Maybe you are just a little bit different. Maybe you are a boy who doesn’t like sports, trucks, tools, or girls. Maybe you are a girl who doesn’t like dolls, make-up, shoes, or boys. Maybe you could never believe in the parting of the Red Sea, or the story of Noah’s ark. Maybe you were one of few that had dark skin, or the only one who spoke with an accent. Maybe you wanted to be an actor, or go into publishing, or to become a chef, or something else that no one in your hometown ever thought of becoming. Maybe you are the first one in your family to go to college and learn fancy-schmanzy theories about physics, biology, or sociology.
If so, there is a better than even chance that you left your hometown and came to live in the country’s great coastal cities. Or maybe you settled in Chicago or St. Paul.
:::flip:::
The folks back home see you as somewhat exotic. Their eyes get big when you tell them mundane things like how you get to work, or about your eccentric Pakastani grocer, or the strange cuisines you have taken a liking to. They shake their heads when you tell them about your gay neighbor and his many cats. They still love you, but they no longer understand you. Your whole life is foreign to them, and it is vaguely threatening.
And then politics or religion comes up. They are concerned about foreign immigration. You are the only white person living in your apartment building. They are concerned about gay marriage. You like to end a night on the town singing in a piano bar. They are suspicious of people that don’t show up for church services. You don’t know too many people that go to church. They support the President. You can’t think of a soul you know that voted for him.
Our great cities are magnets that pull the go-getters, eccentrics and free-thinkers out of the provincial heartland and put them in a cosmopolitan whirlwind.
The result is two populations that can no longer see each other clearly. We may still love each other, but we find each other threatening. Those of us in the cities struggle not to look down on the lack of sophistication, learning, and tolerance of those living in the heartland. The people in the heartland struggle not to resent this condescencion, they struggle to reconcile their values with the seeming anything-goes attitude of the city-dwellers.
The truth is, there is a lot of wisdom in the bedrock conservatism of small-town America. And there is a lot of wisdom in the free-for-all liberalism of a San Francisco. And it seems to me that we have reached a point where we can find common ground in a basic principle. The principle is to say to the government: leave me alone.
We can see the shift in America’s perceptions in this Gallup Poll:
* By 53%-40%, they say Democrats, who sharply expanded government since the Depression, aren’t trying to interfere on moral issues.
It’s time for the Democrats to reach out to the libertarians. We need to support the privacy of Americans from Schiavo-like intrusions. We need to oppose the politics of fear, with the politics of personal liberty. Small-town America never liked the federal government telling them what to do. Now that the federal government is not fighting for civil rights, but against them, the easy-going city dwellers need to join with the small-town conservatives to say: get out of my bedroom, get out of my hospital room, get out of my doctor’s office, stop snooping around my public library, just get out of my business.
And bring our boys and girls home from Iraq, and some of the other 105 countries they are stationed in. We never asked for an empire…just a republic.
The first few paragraphs is exactly my situation. I love and appreciate most of my family back home in the midwest, but there are certain fundamentalist members who I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have an actual conversation with. I try to keep in contact with the others who are a bit more open-minded just to let them know we’re not just always having gay sex and abortions here in NYC.
was it that made you different? How many people from your hometown moved to the coasts?
well, I was a philosophy major and always a reader ,so in that sense I’ve always been “different”. I never took anyone’s word for anything (I’m from Missouri, after all… “Show Me”). I met a friend in high school when traveling in Italy that set me further down the path of inquiry and have been following it ever since. He once wrote to me that if I never left Missouri again I’d think the whole world was a limitless plain (he hadn’t been there yet and didn’t realize that was Kansas and that MO can be very beautiful). Even without politics, many in my family don’t quite know what to think of me or where the hell I get my crazy ideas.
And, actually, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit for some time now and have become convinced that a major problem with the US is its anti-intellectualism. This is caused by any number of factors, from the media to a society that values money and profit above all else (and deludes itself into thinking it really cares more about family and morals) to an education system that merely wants to produce compliant yes-men and yes-women. This obscurantism can be seen everywhere. In fact, I just read an article decrying the lack of good fiction in the US the past few years that illustrated the problem (though it seems the people worrying are only worried because it means there are no good books to sell). I think this is our biggest challenge, to actually cultivate a place where intellectualism is once again a virtue. Will we nurture our future Chomskys, Duboises, Whitmans, Zinns, Goldmans, etc? Without doing so, I don’t hold out much hope for the American Republic. (Not that I think it’s really worth saving, considering all empires must fade and we’re certainly on the downside.)
