensive commercial forestry practices including essentially strip mining old growth forests 100’s of years old. The counties got a percentage of the revenue which paid for nearly all county services. They still get a percentage but the revenue for second growth plantations is way less. For generations the locals have believed the forests own by us all are theirs. This is something they still believe. The rest of us reclaimed our land for other uses. The counties formerly subsidized by us all have mostly refused to raise their taxes. Instead they spend money on lawsuits to reverse changes that began in the 1980’s.
The Moar You Know
@Nelle: kickass. It absolutely matters even if the outcome is a death. You tried.
I got trained in sixth grade. And yeah, that’s when you decide to get involved, as I have with a number of people having health emergencies over the years. Not that particular one, though.
I made our company offices get defibrillators installed. That’s a far better option in most cases. My uncle dropped a few years back with no heartbeat between a former Marine battle surgeon and a defibrillator, and that’s the only reason he’s alive today. Defibrillators should be everywhere. I make sure to look for them every public place I go.
ETA: I bought them under the IT budget. They do have computers in them, after all.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Nelle: That’s a great story.
The book documents how Dr. Sofar had to prove that the current method of resuscitation, which involved arm movement, just didn’t work. The crazy story (to modern ears) was that he enlisted a bunch of doctors and nurses, paralyzed them with medication so they could not breathe, and then had two different sets of people do resuscitation. Trained firemen did the old method, and boy scouts who had received limited training did mouth-to-mouth. Sofar’s goal was to show anyone with limited training — like you — could save lives. (And your story would count as a save, in my opinion.)
eclare
@Nelle: What an amazing story.
Kent
@James E Powell: I come from rural roots and much of my extended family lives in rural central Pennsylvania where the family farm goes back to the Civil War days. I used to spend all my summers out there when I was young. It is Belleville in Mifflin County just south of State College in the heart of Amish Country.
There is most definitely a huge bias against any change that might bring more prosperity or alternatives To cite just one example? A couple of decades ago some enterprising young couple bought up a small dairy farm in Belleville and converted it into a very nice winery and B&B which brings in a few tourists and such. And is more productive and employs more than keeping it a dairy farm, although the do questionable devilish things like yoga. This is the actual place: https://brookmerewine.com
What did the locals do? They reacted in horror and quickly passed some sort of local ordinance or zoning to prevent anyone else from ever doing the same.
Now when I go back I hear complaining about how the Dollar General at the edge of town is the only grocery since the nice IGA closed.
That is rural America in a nutshell.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Aspirational, but there’s also the evolving sense of what is normal. Conservatives particularly have a strong desire to identify as the regular type of people; being abnormal is bad. If they’re rural, they know deep in their bones that there was a time when a rural lifestyle was the normal one in America. It doesn’t matter that this time was long before they were born. The fact that they’re the exception now really steams them.
This is why little things like “Happy Holidays” (supposedly) replacing “Merry Christmas”, or pressing 1 for English, or someone referring to cis people as “cis people” cheese them off so much. It’s someone treating their type of people as a special type of people instead of as the understood default, and being the understood default is this huge identity claim.
Bostondreams
DeSantis has appointed Christopher Rufo, an unpleasant person, to Florida New College’s Board of Trustees to help get rid of wokeness.
Hoodie
@$8 blue check mistermix: Is that really a choice, though? This whole thread started with Drum’s presumption that living a rural life is a choice. Maybe it is for some, but for a lot, it may not be.
Brachiator
So, some of these folks try to have it both ways by bragging about their independence and self-reliance, but then complain that they don’t get enough attention and support from liberal media and the government.
Kinda sad and self-defeating.
tobie
@UncleEbeneezer: As a part-time denizen of rural America, I have a lot to say about rural cultural resentments and grievances. Suffice it to say, rural life is not self-sustaining. They don’t have the tax base to cover the cost of infrastructure, so everything comes subsidized from metro America. Folks here have little interest in learning new skills, so half the population earns its living taking care of the other half (roofers, electricians, plumbers, etc). The only option besides the small biz route are minimum wage jobs. A handful of plutocrats may control the Republican Party, but rural and exurban America is where they rack up numbers in elections.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Hoodie: It’s as much or more of a choice as many other things that conservatives would call a choice. To me, this is the nut of the argument that Drum makes:
The young and educated have no place in the parts of rural America that I know. It’s almost a necessity to get out if you want to do anything with your life.
WaterGirl
@Nelle: That is amazing. The details are fuzzy for me, but decades ago I took a CPR course or a first aid course where we also learned CPR. It was more than a one-day course, which I recall because:
On day 2 one of the other students came in and told us that her dad had a heart attack the night before and based on what we had learned yesterday she was able to save his life.
narya
@Kent: Yup. In addition to the conundrum I described, there IS very much the attitude you describe.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
cousins of the young coal miner who didn’t want to hear about HRC’s alternative jobs programs because God put that coal in the ground so that he could provide for his family
Cameron
@Bostondreams: The aim is specifically to turn it into a “Hillsdale of the South.” Horrible .
Kent
@Brachiator: This quote from the recent Washington Post profile of a rural blue collar Democrat in northern Georgia is about the best one sentence summary of rural life that I have ever seen: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/22/red-wave-midterm-elections-2022-what-happened/
Yep….
Chetan Murthy
@Hoodie: I’m 58. When I grew up in
WeatherfordEast Incest TX, the joke was that smart kids who graduated HS (many did not) went to Texas Tech and flunked-out, came back home. The idea of kids getting to UT Austin was unfathomably aspirational, forget going to a out-of-state school. Going to an Ivy League school was looked-down-upon, b/c they’d rot your brain out East.My schoolmates who still live in that area (which I’m sure many/most do) all made a choice, all those years ago — at the same time that people like me were *fleeing* the place. [e.g., there’s a guy I went to high school with who works in the local post office — my mom ran into him, b/c she refuses to leave too]. They all had a choice to leave, and by the early 1990s, they knew what was coming, b/c it was arriving with a lotta noise as the US opened-up to Japanese imports.
Or as I once put it back then: you can’t want Toyota Celicas and also want your life to be completely unchanged — it doesn’t work like that.
topclimber
@UncleEbeneezer: It is a failing they share with suburban whites who benefited from decades of racist covenants that forbade selling your home to a black person (Ronnie Rayguns owned a home with one); redlining; discriminatory property tax schemes (a Long Island specialty that resulted in minority communities paying as much in property taxes as white neighborhoods with valuations many times higher); a whites-only policy in my GI Bill subsidized hometown of Levittown (model for post WWII suburbanization in this and other ways); and persistent white refusal to allow integrated neighborhoods by fleeing as soon as a few black families moved in.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Agreed. Many people have this very strong desire to see themselves as the middle, and lots of subcultures encourage this. Those of us who are weird got emotionally comfortable not fitting in.
