Toni
Contributor
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2011
- Messages
- 21,011
- Basic Beliefs
- Peace on Earth, goodwill towards all
That’s really a shame. Believe it or not. Rural and urban dwellers share far more values in common than not. I believe that it is absolutely essential that everyone reach out and find common ground.
So much of the divide comes from fear, ignorance and lack of understanding. This flows both ways. I see it obviously in this discussion
I’m about to type something that I know many/most/everyone else will see as untrue and inflammatory. I’m not trying to upset people but rather to nudge people to examine their own attitudes and beliefs —and exactly where those attitudes and beliefs come from.
I’ve been very frank that I grew up in a rural area and that I had very numerous…disagreements with my father over most political issues, especially over race. Those arguments did not abate until the last few months of his life, during which time my mother died and Dad was diagnosed with a second fatal medical condition and died soon after. As you can imagine, politics were of little importance during that time. But years before that, even during the height of my …fierce and sometimes verbally explosive disagreements, even when I was a pretty typical teenager—I knew my father and I shared most of the same values and beliefs. The same values and beliefs I am willing to bet most of you largely share. Two things were key: my parents, more explicitly my father, wanted all of their kids to do better than they had—in terms of educational achievement and socioeconomic success, yes, but also not to be burdened by their shortcomings or the harsh judgements they faced growing up poor, each with a parent who was seriously ill and dying and ultimately died while they were young children, left to largely raise themselves by single parents who worked back breaking work to feed and house their family, with little time left for tender mercies. They felt the judgement of others who were a little better off and family as well who mostly did little or nothing to help.
In our country, just as in Dickens’ England, the poor are looked down on, resented, ridiculed and blamed for their circumstances and very often hamstrung by society. Recently, in the US, there have been changes—to some extent. Perhaps millennials and Gen Z and those who come after will do a better job of ensuring the promise that we are all equal under the constitution. I hope so. But it’s incremental real work. The younger among you will not realize just how much better life is for most people compared with the time the boomers grew up. We boomers knew our lives were many many times easier than our parents’ had. We want better for the younger generations. We’d prefer not to be hated and we wish you understood that Mayberry and Happy Days are pretty myths just as Shirley Temple and Our Gang were fairy tales about our parents’ childhoods.
I’m sorry—I’m rambling here and I don’t mean to.
People often fear what is unfamiliar or what they don’t understand. That fear is often translated into different kinds of hatred, including bigotry and prejudice.
Those of us who see ourselves as liberal mostly like to believe that we don’t have any bigotries: We accept people of all gender identities and sexual orientations, all races, all nationalities, all religions with usually a preference for no religious ideology. We fight for what we see as social justice, oppose unnecessary authority over private lives and decisions and oppose authoritarianism of all kinds. At least we aspire to all of this, even if we know sometimes we fall short.
But some prejudices are still ok-necessary even. And that includes conservatives, conservative thought, and conservative political beliefs and expression. We attach those beliefs to people who look a certain way, dress a certain way, have different religious beliefs than our own—and who maybe come from places we don’t know much about or want to or see any reason to care about,
From where I sit, that’s not different than the bigotries and prejudices of Archie Bunker. The target/object of fear and am distrust and anger is different but it’s not actually based on anything remotely resembling any actual familiarity or attempt to know or understand why some people feel differently than we do. It’s ignorance and fear and hatred, as surely as is racism and homophobia is ignorance and fear and hatred.
Ignorance is very useful if it inspires a desire to learn more.
It’s a very useful weapon if it is used to manipulate and inspire fear and resentment rather than curiosity and seeking to understand.
Fear is useful in helping us identify and escape danger. And it’s useful to manipulate and inflame emotions which overrides thought.
Hatred-I think that’s only useful as a tool to be used by those who wish to control others.
I grew up in a small town surrounded by farmland. I grew up hearing that people in big cities were dangerous, not friendly, wanted to take advantage of ignorant country folks. They were not to be trusted. Further more, they thought themselves superior to rural people and yet lacked basic common sense and practical everyday life skills.
As an adult I lived in two very different major metropolitan areas, and went into the city every day for work or school. I’ve traveled to other cities as well and learned in each one how to get around in the city, how to navigate public transport, when to cross the street regardless of what the signal says and when not to, how to avoid panhandlers, ask and give directions and ge real life skills in the city. And I took advantage of all the free stuff those cities had to offer as much as I could.
And then, we moved back to the Midwest, small town, surrounded by farmland and forests and prairies and wildlife. To a place so small that my husband, in fact, had never even attended it taught at a university with a student body that did not well exceed the total population of the town where we now lived.
This past spring, I went with an old friend to do a nostalgia tour of our home town and schools ( including university campus and the first apartment we shared). A lot has changed. Our small town is now diverse. My county now has at least one Sikh temple, a bunch of fulfillment centers and my old school, so white that the couple of kids with NA ancestry kept that a deep dark secret, has a student population 2.5 times the size it was when I graduated and a 40% minority student population. Students graduating aspire to Ivy League schools. When we attended, we were not allowed to take two foreign languages because that might be ‘too hard.’ Girls were not allowed to take shop or drafting classes. Boys could not take home ec classes.
The county has changed. The county where I live has changed as well. There is greater diversity and greater acceptance of non-descendants of wester European nations.
There is still within my town a strong desire to keep poor those who are poor, there is a strong desire by a powerful elite to undermine public education.
I live in a blue state.
(Pew Research uses its raw data to derive several "Clusters" of Voter type. They probably show it proudly on-line right now! I think it's relevant enough here that lpetrich or another Pew fan ought to post their present model right here right now in this thread. (Does it have 7 voter categories, or 8? 9?)