The Republican party has morphed into the exact opposite of what it was. And apparently with little notice by red state voters. Huge federal expenditures, intrusions into privacy, dictating morality-little is left untouched in the new age of Republican activism. And what happened to the great uniter who was supposed to bridge the gap between red and blue? Oh, that is sooo last year!
(The division in the population and red staters voting against their own best interests are central to What’s the Matter With Kansas? A very interesting book, worth reading.)
Yes, Democrats need to reach out to libertarians and make clear that their concerns are shared. They (and anyone else) need to see where we are headed and that we need to get off this road, ASAP.
I definitely agree with this post…
^_^
Those escapees from urban America, who gladly moved to the Big Empty, who feel more comfortable around a few grizzlies than crammed together with millions of other humans. As Edward Abbey once said, “I like my neighbors, as long as they are five miles away on the other side of an eight thousand foot mountain”.
True freedom is having a choice of where to live, vibrant urban America, solid Midwestern small towns, or the wide open spaces next to the American Wilderness. But this freedom is being taken away from us, as the country fills up with more and more people, while clear cuts mare the forests, drilling rigs appear in the Arctic Refuge, and McMansions sprout up along Montana’s great rivers.
As the great conservationist Aldo Leopold said of the dissappearing wilderness in the 1940s, “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on a map? For some of us, the right to see geese is as inalienable as free speech”.
Also, convince your governor to run for President. Thanks 🙂
question I have is, how do you survive on Olive Gardens and Bob Evans?
I’d starve if you took away my access to non-corporate food.
Montana has only one Olive Garden in Billings and it’s lame.
But I did need to escape to Missoula last weekend to get a sushi fix.
The Missoula Farmer’s market has gotten so large and diverse, that it rivals Pike Place Market in Seattle. Our local organic food choices have improved a hundred fold since the 1970s when I moved to this frozen desert.
I’m not too fond of Libertarians, at least the wild west kind we have here. Many of them seek a return to feudalism, getting rid of most government regulations and all public lands, they’re content to hide out in their fortified McMansions like medieval dukes, while the serfs get to work their fields.
Libertarians may be more reasonable in other areas of the country, but they are hardly the types of people here that I would try to build a coalition with. They are the people we are fighting against.
be admittedly a coalition of convenience. Those encampment libertarians out there probably don’t vote, vote libertarian, or some other wingnut party, or for the GOP.
All we want is for their 4th choice to be Democrats rather than Republicans. We don’t share a lot in common with them, but we do share an aversion to the Carlyle Group’s New World Order. And that is all the agreement we need.
There’s Libertarians and there’s libertarians … sometimes referred to as big-L and little-l. Big-L Libertarians — who are in or at least generally agree with the US Libertarian party — tend to be right-ish, or at least used to be when the righties were less rabid. Little-l libertarians are all over the spectrum. (Hell, Noam Chomsky identifies as a libertarian socialist, and I know several libertarians who voted for Nader in 2000.)
I used to be a little-l libertarian myself, and still have some libertarian sympathies. As far as building a coalition, here’s a couple of links to check out:
Democratic Freedom Caucus
and
Freedom Democrats
Here’s a quick test to spot the wrong sort of libertarian: see how they react to the term “libertarian socialist”. The right kind, at the very least, does not react violently, and may even express some sympathy or a sense of common cause with that philosophy. The wrong kind (the sort, like Objectivists, whose “libertarianism” is really a thin veneer over some seriously twisted beliefs or goals) will react extremely violently. Be warned that spittle or bloodshed may result.
I’ll make this deal with them … I won’t tell them how to live their lives, who to sleep with, whether they want to waste their time worshiping the Great Cosmic Muffin or whatever gets them through their days — as long as they do everybody else the same courtesy.