The Dreher blog is evidence of this. These people just cannot grasp that it is not discrimination if nobody thinks you’re smart or cool or virtuous.
Chetan Murthy
@tobie:
Whenever this comes up, I am reminded that other countries have *policies* to prevent this from happening: there are explicit policies designed to increase the population in rural areas, by increasing the price of food, and limiting the reach of large agribusinesses and esp large farms. That is to say, by *reducing* the overall productivity of agriculture, trading that for more rural residents and businesses.
But these conservative rural folk would absolutely rebel against that — as we’ve seen them do over and over and over. Major Major’s[1] father, writ large.
[1] Most assuredly not Major Major Major Major’s.
Soprano2
@BC in Illinois: Kind of like when I went up in the airport control tower this summer and thought for the first time about the controller who was talking to the pilot of the plane my sister was on. I thought about how awful it must have been for them to be helpless to do anything. They might have seen the crash, because the plane was close to the airport when it crashed. When I read about what happened to Hamlin I wondered how the guy who hit him must be feeling. How would you be able to play again after something like that?
Betty
@Bostondreams: He really knows no bounds. Scary dude.
Kent
@Chetan Murthy: Speaking of infrastructure. There was a recent report out of Mississippi that 54% of their rural hospitals may close in the next couple of years. And health care is definitely a form of infrastructure. https://www.mississippifreepress.org/30094/mississippi-health-care-faces-looming-disaster-medical-group-warns-lawmakers
Is it because of the tax base? Nope. They keep voting for people who refuse to expand Medicaid. So they are paying Federal taxes anyway, but refusing to take any of it back to fund their hospitals. They are too unbelievably stupid to realize that Medicaid doesn’t actually fund PEOPLE. No one ever gets a dime in their pockets from Medicaid. Rather, the money goes straight from Washington DC into the pockets of local hospitals and health care providers to compensate them for care that they are largely going to have to provide for free anyway in the form of indigent care.
The stupid venality is so thick you can cut it with a fork
tobie
@Chetan Murthy: The only industry in rural America is agriculture and it’s largely automated. Where I live, farms grow corn or soy for livestock feed. It’s a daily reminder of just how much land is devoted directly or indirectly to feed cattle and chickens.
Would making food more expensive change things in rural America? I don’t know. Agribusiness is big but doesn’t employ tons of people till you get to the meat packing end.
Chetan Murthy
@Kent: And so people with enough money or insurance to afford healthcare, go to big-city doctors and hospitals, and that’s one more way that money leaves these areas.
narya
This. It was hard in grade school and high school–bullies are never fun–but I KNEW I wasn’t going to fit in, and it was very freeing, to be honest.
ian
I don’t know if I agree with Drum’s conclusions here.
He writes
The Federal government should spend resources to alleviate poverty. This is basic new deal liberalism. Arguing that the boonies should fend for themselves is only going to lead to more conservatism and less education in rural areas.
I also have some beef with Drum here
Most people live in communities where they have social ties. It is hard to move somewhere that a person has no connections too. So the choice here is not as easy as Drum supposes. Drum is also conveniently ignoring the fact that BIPOC and LGBTQ people live in rural areas as well.
Drum puts weasel words in his article to make it sound better, but he is basically saying “We have done enough” for rural areas. I disagree.
Here is an interesting thought experiment. Read Drum’s article and arguments but replace the word rural with urban. How would we react to Drum saying we should just let urban areas fend for themselves?
Roger Moore
@Gvg:
What I would say is that keeping up with the world is hard. Places that don’t want to get left behind need to be constantly scrambling to figure out if the industry that is supporting them now will continue to be able to support them in the future, and finding something new if it won’t. Even if the local industry looks good now, they need to see if they can start a second or third industry just in case.
I think the rural areas that are having the most trouble are having it because they have given up on trying to find the next thing. They want to stick with the tried and true, and that has left them to decline as the big local industry (farming, mining, timber, or what have you) has declined. The rural areas and small towns that have succeeded are the ones that have been willing and able to find the next thing.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Kent: The nursing homes in the Dakotas are closing left and right because of a lack of Medicaid expansion. The one in my home town is closed and demolished. Old folks are being transported hundreds of miles away for nursing home care. This is all due to not having enough Medicaid money, since almost everyone in those homes is on Medicaid.
Chetan Murthy
@ian: Rural areas are overrepresented in legislatures at every level and have voted consistently to do this to themselves. I’m sad for them, but they have it in their power to undo this, and instead vote to make it worse.
Hoodie
@Chetan Murthy: The federal system in the US makes that pretty difficult if not impossible. The reps and senators from agricultural states are owned by agribusiness and use urban vs. rural cultural other arguments to bamboozle their constituents and undermine any comprehensive federal response that would disadvantage their donors. The problem I have with this thread is that it reinforces this urban vs. rural narrative.
Cameron
@Betty: New College is supposed to be a “public Ivy.” Now it will just be another diploma mill for wingnuts.
Suzanne
@Chetan Murthy:
100% this.
I have seen plenty of comments on the right-wing blogs that I lurk on in which rural people cheer for an upcoming civil war of Country vs. City, and they always note how rural areas have all the food and thus will obviously win. And I always think to myself, “And we have all the medical care”.
Kent
@tobie: Other countries do much better job. Travel in rural Norway, for example. The rural schools are beautiful. There are all sorts of government run amenities like sports centers and pools in rural towns. And, of course, the public health care is largely the same as in cities with lots of good rural clinics and hospitals. Do kids still leave for the cities? Of course, But not do desperately fast. And they are more inclined to come back.
But that would be socialism so we can’t even imagine a rural landscape like that.
Chetan Murthy
@$8 blue check mistermix: I’ve read enough stories about what happens when well-run nursing homes are bought up by big private equity-run conglomerates to know that part of the problem is also that even where Medicaid expansion happened, the money got sucked upward and out-of-state.
In many of these businesses, allowing takeovers, rollups, and other forms of conglomeration is the same as sucking money out of communities.
But hey, Ayn Rand amirite!
