there's this one-way thing where rural relatives get to be really offensive about your life in ways they would *never* accept if you behaved reciprocally
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At a Colter Wall concert, I was stuck hearing his out-of-nowhere lyric about wanting to “kick a hipster’s a**”. I thought: Ah, this must be an important rejoinder to all those hipster songs about wanting to kick cowboys’ a**es.*
*Colter is the son of a former premier of Saskatchewan
Like why are you telling me that I’ll grow out of wanting to live in a city, you literally took public transit to a show at Madison Square Garden after work last week. You walk to restaurants. Your “small town” has smushed up its borders against every other “small town” around it. You love cities!
My Texas relatives are relatively chill (as it were), but they love sending us Texas-themed shirts and bumper stickers and stuff as Christmas presents. Every year I'm tempted to send them a bunch of California-themed stuff in response. I doubt they'd be amused.
Not to disparage the Lone Star State overly much, but the majority (not all of them!) of the Texans I know are Texan first and everything else second. It's the nucleus of their identity.
When I visit I'm always struck by how everything in the state is a Texas-themed theme park. Like the zoo is a little model of an Old West town. The LA Zoo doesn't keep the animals in a little model of Graumann's Chinese Theater!
Yes, the place is infested with Midwesterners. People who think it's fine to chat to others when you're stuck in a line, who like to hold doors open for uncomfortable lengths of time and live for the moment they are asked for directions. Same number of bigots, so don't get ideas.
As someone who was raised out east, most of that seems incredibly rude to me. Except that last bit. Yes, please give me directions IF I ASK FOR THEM. (I moved to the Midwest in 1979, and have been struggling with culture shock ever since.)
I live in central Illinois and a woman here told me she’d like to go to a game, but it feels too dangerous to go to Chicago. I just told her how easy it is to get there on Amtrak and left her to be scared of midwesterners at a hockey game.
I don't know how to fix it without Fox News going out of business, but they successfully convinced millions of people that whole cities were literally burned to the ground by BLM. Like how do you deal with that without saying, "You sound insane."
You can tell them about your own good experiences, but they are primed to believe Tucker Carlson or whoever is lying to them now over their own family members.
Yep, I was just at a grocery store in the NJ suburbs and I was talking to a guy working at the store. He genuinely thought that the city I live in was burned to the ground. I told him that the protests he was referring to were in a small three-block area of downtown in 2020.
people in northern MN now routinely talk about "murderapolis" as if the whole city has been completely burned and destroyed and is now nothing but rubble. that's what fox news has told them. meanwhile I was just there feeling nostalgic & admiring how pretty mpls is at xmastime (needs snow, though)
Jon Ronson wrote about a July 5, 2005 denier telling a woman who was injured in those Tube bombings that she hadn't really experienced that, because he had looked at the CCTV footage. That guy's no longer a weird outlier.
Bad news: consolidation of media ownership means that millions of viewers of TV news on "normal" channels are now getting this same brain poisoning, just more subtly. The things my Indiana parents ask me about when they phone....
Yep. I live in NW Indiana and even the ordinary Dems here think Chicago is crumbling. I am a little (darkly?) curious what the Republicans around here think of the migrant busing situation though. Of course they like to own the libs, but that also means more "undesirables" in their backyard.
And you have to behave respectfully towards their opinions even when you know for 100% dead certain that the things they believe happened never happened.
I went for a ride into Rogers Park today (I live in Evanston). Had an extremely scary encounter with a middle aged white guy in an SUV. (I'm an older white guy.) Reflecting on the incident after extricating myself from the situation, I concluded he was probably a Chicago cop.
I live in Minneapolis, but work in rural Minnesota. I am frequently told that my city has burned down. I tell them, no, not so much. They say, You must live in the suburbs. I say, No, I live in S. Minneapolis. They say, You must be so scared. I say, Only of the cops.
Here in San Francisco a bunch of former suburbanites or rural folks moved in for the tech jobs. Some are so scared they claim they fear walking their dog around the city or taking a kid to the park. Covid helped many leave. LOL
When I was moving from Denver to Oakland, I stopped for the night in Reno. Checking into the hotel w/my cats, the clerk asked where I was moving to. I told her, and her response: "Oh, dear." I hope she found a hair in her next meal.
lol I live in Brooklyn and for some reason that means my mom gets to have opinions on my mayor but I don’t get to have opinions on the local politicians of the town they live (and where I grew up).
Oh trust me, there’s no shortage of opinion sharing on both sides but I do try to keep it light because my mom means well and we’re generally on the same political side, I’m just more progressive and she’s more centrist.
It's sort of agreed-upon that culturally, rural whites are the Realest Americans, the most authentic expression of our national essence. It's not really ever been effectively challenged and mainstream media still reinforces it!
100%. They are the flimsiest fo snowflakes. They will endlessly spout the most vile, racist shit about your big city. But the second you say anything even slightly negative about their town, they react like you personally burned down their home and urinated on the ashes of their loved ones.
I wonder if there’s a measurable cutoff of when you’re allowed to talk shit about a town. Is it just as long as you live in a smaller town? You’re only allowed to punch up, not down? Or is there like a population limit when something officially becomes an evil cesspool?
If the person is a MAGA conservative? Never. Their town is sacrosanct as if it was a gift from god and the lone bastion against the evils of the planet.
Everyone else? In my experience, it is punch upwards.
My uncle, before he died, ran and owned a magazine geared to the rich living in the Panhandle of Texas. He had money and hobnobbed with other Texas GOP elite inc GWB
Yet he was convinced Obama caused the Great Recession & the economy never recovered despite his net worth growing dramatically.
Yes…and given he & my mom grew up poor, he subscribed to this kind of thing.
Even worse: since he was lighter-skinned than my mom (who was pretty light skinned herself for a racially-mixed
Hispanic) and his hair was in between blond and very light brown, he definitely didn’t admit to being mixed.
Not even relatives. People who barely know me have told me:
They are surprised I’m polite, because all people from the Big City are rude
That they would be horrified to raise kids in Big City, where I grew up
That it is disgusting, dangerous, crime ridden, etc.
People who live in urban settings have to be able to get along with others. Others that include friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Lots of them, constantly. We can't march off to the woods in a huff if someone bumps into us. Or has a slightly different opinion.
Is that really what you think happens in rural areas? Because lemme tell you, it's even more true in rural areas. If something happens to a family member, it's your neighbors you're gonna depend on for help. Not an agency.
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*Colter is the son of a former premier of Saskatchewan
Now Detroit at a certain time I get. It was legitimately bad, but even now people think Robocop is the reality there.
Chicago has been inexplicably hated by the media my entire life.
I also remind them that painthuffing and cowtipping are not acceptable recreation in cities.
Everyone else? In my experience, it is punch upwards.
Yet he was convinced Obama caused the Great Recession & the economy never recovered despite his net worth growing dramatically.
Even worse: since he was lighter-skinned than my mom (who was pretty light skinned herself for a racially-mixed
Hispanic) and his hair was in between blond and very light brown, he definitely didn’t admit to being mixed.
They are surprised I’m polite, because all people from the Big City are rude
That they would be horrified to raise kids in Big City, where I grew up
That it is disgusting, dangerous, crime ridden, etc.