I’m back in the midwest after living for quite some time in NYC. I’ve lived in the middle of nowhere in CO, and in suburban CT. I grew up in exurban (before they called it that), now suburban, Chicago. I’ll take NYC anyday, and I DO look down on those cozy blinkered values. However, up to them if they want to keep their heads in the sand.
I do agree, make some common cause w/ Libertarians, but remember, they want to get rid of OSHA, of some civil rights legislation.
And lets not forget that they let their “Pro-Choice” position drop off of their Platform and are “Just Not Talking About It” now.
My first impulse is to agree whole-heartedly with this argument. I was raised Republican, but (as the “odd” one in my family, appropriately) always retained a belief that people should be able to do what they want so long as they’re not hurting anyone else. When I first registered to vote, I registered Libertarian.
And I am, to this day, a social Libertarian. But I no longer trust the power elite – those who run corporations, control the money supply, make the laws, and have significant impact on our futures – to have any interest at all in the greater good or the LONG TERM. When the apparent goal of the ruling class is merely to acquire and maintain as much of the power and money as they can with no regard for the well-being of the rest of the population, libertarianism falls far short of being a workable approach.
As I see it, we need a rigorous government to moderate the power the corporations have over our lives. What we desperately need to get rid of, right now, is a government that colludes with corporations against our best interests. I don’t want kids to die in bogus wars so that my taxes can be spent to enrich Halliburton. I don’t want to endanger the future of life on the planet to fill the Exxon-Mobil coffers.
What we need far more than a smaller government is a balanced government, and until the one-party control of the Republicans over all three branches of government is broken, that won’t exist.
I have never understood why we need a smaller government, when our country’s human population soars toward a third of a billion souls, and corporations achieve the size and wealth of nation states.
Real freedom to me would require a smaller human population and footprint in the U.S., a small , balanced government (as you suggest) and small vibrant businesses.
I’m curious. You keep saying we need fewer people. How do you propose we achieve this goal?
(I’m personally in favour of an O’Neill-type space colonization program, in general terms, but it seems a goal unlikely to garner widespread support any time soon.)
Unfortunately. But I feel that I have to raise the serious questions about unrestricted population growth. After all, the two countries with larger populations than the United States; India and China, are hardly cultures that we should want to emulate if our country’s population should reach those levels.
A more agressive space policy would be one solution in my mind.
My major concern now is that we are losing many freedoms in the United States by poor sprawl policies and unrestricted ppulation growth.
I lived in a small midwestern town for the first 17 years of my life. The 30 years since then I’ve spent mostly in cities. So you’re touching on my story here.
Why did I leave? Where do I start? To avoid this becoming three chapters in my autobiography, I’ll oversimplify.
I grew up feeling like a city soul trapped in a small-town body. Although I had a couple of dear friends in high school who enjoyed reading about and discussing philosophical and metaphysical subjects, a functioning brain was for the most part a social handicap. Didn’t help that I refused to demonize other people based on race, religion, nationality, or sexual preference. Most conversations with fellow townspeople ended with me sitting slack-jawed and speechless.
And boy, does this ring true:
My mother, an especially fearful person, is horrified over my preference for living in the city. The cruel irony is that the only one of our relatives who has been the victim of violent crime was a second cousin. She had just moved into an apartment in an even smaller town, just miles from where my mother grew up. That’s where they found her after she was stabbed 54 times. She was 18. It’s been 10 years, and nobody has ever been arrested for the crime.
But I digress.
Ironically, one of the things I most appreciate about living in a city is a sense of privacy. Everyone in that small town knew entirely too much about me. I’d be introduced to someone, and the response would be “Oh, sure, I know your mother/father/sister/uncle,” or “Oh, yeah, you’re that kid who skipped a grade in school.” And everyone was entirely too interested in how everybody else in town was living their lives. It’s just creepy. My mother actually owns and listens to a police scanner so she can find out who’s getting into trouble.
For me, then, a small midwestern town was where I spent a miserable, lonely childhood. If it’s condescending of me to look back and shudder, well, so be it.