Kent
@Suzanne: The don’t actually have all the food. What much of rural red America has in terms of food is alfalfa, seed corn, and soybeans. None of which is used to feed humans. Most of what we buy in the grocery store comes from places like California or Mexico. I expect that blue states produce more real human food than red states.
Chetan Murthy
@Hoodie: You’re saying that these poor rural salt-of-the-earth yeoman farmers are just bamboozled by those big-city slick double-talkin’ lawyer types into signing away the family farm? Shocker!
People have agency. They’ve had everything handed to them for decades, and what did they do with it? Transfer it upward to the local richies. And now they want even more.
Suzanne
@Kent: Oh, I know.
I am fully aware that their argument is bullshit.
I am also fully aware that no one needs to eat a cow or a chicken to survive.
Bupalos
@$8 blue check mistermix: I wouldn’t argue otherwise and am not arguing otherwise. I’m arguing against a moralistic judgement being made, ala Drum, on those who don’t or can’t make that choice for a multitude of complex human reasons. Chief among them that they were already failed by an unequal educational and developmental environment and become part of a cycle. And I’m arguing against seeing these seismic and systemic economic shifts as something we just expect people to get out of the way of, and if they’re “too stupid” to abandon their place…fuck’em, they deserve it.
Nelle
@WaterGirl: Wow. Talk about crucial timing!
Kent
@Chetan Murthy: Yes. People don’t get it.
When you buy something at your locally owned grocery or farmer’s market the money bounces around in your community passing from hand to hand and making everyone better off. The economic term for that is the “velocity of money”.
By contrast, when you swipe your credit card at the checkout line at your local Wal-Mart the money is transferred in less than a nanosecond to the corporate coffers in Bentonville Arkansas and is gone from your community forever.
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: this sounds for all the world like a winger talking about the inner city.
Chetan Murthy
@Bupalos:
So you’re saying we were fortunate, me and my gay friends, that we were driven out of the places we grew up by the racist/homophobic bigots ? That they’re the ones who are really oppressed here ? Interesting.
Chetan Murthy
@Bupalos: Sure, except in one minor detail: IT’S TRUE.
tobie
@Kent: I don’t doubt that rural Norway looks a lot better than rural America. But the issue is that rural Americans vote for lawmakers who oppose any govt spending, even though their communities depend on it. I see in Maryland how we’ve starved Baltimore City while giving aid hand over fist to the Eastern Shore This inequity needs to stop.
Rural Americans have agency. They make their choices regarding media consumption just as we do. They vote for what they want. They believe they’re the real Americans, and we should all be leaning from them and following their example.
Immanentize
Just dropping in on a break +- but the dynamic that MM and Drum observe in rural voters/denizens can be best summed up as: “help rejecting complainers.” They are everywhere, but when you base your community norms and intransigent views on that quality, it kills ya.
Suzanne
@Gvg:
I have a hard time with this attitude. If your prospects are shitty, there is no reason not to try something different.
I am feeling this because a friend of mine, who is a social worker in rural Oregon right now, is looking to leave. She has been there for two years and it is not offering her the professional or romantic opportunities she wants. So she’s leaving. Selling most of her stuff and leaving. She has done this before, and I find it very admirable.
Roger Moore
@frosty:
That’s not what I remember from my visit to Paris. I didn’t speak much French, and it was certainly worse than their English. The people I interacted with still seemed to appreciate that I tried to communicate in their language rather than assuming they would be able to communicate in mine.
Hoodie
@Chetan Murthy: I’m just saying that your policies won’t happen because of structural differences between the US and other countries. Like them or not, agribusinesses, Walmart, etc., provide jobs in those places, sometimes the only jobs. In the case of Walmart and Dollar General, they provide shitty but cheap goods. People there can’t afford artisanal cheeses and wine and the city folks who can don’t make that much of a dent in the local economy unless you’re close enough to a major city to generate sufficient sales volumes. People are going to vote their perceived short term interest, not for some urban liberal’s dream of rural socialist future that may or may not happen.
Chief Oshkosh
@Alison Rose: That’s not been my experience. I’ve worked and vacationed quite a bit in Paris over the years, and with one lone exception,* I’ve found Parisians to be helpful in general, and very helpful specifically with language when they perceive that I’m at least trying to speak French. I’ve sadly come to the conclusion that learning a useful level of French is beyond me, so I’ve memorized (or had memorized – I’ve forgotten since Covid) a phrase that means “It’s a great pity, but I don’t speak your beautiful language. Might you speak English?” More often than not, this got a chuckle and so opened the conversation in English.
*The one lone exception was a rude waitress – but she was rude to everyone, non-French and French, so maybe she just wasn’t in the right job or was having a bad day.
eclare
@Kent: Japan just announced a program to pay people with kids living in Tokyo a nice sum of money to move out.
ian
@Chetan Murthy: The current and previous voters in many rural areas have made many poor decisions regarding leadership and politics.
Doing nothing for these areas condemns future generations to continue to experience the decline.
I believe in a active federal government that tries to improve the living situations for all people in all areas of our country. The terrible voting preferences of hinterland Americana does not dissuade me from wanting a better future for those areas and people.
Brachiator
@Kent:
Yeah. I understand that way of thinking.
Bupalos
@Suzanne: I’d be pretty lost without eggs and milk and wheat.
But this whole line has been completely derailed by starting with the red-state/blue-state fallacy.
Yes folks, food comes from rural areas. Just about all of it. This is pretty much a definitional thing, even if I’m rooting for the cricket flour facility in Youngstown.
Chetan Murthy
@Hoodie:
Um, you’re aware that there used to be laws against such large-scale chain stores, right? Even chain restaurants. [Turns out one of the few places that still have such laws is … San Francisco.] Most of the country did away with them, b/c, well, “deregulation”. The argument that people will vote for their short-term interest is the argument that in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, it always makes sense to “defect” — rat out the other guy — and yet, the argument here is that we urban residents should “cooperate” — help our poor rural neighbors — instead of “defect”.
I’m sorry, but rural people can start actually voting and acting in their own self-interest for a change. They certainly have the electoral leverage for it.
Immanentize
@$8 blue check mistermix: As you may remember, I grew up in Binghamton. One of my Dad’s one million quips was: “Binghamton is a beautiful place — in the rear view mirror.” Now that is a smallish city/area with a big University. It took the city until this millennium to finally realize/capitulate? to the reality of the massive economic value that embracing the Uni could bring. Things are looking up there from my vantage point.
