You shut up with your big city facts!
Ever notice that it’s perfectly acceptable for Republican politicians running for federal office to write off a state like Massachusetts (6.4 million people) or a city like San Francisco (776K people, more than all of Alaska), as if they weren’t really America, much less under federal jurisdiction? Or how about dismissing the “blue coastal elites,” (population 125 million just in coastal watersheds)?
Reason (aghast!) dismantles some myths of small town snobbery, perpetuated by big city politicians even though “small town” describes only 1/5 of the US population because even big city people like to romanticize rural America.
Maybe if they ventured beyond the city limits more often, those people would not be so inclined to believe everything they hear about the merits of rustic hamlets, which harbor a full complement of social ills.
Not everyone in rural America gets high on fresh air and the smell of new-mown hay. Illicit drugs are nearly as common out there as they are in cities and suburbs.
In 2007, a survey of 8th graders by the Monitoring the Future project at the University of Michigan found that country kids were 26 percent more likely to experiment with drugs than middle-schoolers elsewhere. Overall methamphetamine consumption among adults and teens is more than 50 percent higher in the country.
The story with alcohol is worse still. “Relative to their urban counterparts, rural youth ages 12 to 17 are significantly more likely to report consuming alcohol,” says a 2006 study by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. Excessive boozing among adults, it noted, appears to be no less widespread in Mayberry than in Metropolis.
Nor is the countryside exempt from social problems often associated with the inner city—such as, if you’ll forgive me, out-of-wedlock births. The federal government apparently doesn’t tabulate these births according to whether they occur in urban or rural areas. But it does break them down by state, and wide-open spaces are no guarantee of responsible sexual behavior.
The highest rates of births to unwed mothers are in Mississippi and New Mexico, both of which have high rural populations. The most urban states, New Jersey and California, do better than the average in out-of-wedlock births.
Mike and I grew up in a rural Iowa town as small as they get. We were responsible for some hell-raising and bad behavior, but we were pretty tame compared to some of the kids we went to school with (we were late bloomers when it came to booze and sex). Given that our time predates the scourge of meth, we might have a rosier view of small town life in Iowa than is likely warranted today. As for the debauchery going on in college towns, you don’t even want to know. Well, unless you’re in one…
The point is that small-town folks aren’t necessarily better than big-city folks. I know lots of good and moral people in the urban sprawl of Southern California, people who anybody could learn from. One could argue they possess a “small town frame of mind,” but that’s pretty close to a no-true-Scotsman fallacy. The prevalence of good Americans in big cities means that a city frame of mind must possess its own virtues as well, or possibly be neutral morally (given that you interact with people every day you’ve never met, you’re very likely to produce a code of behavior that is applicable to all). Yet it’s fair game in politics to deride and insult the majority of Americans who live in cities.
Republicans have perpetuated this in order to get votes and advantage in the big sparsely populated states, taking a country where those states already had a lot of political punch and dividing it for their own personal gain. Tonight, Sarah Palin, a proven liar, will take to the stage and undoubtedly spout some vague claptrap about how she loves the “real hardworking” Americans in those small towns, but as anybody from a small town can tell you, we’ve got some slimeball liars too. There’s the usual salesmen, drunks and thugs, but you can find the Sarah Palin type easy, crashing school boards or taking a check to lobby for some big company to build a hog factory upwind of your peaceful country home. Them small towns got the same DNA as them fancy cats in the big city, folks. Human nature prevails.
-jb
Leave a Reply