<
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://medium.com/ellemeno/i-know-why-rural-populations-are-vulnerable-to-the-lies-of-tyrants-867ec1ac8f8c>
"I grew up in an unincorporated town in Northern Wisconsin. My school district
served many small communities within a large geographical area. Every morning
we took a 45 minute bus ride to a metropolis of 2,000 people. It was the
nearest town with facilities that came the closest to meeting the state’s basic
educational standards.
I grew up surrounded by wilderness and dairy farms. Our nearest neighbor was
several miles away.
I’m often confused when people talk about “rural life” because the social
dialogue never matches up with my lived experience. What I’ve come to realize
is that almost all discussions of the “rural mindset” are either fabricated or
they’re made up of commonly believed but baseless assumptions.
The simple fact is that I know what American rural life is like and most people
don’t. I was raised in the reddest of the red. There’s a chasm of difference
between an unincorporated town and a town of 10,000 or 50,000 people. “Stadium”
country music singers don’t know what country life is like. Almost everything
in their songs is wrong. Media personalities have no clue. Politicians don’t
know because none of them have ever been there.
But I know, and I also know we aren’t going to make progress as a society until
we make an honest effort to correct the wrongs that nobody wants to see."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