Also, I bought a place in Cleveland — New York! North of lake Oneida. I am very interested to meet and dance with that community. It looks like other rural upstate areas, but there are lots of signs of progressive thought. Maybe the influence of Syracuse U., SUNY Oswego, the sub-Ivies and Rochester, etc. Micron is building a huge chip facility near Syracuse. There are jobs to be had even if commuting from Cleveland. So, maybe not so grim?
Chetan Murthy
@Immanentize: Like many, many Cornell students (PhD CS ’90) I spent decades musing about moving back to Ithaca, NY. And I’d do it in retirement, except … the whole damn countryside around Ithaca turned beet-red, so it’s a no-go zone for people like me.
Ah, well. Those Central NY farmers fucked themselves.
JustRuss
@$8 blue check mistermix: Thanks, just downloaded Translate. Going to Baja in a week, my espanol is pretty rusty.
Immanentize
@Chetan Murthy: Brenham Texas, between Austin and Houston, was the home of my in-laws and their parents was a small farming community, with the great ice cream producer Bluebell (mmmm), and a couple of crop transportation related companies (grain and cotton). It had a cool downtown — you know the type, hair shops, grocery, cleaners/tailors (where my son’s G-mom worked), hardware, feed, auto repair, lumber on the outskirts, etc. All gone. Walmart, Super K and Home Depot took over. And the people weren’t being jerks going there — it was way more convenient and cheaper. But when a few of the small town-shops closed, they all closed fast. But that was just the reiteration of the Mall story where I grew up. Just big box instead of communal space.
Citizen Alan
@Immanentize: I call it the “peasant mentality,” defined as follows: A poor person is someone with the misfortune of not having much money. I’ve been poor. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. A peasant, however, is a poor person who is irrationally proud of their own poverty and believe it is a sign of their own virtue. Peasants also worship-literally worship, as we’ve seen with Trump-the rich people most directly responsible for their poverty while snapping bitterly at the hands of anyone who tries to help them. And finally, peasants hate their own children if they express a desire to be anything different (let alone better) than what their forefathers were. In the medieval era, there were people who would happily fling themselves down into the muck whenever the local landowner rode by in his fancy carriage, and then get back up and head back to the fields, grumbling the whole time that all their problems were the fault of the Ottomans and/or the Jews. And that same mentality plagues us to this very day.
kalakal
Many of Mrs kalakals relatives are from rural Ohio. Historically they were farmers but most have sold up and many of them have moved out of state. My MILs funeral was in a small town (a recent ex-city as the population dropped below the Ohio definition of a City: pop 2,000) called Greenfields and it’s profoundly depressing to visit. On the main street you can see that a century ago or more it was a growing thriving place, now it’s like a Potemkin village, step off that street and there’s a lot loads of abandoned or decaying houses. There is almost no employment outside of nursing homes, prison staff ( nearby Chilicothe has a State pen and a Fed pen) or farming and farming employment is minimal as farms are scooped up and automated. The local joke is that it’s been downhill since the invention of the Horseless Carriage as it was once a major center for manufacturing horse blankets. I have no idea what could be done to make the place thrive again but I found it like being in a different country*. I also found it ineffably sad
* And to me America is already a different country
Roger Moore
@tobie:
This is not 100% correct. There are other rural businesses, like timber, mining, and tourism. And not all agriculture is as heavily automated as growing the big commodity crops like corn and soybeans. A lot of the farming here in California is still in high labor, high value crops like fruits and vegetables, which is a big reason the Central Valley is still a major population center.
Served
My rural home county received a $30 million offer for a windfarm. Farmers would get ~30k per windmill, and the result would be a windfall for the local school districts.
The county board responded by passing a law that windmills can’t be placed within 5,000 FEET of any residence. The school districts are going to have to put tax referendums on the ballot.
They choose this life.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Immanentize: I’d move to a rural part of New York looong before I’d move to a rural part of the Dakotas. It’s a lot more population dense out here (even in the rural areas) so you don’t need to go 100 miles to get decent food/clothes. Also, we have blue state benefits and blue state rights. Cleveland looks like a great location.
Chetan Murthy
@Immanentize: Weatherford was like that, too (though no Blue Bell — just peaches). The downtown was centered around the county seat. They allowed a highway to be built south of town, and lo! eventually a bunch of big-box stores got built down there, and the whole town moved south. No more Mott’s 5&10 on the central courthouse square.
You can see it on the map (I haven’t been back in >30yr, b/c ffs, I wouldn’t go back to that town without a small army). They fucked themselves.
Immanentize
@Chetan Murthy: Im not so sure it is quite like that still. I have Dem friends living in or near Ithaca and they have good communities, many living the aging hippy life. My friend’s son, I think, will be going to Ithaca College next year of engineering. I’m looking forward to my re-entry if only to make an idiosyncratic study of Spiritualist Communities. Don’t give up on the place yet! The finger lakes are among the most beautiful spots in the country (ooops, I shouldn’t have told people that…)
Citizen Alan
Or as I bluntly told my nephew a few years ago, “Mississippi is a shithole. It has been a shithole since approximately 1866. It will continue to be a shithole long after we’re dead and buried. And this is so because a majority of the voters in this state would prefer to live in a shithole than in a prosperous, modern, and decent society where they had to share the benefits of prosperity and modernity and to show decency to people they hate.”
Elizabelle
@Nelle: Good for you, Nelle.
And it would be terrifying to be 3 hours by airplane from medical care.
Chetan Murthy
@Immanentize: Oh, I’m sure Ithaca is still lovely, and still lefty-as-all-get-out. But when I was in grad school there, I biked all over the Eastern Finger Lakes: up-and-down both sides of Cayuga Lake, over to Watkins Glen, to Cortland, south to … I forget what. That sort of thing, I could never do today, I’m sure. Too goddamn red. And I won’t live in a place where I can’t feel safe traveling around the region.
trollhattan
Iowa congressional district I was born in was once represented by Tom Harkin (five terms), before that Neal Smith (seven terms). More recently, Steve King.
Now, what could possibly have changed?
Another Scott
@eclare: I heard a BBC News story about that a couple of days ago. It’s apparently been in place a few years. IIRC, the number of takers increased from 600 to 1000 – teeny tiny.
And understandable. Who is going to uproot their life and career for 1,000,000 yen (about $7,600) per child if they have other options??
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Served: That’s a fucking mile. “Oh noes, it’s going to come uprooted during a twister and smash my house!”