To move on to your larger point, I’m not so sure that “leave me alone” would be common ground as far as the folks in my hometown are concerned. The spurious “moral values” approach of the Republicans appeals all too well to their self-righteous desire to meddle in their neighbors’ lives. They’re not so worried about the government meddling in their own personal (as opposed to financial) lives, because they’re convinced that they’re morally irreproachable. “Moral values” is all about interfering with the lives of those one disapproves of–and that’s practically a team sport where I came from.
But, on a more positive note, my parents deeply despise Bush. My mother hates his smirk. So there’s some common ground for you.
I hear ya. I got beat up in my small-town high school, got shot at by a (probably drunk) hunter, nearly intentionally run over on a rural road, but my mom worries about me now just because I now live in a city, “where it’s dangerous”.
Now granted, I have been mugged — once — in Boston. And I’d be unsurprised if the violent-crimes-per-thousand numbers tend to be somewhat higher in cities. But small towns aren’t exactly peaceable kingdoms.
Here in the city, I try to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The concern is that I might be the victim of a random crime, most likely someone who wants my money. But I’m not afraid (within the confines of Denver, at least) that somebody is going to shoot me or beat me up because I wear a pentagram or stand up for gay rights.
If I lived in my hometown, I’d have to think twice before telling anyone that I’m Wiccan or before putting up an anti-Bush yard sign. I’d be running the risk that–at a minimum–my property would be vandalized.
As I have a very hard time keeping my mouth shut, I think I’m safer in the city.
I did that-ran away to the big city-more than once-it was because I was bored stiff.Moved back to Western PA and I was regarded as a member of an exotic species.It really was just the way Booman decribed,that suspicious look– like maybe you have some ‘city disease’,unknown to the locals.
Certainly there is common ground for everyone who doesn’t want to be interfered with in their daily lives,I think the difference lies between those who want to make everyone JUST LIKE THEMSELVES. Not gonna happen,never has,never will.
I can’t think of anyone I have ever met who didn’t have something to teach me.Open mind,open heart.
Go after drug laws, the patriot act, privacy rights. Another libertarian ideal thats possible would be a states rights priority. This could be the way to take the three G’s off the table permanetly. If we were to delegate hot button issues to the states, then we could agree to disagree on the single issue voter type issues. It makes more sense anyways.
I think both the urbanized regions and the conservative rural populations are both afraid of gentrifacation, and somehow they each think the other is to blame. They see Walmart and think that the next step is they will open a second End-Up next to their megachurch. We see Walmart and fear the next step is churchgoers shutting down the Endup. We are both being attacked by Corporate America.
Going after the drug laws would not play well in central Illinois. Parents may give their kids a beer now and then, but drugs are Satan’s own form of recreation. Drugs are bad, mkay?
Folks there don’t have much of a problem with permitting intrusive law enforcement, either–the operative assumption is that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. Not to mention the fact that in a small town, the police know every frigging thing about you anyway.
And Wal-Mart? They loooooove Wal-Mart! It’s more popular than church!
i think it is starting to, or will sink in that the laws are useless. All the billions wasted. Also prescription drug abuse is blurring the lines. Whats the difference between a tweeker and someone on ritalin? Or a junky and someone on Oxycotton. Gradully, people are getting it, as prescription meds gain in popularity, they are seeing it up close.
My mother has taken her “nerve pills” for decades, but she’s still convinced that pot is evil. If a doctor prescribes it, it’s “medicine” and it’s OK. It’s even OK to share your “medicine” with a friend who needs it for “nerves.” But if you buy an ounce of pot from a friend, it’s wrong and bad.
My mother’s friends all sit around the kitchen table and smoke and drink coffee for hours at a time, but that doesn’t count as substance abuse. One friend’s daughter was caught with drugs, and the friend is too ashamed to ever talk about it.
The people I grew up with–the ones who didn’t leave town–still drink like sponges, but they don’t smoke pot anymore and they don’t think it should be legalized.
Logic does not work in this situation. It’s largely circular–recreational drugs are bad because they’re illegal; therefore they should remain illegal because they’re bad.
Another thing to keep in mind when you’re talking about recreational drugs and the rural midwest is that–especially for women–having fun is always suspect.