Immanentize
@Chetan Murthy: When I get settled this coming summer — you come visit. In fact, we will have a Jackal meet up w/MM and Jonas and Nelle and everyone else I am forgetting. It should happen during berry season. Then you can mellow or not on the possibilities.
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: No go zone? This is going to be real news to my Burmese friend, he’ll have to sell his organic farm.
Immanentize
@$8 blue check mistermix: That is a good insight. What makes a place sufficiently “populated” to not make it turn inward and bitter.
I can’t remember which state it was –Montana? — where the Governor once pointed out that the State’s number one export was it’s children.
Served
@trollhattan: stickin it to those libs!
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: You’re talking about images in your head. The finger lakes today is undoubtedly more welcoming to minorities today than in 90.
Chetan Murthy
@Bupalos: I grew up in Weatherford, TX. 81-17 for Trump in 2020. I have relatives who still live in the area. And sure, they’ve never been attacked physically. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a no-go zone. Similarly, upstate NY has trended redder and redder, and while it wasn’t a no-go zone 35 years ago, it is one today.
I know better than to spend time in an area filled with people who look on my kind as pollution.
Steve in the ATL
@Suzanne:
you must be a Vonnegut fan!
Nelle
@Elizabelle: We were young and felt somewhat the insurance of a history of good health, though my husband, a pilot, flew a lot of medivacs to what was then called Barrow. That’s how we learned that a change in pressure can accelerate dilation in labor. He was trying to get a woman to Barrow, but had to climb to avoid weather. About 9,000 feet, the health aide told him to go back and land as the woman had suddenly gone from 3 to 10. I hustled down to the airstrip, just in time to see the birth in the back of the plane. There was talk of naming the baby boy, Cessna, but they finally opted for something else. (Another reason I thought Sarah Palin was a fraud with her story of flying while in labor.)
geg6
Actually, I don’t believe Hamlin had a second cardiac arrest. That was bad information from his uncle. But this is excellent news and bodes very well for his recovery.
And I thought people knew the story of CPR and Dr. Safar. Apparently not. But it’s not new information for Yinzers of a certain age. Lots of cool medical stories that come out of the ‘Burgh.
tobie
@Roger Moore: Some farming in places where food for humans is produced is labor intensive. I gather even apple harvesting has been automated. Corn, soy, wheat, barley, alfalfa, rapeseed etc are all harvested with heavy equipment. Ditto for mining. There are more baristas in America than miners but only in recent years have we acknowledged them as a labor group with legitimate needs. It’s simply not considered real work. Reviving rural America would require bringing in new industries and training a workforce with the necessary skills. I don’t see much of an appetite for that from my perch, and I ask myself why we don’t make the same kinds of investments in urban communities.
Kent
@tobie: We do make investments in urban communities. We make investments everywhere actually. Some communities and some people are just more attuned to take advantage of them.
Kent
@Immanentize: I’ve been through Brennan various times and it is actually one of the nicer small towns in TX for its size. My daughter used to have soccer tournaments out there. Most are MUCH worse.
Immanentize
@Suzanne: Mooo! Cow agrees!
tobie
@Kent: Yes, we do but per capita investment in rural America is much greater than in metro America. Heck, even the poorest of the poor in Baltimore City pay a surcharge on electricity, phone and cable to subsidize rural America.
All I ever hear about is $$ we need to spend on rural hospitals and rural broadband. I have not seen any investment in laying FIOS cables in cities in my state.
Kent
@Chetan Murthy: I lived in Waco for 13 years and spent a lot of time traveling in rural Texas. I wouldn’t really call any of it a “no-go-zone”. But much of it is definitely a “no-live-zone”. It’s just not a pleasant place for ANYONE to live unless all you want to do with your life is drive ATVs around and shoot feral hogs. If that is you then Texas is pretty much perfect.
Cameron
@geg6: That’s where I went for surgery in 2015 because no Philly docs had experience with the procedure I needed. Allegheny gets patients from everywhere.
CaseyL
@Kent:
This is something I’ve wondered about. Do Congressional representatives need to formally request program funds be spent in their district? Are the (R)s deliberately not doing so?
This is something the (D) candidates in those districts could use in their campaigns: The money to improve rural lives is there, is budgeted, but the GOP chooses not to ask for it, in order to keep their voters poor and angry.
Immanentize
@Kent: believe me, I know. I may have been to almost all the small Lutheran churches in the area, which showed me a side of the kinder, older, farming people. One detail I loved is that in our yearly Easter tour of the graves of relatives, there was a large showing of “Woodmen of the World” farm guild members whose markers were bought by the collective community and identified their membership often with little stone logs on the top of the gravestone. Where I was born (Castle Creek, NY) it was the Grange. Nothing like that seems to exist anymore….
Kent
@CaseyL: Individual Congressmen have little to do with it. That sort of pork largely went out two decades ago. But just for example
There is lots of Federal money available for rural broadband. But I think rural communities have to take *some* initiative to get it.
There is money for rural education, community colleges, and such. But people have to make use of it and the opportunities.
There are all kinds of small business investment programs geared towards rural areas. But again, you have to actively seek them, no one is going to knock on your door.
We made an enormous investment in public health in this country with the affordable care act. But states have to expand Medicaid to tap into much of it. Many have chosen not to, including many of the poorest and most rural states like MS. That is money that would go right into the communities.
There are all kinds of green energy incentives for solar, wind, geothermal, etc. But as illustrated by the example above, some rural communities block them.
I could go on and on.
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: This just isn’t a realistic portrayal of the finger lakes region, sorry. I’ve been there off and on for the same 30 years you’re talking about being absent. If I had to say, Ithica is marginally less leftist than it was, the surrounding area is marginally less xenophobic and more diverse I’d say. Although Ithica might just look less leftist to me because now I’m way more leftist than I was in the early 90’s.
Obama is wrong about some things but one thing I think he’s right about is that things are overall better than they were 30 years ago as regards racism and xenophobia, and that’s true for almost everywhere in the country. We’re doing ourselves and the present a disservice when we deny the progress.
It’s just that a few people are worse, and a lot of those worse people seem a lot louder.
Chetan Murthy
@Kent: Let me put it this way: in 1990, when I still felt it was safe to bike alone on backroads in Tompkins County, you couldn’t have *paid* me to bike alone on roads in countryside around Weatherford. I’d have been constantly worried about some good ol’ boy coming by in a truck and sideswiping me into a ditch for his jollies.
I’ve encountered enough racism in the few times I’ve visited recently, that there’s no way I’ll go back there except for a family medical emergency.
Kent
@tobie: I don’t know what to tell you. I lived and worked in DC for a spell (actually Silver Spring) and I had co-workers who commuted in from Baltimore and as as far away as West Virginia. Most of the jobs in the greater DC area are theoretically available to someone living in inner Baltimore. So there are opportunities.
But yes, we do disinvest in some urban areas, mostly the ones that are poor and black frankly. Northwest DC and Bethesda is doing just fine. Thank your former Republican governor.
H-Bob
@Matt McIrvin: The “press 1 for English” options lets people skip listening to the menu choices for other languages. Screw Jeff Foxworthy for ranting about this concept and causing me to waste time to listen to the menu choices!
tobie
@Kent: I didn’t vote for Hogan. I divide my time between Baltimore City and Cecil County, Maryland. Hogan starved Baltimore of every resource. Cecil County got new school buildings, new libraries, new roads paved, broadband, new water infrastructure, new parks, etc. It’s astonishing to me how much rural counties in the state receive in aid. Montgomery and Howard counties largely fund Maryland.
geg6
@Kent:
That pretty much sums up my county in a nutshell. There are still people complaining about why there no steel jobs here anymore. Jesus Christ, people, the last steel mill closed early in the first Reagan term. And they complain about us being left behind compared to Allegheny County, which is filled with…well…you know…those people. And we’re not even a rural county, we’re a suburb. I am one of the very few people of my Class of ’77, the largest class ever at my high school, who still live in the county. And that’s only because I found opportunities here after completing a BA and MEd and having worked in the city for several years before finding those opportunities. Otherwise, I’d have been living in the city all these years and probably been a much happier person.
Bill Arnold
@ian:
Yes. That is always a useful technique for identifying one’s own biases.
Kent
@Bupalos: Obama was speaking in the pre-Trump era though. Although Trump was a horror show on so many different levels, one of the worst was that he normalized overt bigotry. I saw the change teaching in a semi-rural exurban school in SW Washington on the outer edge of the Portland metro.
Pre-Trump, kids were pretty chill and tolerant. After Trump and MAGA there were a certain set of asshole kids (mostly from white rural conservative homes) who just used Trump as a license to let their racist and homophobic free flag fly. It was disconcerting. But I had to deal with a LOT more overt cases of racism from kids during the Trump era than before.
To cite just one very random example that sticks in my mind. I was doing an outdoor physics lab once in the school tennis courts and I had kids bang on the big fence behind the tennis courts chanting “build the wall” when some Hispanic kids walked by.
The Trump era adult version of that is all the racist dipshits driving their trucks around with MAGA and blue lives matter flags on the back.
Ruckus
@UncleEbeneezer:
Have been to Mexico a few times decades ago because I had a really good customer there. I never had any problem with people and I speak rather crappy, weak, minimal Spanish. When I was in the navy over 50 yrs ago we spent a lot of time in Europe and I never had any problem talking to complete strangers because many/most people spoke excellent english. One girl in a Copenhagen shop spoke in a perfect Oxford English accent and when I asked her if she was English, she laughed and told me her english teacher was from Oxford and she’d never been to England. She was more amazed that I, an obvious American english speaker, recognized her accent than anything else.
My point is that yes, we can still be ugly Americans if we don’t try, but trying works almost as good as speaking someone else’s language well. It did 50 yrs ago and it still does. Do your best, try to speak their language and even the attempt will be appreciated. You may get laughed at but isn’t laughing a good part of life?
planetjanet
@$8 blue check mistermix:
The problem that poor counties have is not that they do not tax the citizens enough. Seriously think on that for a minute. There are complex problems. Even in the very conservative rural county that I consider my family home, one out of every four people vote for Democrats. This broad brush, quick take is quite insulting.
Raven
I made it to Austin with another 2 hr layover! Still not many masks, just me and mostly AA folks.
Chetan Murthy
@planetjanet: Two thoughts:
brantl
Or when you don’t have any f*ing MONEY.
WaterGirl
@Nelle: I think we all got chills.
Ksmiami
@Matt McIrvin: we are going to have to alter the Supremely Sucky Court to reverse this yet again…
geg6
@brantl:
People keep saying this and all I can think is are you saying my grandparents and great-great-grandparents who immigrated to the US were wealthy and that’s how they got here? Are you saying that the people who have walked to our southern border from Central and South America only did it because they had no one back home that they loved or that they must have had a lot of cash to do it? Because this is a bullshit argument. If you want it enough and have an ounce of gumption, you can do it. The population drain here in suburban Pittsburgh is pretty easy to see and it isn’t because they have no loved ones here or were rich enough to get out.
Brachiator
@ian:
Good point. Of course, some people try to get out as soon as they can. As you note, some people have a difficult time leaving a place where they have social connections. But other people are sometimes eager to flee a pace where the local society is not encouraging.
I don’t agree that rural areas should be left to flounder. And hell, for decades, tax and economic policy was biased in favor of rural areas, at least with respect to farming. And a fair amount of progressive policy originated in farm states.
But part of the issue seemed to be how you deal with rural people who claim a false ideal of self-reliance while complaining that the government doesn’t do enough for them, or does too much for urban people?
EthylEster
@Cameron: new college was the most radical of Florida colleges when it started. It was the Berkeley of the South. Only hippies went there.
Elizabelle
@Nelle: Interesting. And yep, with the Palin story. Odd, odd, odd.
Bupalos
@Kent: Yeah, I mean, “a lot louder” is a serious problem itself not to be minimized. But I don’t know, I still think as far as the general atmosphere, today is marginally better than when I was in college. The increase almost everywhere of representation of minorities of all stripes outweighs the backlash. We just notice the backlash all the more.
Ksmiami
@ian: it would be better if we shrunk the dying rural towns tbh as the cost of road maintenance etc isn’t worth it and much of the work in those areas will be automated going forward. Plus It’s better for the environment and the economy to have urban/suburban population density while preserving farm and feral lands.
ian
@Brachiator:
When we have an answer to this question we will have gotten 1/2 way to solving our homegrown fascism problem.
Chetan Murthy
@Bupalos:
The backlash has increased dramatically. At least, in the area of Texas I grew up in, it has. This is what convinces me that all Red areas are no-go zones.
Roger Moore
@tobie:
I actually have an elaborate economic theory for why mining is considered real work while being a barista (or school teacher, auto mechanic, or whatever) is not treated with the same mystique.