If you’re not working all the damned time at jobs, watching the kids, cooking, cleaning, mowing the lawn, tending the garden, doing the laundry, and cleaning some more, you’re a bad woman. During family get-togethers, it’s still women in the kitchen while the men watch TV.
If the doctor prescribes a little something for stress, it’s acceptable because you need to get over your stress and keep working. And if the medication knocks you on your butt for a few days, that’s not your fault because the doctor gave it to you.
But if you indulge in recreational drugs and enjoy life a little, well, you’re not fulfilling your required role of working all the damn time. Drugs are therefore A Bad Thing.
All of the above rural vs urban comments pretty much follow the pattern here too.
One thing puzzles me, however. TV ads, “Talk to your kids about drugs,” pot of course and not a word about meth.
“Click on this link” as you see on many websites, and again “Talk to your kids about drugs,” pot again, and not a word about meth.
WTF
We’ve got an epidemic of meth users, brothers shooting brothers, friends shooting friends, hammer and axes in each others’ heads, predictions of whole wings of nursing homes in the future to be devoted to meth users who know longer know who they are.
And even now talking to the social service people… they already have a serious problem trying to place the children of these parents.
Recently, I read (somewhere?) that that feds are cutting back funds for fighting the meth battle… but not, of course pot.
Supposedly all this is similar throughout the rural mid west.
???
I think that, as happens a lot, the people on the coasts–particularly the feds–haven’t a clue about what’s going on in the rest of the country. Meth is a huge problem here in west-central IL, too, and there are some semi-serious attempts at preventing the manufacture of it–limits on sales of psuedoephredine, programs to encourage farmers to be vigilant about thefts of anhydrous ammonia–but much less going on by way of education.
In a similar vein, I think the rural vs. urban dichotomy folks are latching onto is not as clearcut as folks would like to make it.
My mother was raised on a farm in rural IL in the 30’s and 40’s. After teacher’s college she moved to a small town about 60 miles north to be a high school home ec teacher. Unsophisticated? Intolerant? No. She was as upset as I was about the last election; we talk often about her fears that this country is irretrievably divided. I’d been thinking about talking her into joining here, but frankly, the assumptions made in this diary about rural Midwesterners would make her head explode.
My late, sweet, right-wing mother-in-law, on the other hand, was born in Chicago. After her divorce, she moved to the suburbs, and visited the city less often than my mother did even though she lived significantly closer and could have used mass transit to get there. She was concerned about foreign immigration. She was urgently concerned about gay marriage. She didn’t attend church (divorced Catholic), but was deeply suspicious when her son and I joined a UCC congregation.
What Booman’s diary fails to recognize is that there are sophisticated, well-educated, tolerant people everywhere. Some never get the chance to escape to the city; some of them don’t want to. On the other hand, there are also what my uncle (a farmer) used to call “Chicago hillbillies”–people who live in the city but don’t know anything beyond their own neighborhood.
I understand the point you’re trying to make, Boo, but the broad brush you’re using is bound to offend some of the very people you’d like to reach out to.
my neighborhood in Philly is filled with people that have never left the city except to visit the Jersey shore. They have no idea what the rest of the world is like, and most of them will never get a 4-year degree.
Meanwhile, there are tons of well-educated people in every county in the country.
But, it’s still true that the coastal cities are filled with exiles from small-town America that found their upbringing stifling.
It’s still true that there is a gulf of understanding and values between the coastal cities and the heartland.
Of course there’s not a rigid dichotomy. Naturally there are tolerant people living in small midwestern towns and intolerant people living in cities. But if we’re talking about building a “coalition” based on, essentially, the right to privacy, my experience teaches me that such an approach would not meet with open arms in the small town where I grew up.
I could recharacterize the tendency I’ve found prevalent in my hometown for people to get involved in everyone else’s business as caring rather than nosy. People check on their neighbors’ welfare, and they’re generous when someone’s in need. But the social pressures to conform in thought and deed are nonetheless tremendous.
I just can’t envision a groundswell of support in my hometown for the idea of getting government out of one’s private life, and I think a lot of that is because people are accustomed to their private lives being pretty much public. Certainly there would be individuals who would lend quiet support, but I’m talking about majorities. There’s much more concern about getting the government out of one’s pocket.