The basic idea is that industries can be broken down into ones that generate positive trade balance with the rest of the world and ones that don’t. If you look at a place like West Virginia, there are lots of people who work as nurses, teachers, baristas, and such, many more than work as coal miners. But medicine, teaching, coffee making, and such mostly move money around within the community or, even worse, send money to the outside for necessary supplies (medicine, textbooks, coffee). In contrast, coal mining ships coal to the outside world and brings money in.
If you didn’t have coal mining (or whatever other industry brings money in from the outside) the rest of the economy would dry up and blow away. That tends to make whatever the local export industry is higher prestige than other industries. There is some hierarchy, of course, so not all industries are equally prestigious. If an industry is low enough prestige to start with, it may still be looked down on even if it’s what makes the local economy works. For example, making money from tourism is still acting like a servant to outsiders, which makes it inherently low prestige even if it’s super important.
I think this is one of the things that hinders places trying to switch to a new primary industry. West Virginia might very well do better for itself economically by trying to switch from coal to tourism as a primary industry, but tourism is low prestige as primary industries go. That makes people dislike the idea of switching to it. Also, the longer a single industry has dominated the local economy, the more prestige it gets. It’s really hard to convince people whose ancestors have been in the same industry for generations that it’s time to let it go and do something else.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
Sure, but you’re White. I can totally see some of those places being a “no-go-zone” for a minority.
Ksmiami
@Bupalos: after inflicting Trump and their shitty grooming attitudes plus their ignorance and hate on the rest of us…. Yes fuck them over and over and cut off their Advil.
Brachiator
@Ksmiami:
Ironically, the rise of the federal highway system and the lessened reliance on railroads contributed to the death of rural communities. Progress is often destructive.
However, the possibilities of remote work and automation make it possible for more people to live in thriving rural communities. Work can be disconnected from physical presence.
There has to be better alternatives than this semi-return to late 19th century packing of people into cities. And I would dispute that this is necessarily better for the environment.
James E Powell
@Bupalos:
Is it really a moralistic judgment? I’m sure it feels that way to rural/small town people because that’s their usual way of looking at things. But I think Drum is making a practical, political observation, not judgment.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
I’ve stated this before that I’ve traveled to a lot of places, many of them on everyone else’s dime while in the navy. I learned early on that learning 3 things was a key part of it. Hello, please and thank you are not that difficult to learn in most languages and just knowing those got me a hell of a long way in communication. I once had an amazing evening in Mallorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean with a Greek woman I met at a dinner 30 or 40 of my fellow sailors and I attended. All the sailors were seated in one room for dinner but afterwards we were shown a large area with a band, dance floor and bar where everyone gathered from the several banquet rooms. As we walked out to the dance area I met this woman and she and I danced, had a couple of drinks and attempted to talk. She spoke Greek and I spoke American so communication was minimal at best but we both had a great evening dancing, a couple of drinks and a great time. Talking can be overrated, even if it is better than not talking. And believe me I’m not a great dancer. I still had a better time than most of those 30-40 sailors because I tried. And they didn’t.
Kent
@Roger Moore: Yes there is definitely a certain amount of “white privilege”. I don’t deny that.
But rural Texas is not really that white. It isn’t Wyoming. East Texas has lots of black folks in every little small rural town. And West Texas has fast-growing Hispanic populations.
Here is McGregor TX, for example, a very rural town SW of Waco. This is what the center of downtown McGregor looks like so you can see I’m talking about the rural sticks. https://maps.app.goo.gl/HZpucPSjoMgoivY76?g_st=im This is the demographic profile of the school district:
Hispanic 43.8%
White 42.1%
African American 6.2%
Native American 4.3%
Multiracial 2.6%
Pacific Islander 0.7%
Asian 0.3%
Bupalos
@Roger Moore: Waco has to be close to majority non-white.
Kent
@Bupalos: It is. But it is also a metro area of 250,000
The very rural towns west of Waco all have big Hispanic populations. As you go east you get into old Deep South cotton country and the small rural towns all have large Black populations. For example, this is the demographic profile of Marlin TX which is way out in the rural area SE of Waco. https://www.niche.com/k12/marlin-high-school-marlin-tx/students/
You probably have to go way out to the panhandle near Oklahoma to find rural towns that are all white.
Gvg
@geg6: do you happen to know how many immigrants and pioneers ended up dead? It wasn’t cost free to immigrate to the US back when and I am not talking about money here, I am talking about their lives. Then there is what they left. in many cases, it was near certain death. My ancestors were largely Irish famine fleeing stock, though I have a couple of types of fleeing religious wars including a purported Mayflower ancestor. So they survived long enough to have descendants. Plenty didn’t if you look at the records.
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore: I think this is what people refer to as “producerist”. That is to say, the only real work is that which produces “stuff”: the rest is ephemeral. Of course, most of life is about ephemera — medicine, education, entertainment. That’s what living in a high-productivity society is all about.
zhena gogolia
@geg6: I am in total awe of my father, who upped and left Slovakia at age 18 and got on a ship. I don’t know how they did it.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
In an interview with Dick Cavett, actor Richard Burton talked about growing up in a mining community. He spoke of how miners saw themselves as the aristocrats of the working class, superior to all other manual laborers, because of the skill it took to work a coal face.
He speaks of how every kid admired miners. “There was the arrogant strut of the lords of the coal face.”
I think that West Virginia coal miners may have had a similar vision of their jobs compared to other workers.
Bupalos
@James E Powell: I think when you say essentially “these people have a choice, but they actively choose to hurt themselves, and that’s their own fault, so we shouldn’t bother to help” that’s an inherently simplifying and moralizing argument. And a very common one in many walks of life.
It’s also inherently anti-liberal, but of course everyone has limits to their liberality and generosity. It strikes me that the most virulent “they’re bad, they deserve it” among those saying it are those who grew up in alienated proximity to the folks they’re talking about. I’ve noticed this both with (temporally speaking) ex-urban racist wingers that grew up in colinwood, talking about not helping blacks, and ex-rural liberals talking about “fuck these rednecks.” It’s completely understandable. But I’m liberal enough (and perhaps had a fortunate enough upbringing) to think it’s wrong.
These are people, and we waste human potential with these attitudes.
Chetan Murthy
@Bupalos:
It would be easier to want to help them, if they weren’t so busy trying to, y’know, murder the rest of us. Literally so.
EthylEster
@brantl: I am not trying to score cheap points here. BUT a lot of poor people (who were poorer than I can imagine) left their birth country and travelled thousands of miles to get to this country. Somehow they found a way to make it happen.
Also, too, can someone be too poor to join the military?
I see geg6 got there before me at #157.
tobie
@Roger Moore: That’s an interesting theory about what counts as a high prestige industry as opposed to a service industry. Sounds plausible to me. I think knowledge may be the US’s biggest export. Biden always likes to say we invented the solar panel. The same is true for the CatScan, mRNA vaccines, the combine harvester, the MRI machine and any number of other inventions. Think about the decades of basic research that went into each.
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: This again is not a realistic portrait of people living in rural areas.
Low Key Swagger
Probably a dead thread…but here in this small rural area, the demographics are rapidly changing. Mostly it’s California transplants that made a killing selling their homes there and driving up prices here. But I’m also noticing that the introduction of fiber internet is attracting young professionals or semi professionals who are priced out of the cities. Oh my god the Next Door posts. “Can anyone recommend someone to help fix our clogged toilet? “I need someone to pressure wash by driveway pad. ” etc. Anyway, it is difficult to find skilled labor because all the good ones go to Nashville because they can charge so much more. Still, the youngsters are coming back, including my own, who plan to live here so they can save to move elsewhere. Remote work/high speed internet has been a game changer.
Roger Moore
@Chetan Murthy:
It’s not so much stuff vs. ephemera as it is positive trade balance vs. negative trade balance. There’s some real truth to the idea there, too; the overall wealth of a community depends on its balance of trade with the outside world. If the main local industry brings in lots of outside money (relative to the number of people working in it, at least) then it has lots of money to spend on outside goods and services. If it brings in little money from the outside, the community will be poor because they won’t be able to afford many outside goods and services.
That’s the fundamental reason why these poor rural communities are poor. The big local industry just can’t bring in the outside money like it used to. The mine shut down, or the price of oil dipped, or ADM isn’t paying much for corn these days. Not that this is confined to rural areas. We all know how badly cities in the Rust Belt suffered when international trade upset their local manufacturing industries.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@EthylEster:
@geg6:
What about the ones who failed? Who were exploited and taken advantage of?
It’s not so simple as moving away. You need money to get an education/training in the first place. It’s a big risk that might not work out. Not everyone is cut out to go the college route, and the ones that did go sometimes flunk out because they choose the wrong major. Or they choose a major they could live with and can’t find employment and are stuck with the student loan debt
planetjanet
@Chetan Murthy: Taxing people who are poor does not create revenue.
Anyway
@zhena gogolia:
I think it’s “easier” to emigrate at 18 — sense of adventure, explore the world, no dependents …
Kent
@planetjanet: Even the poorest parts of the country have PLENTY of rich people scattered about, not to mention PLENTY of wealthy landowners, many of them from out of the area or out of state.
Raising property taxes in a poor county doesn’t mean you are necessarily taxing poor people. You might be taxing the corporate owned coal mine or timber company with vast landholdings. Or corporate farms with vast holdings.
The devil is always in the details. You can always design any kind of tax to be progressive or regressive.
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
My father had a man working for him who had been working as a merchant sailor, and when WWII broke out he couldn’t go back because of the country he was from, if I remember correctly Rumania. His wife was still there and after the war they decided to just break up. He left the ship in Canada and then later moved to the US. He got married and learned a trade here. And worked for my dad for almost 20 yrs, till he retired about 40 yrs ago. From knowing him for a couple of decades I’d say they did it because there often was not really any other choice. Same reason people walk hundreds of miles to come to the US. There are more choices, more opportunity, a possibility that often isn’t available other places.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
The biggest difference between Texas and California is in the types of taxes. Texas has no income tax, so its main tax revenue comes from sales and property taxes. Property taxes tend to be only moderately regressive, but sales taxes are very regressive. The net result is that Texas has a very regressive tax system, with poor people paying a lot of taxes relative to their income and rich people paying a comparative pittance.
In California, property taxes are famously capped, which means most of the money comes from sales and income taxes. The sales tax is regressive, but California has a very progressive income tax. That results in a somewhat odd situation, where the richest people pay the highest percentage of their income in taxes, followed by the poorest people, and the middle income people pay the least. It’s mildly progressive overall- IIRC, California is the only state where the richest 20% pay more of their income in taxes than the poorest 20%- but could certainly be better.
The other thing is that California’s tax system brings in a lot more money than Texas’s. As @planetjanet said, taxing poor people doesn’t bring in a lot of money. The net result is that California can afford a bigger government than Texas has. I’m not sold on everything our state is spending money on, but I think we’re overall getting good stuff in return for our taxes.
randy khan)
@geg6:
This has been confirmed – just one, not that one is not one too many.
Chetan Murthy
@Bupalos:
BULLSHIT. [Insert A.R. Moxon quote about Nazis]
Those rural voters who voted GrOPer are MAGAts — b/c that’s what being a GrOPer is — and MAGAt means being fine with the ethnic cleansing of America. It means being fine with stripping brown people like me of our rights as citizens, stripping my natural-born American relatives of their rights as Americans. These fuckers want us dead or in camps, and the way I know this is that they fucking voted MAGAt.
And when you tell me this is not true, I respond quite simply: “WTF, Were you Asleep the last seven years?”
Chris T.
@frosty:
“No, I’m embarrassing you!”
Betsy
Some people live in rural areas because they need to. They have rural occupations that need to be where the resources are: farming operations; large animal veterinarians; loggers and foresters; firefighters; research station personnel; equipment mechanics; miners; etc. Or, their family members do these things, and they are attached to those families — as grandparents, homemakers, kids.
MOST people who live in rural areas are making a lifestyle choice. Retirees, exurbanites seking to get away from the “noisy, crime-filled city” (sic) (cities are only noisy because of gas-powered vehicles, and rural areas are very often full of crime and other ills), suburbanites — people who use heavily subsidized highways to commute to fancy jobs two counties away while living on a heavily subsidized “pretend farm” with a tax-deductible McMansion in the middle of a five-acre lot — these are the people who have choices, and whose choices are heavily subsidized by others, mostly in urbanized areas.
This isn’t about morality or tut-tutting; it’s about economics and practical reality.
We should consider subsidizing the needs of people who MUST be in rural areas, because they are Americans or US residents who also need schools, health insurance, and medical facilities, libraries, and clean drinking water (etc.).
We should not consider subsidizing the choices of people who don’t need to be in rural areas. They have the ability to make different choices if they want to improve their situation.