Melting Mountains: An Urban-Rural Gathering
March 9, 2017 6:58 AM   Subscribe

Urban Seattle residents visit rural Oregon. "The people who took part in the discussions told each other whom they’d voted for, revealed their stance on some big issues, talked about the hopes and concerns they had about their country over the next few years, and practiced listening to each other for minutes at a time (with instructions to not interrupt one another)."

Seriously inspiring. Good on all these folks!

Follow up/another POV here.
posted by gsh (68 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
So what I'm seeing here is a bunch of city dwellers being told that they don't know anything about rural life. Which may very well be true (though a whole lot of city dwellers did not grow up in cities and in fact grew up in rural areas). But both articles are missing the perspective of what the rural folks learned from the city folks. Were there any misconceptions there? If so, were they dispelled?
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:08 AM on March 9, 2017 [54 favorites]


“If you knew what it took to get that simple sandwich on your plate"

Sure. I get it. Raising cows is hard. Now lets talk about the complexity of running a 150TB Oracle database on a 70k annual storage budget. Lets talk about the details of partitioning your 50billion row tables such that multiple users get their data in a timely fashion. Lets talk about the java libraries we embed in matlab to enhance query performance. Whats that - you dont give a shit? Oh I see.
posted by H. Roark at 7:31 AM on March 9, 2017 [76 favorites]


if you (the general you) think that the election results suggest that it's urban folks who need to learn more about the humanity of rural people, all I can say is "what the fuck is wrong with you?"

I'm almost getting tired of how well the framework of an abusive relationship fits our political situation, because honestly, at this point it's almost boring, and we can't just leave. But goddammit it keeps being accurate.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:51 AM on March 9, 2017 [77 favorites]


I guess urban dwellers have to pay attention to rural folks (rather than the other way around) because rural votes are worth five times as much as urban votes. Ha ha.
posted by My Dad at 7:53 AM on March 9, 2017 [33 favorites]


Yeah, the perspective of that first blog post is so one-sided. It essentially assumes that all the learning that needs to/can happen is on the Seattle side - which lets one side off the hook but is also pretty patronizing to that side.
posted by lunasol at 7:55 AM on March 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


Macnab, our de facto tour guide pointed out projects that were helped out with volunteer labor virtually everywhere: People leveled and laid the field’s turf; a local veteran’s group donated a building for the historical museum; volunteers publish the local online newspaper.

Yay free labor! Because the answer to government woes is a sweat equity tax.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:01 AM on March 9, 2017 [12 favorites]


One Shermanite suggested that if Seattle enviros want to reintroduce wolves into the Northwest, maybe they should be put in Seattle’s city parks. Perhaps that would revise urban liberals’ views on gun control.

Okay, this is just a bullshit asshole response. There's no rational reason to reintroduce wolves into an urban area. They won't do well and it would make a mockery of the entire process. To indicate that the only reason anyone could ever understand having a gun is to defend them from wolves is total and complete bullshit.

Like others mentioned above, I didn't see any indication that the farmers were making any effort to see life from the point of view of someone else. Only more misunderstood white folk talking about how no one gets their struggles.
posted by teleri025 at 8:02 AM on March 9, 2017 [37 favorites]


I hear your legitimate grievances. Obamacare has real faults that need to be fixed. Hillary should have been more careful with her emails. Blue collar workers are hurting. White people feel culturally marginalized. I think there's a lot to talk about here.

Wait - you don't actually care about any of this do you?
posted by xammerboy at 8:02 AM on March 9, 2017 [11 favorites]


I am a vegetarian and I live in the city. I do not know how many times I have been told this was an urban affectation that I would not have if I came from the rural world. When I point out that I grew up in rural Ireland, plucked chickens, gutted fish and all that and became a vegetarian at 11, they still insist it's an urban affectation. When I point out that my brother, who has raised free range pigs for his family's consumption became a vegetarian 2 years ago, and is very conservative in many ways, they don't stop that line of argument. This appears to me as pretty typical of a lot of urban-rural value and lifestyle conversations.

For some reason rural life gets so tagged as all sorts of crap, both by the people living in it and by those outside, that you can't talk about how rural life can be vastly complicated and vary from region to region, and village to village even now. And then if you try and argue with the crap you get labeled an outsider who has forgotten the ways of their people, like everyone else who complicates the picture.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:02 AM on March 9, 2017 [43 favorites]


So this is a thing I've been struggling with. I have a good friend who is a native, nth-generation Iowan. She's a good person who is horrified by Trump and definitely didn't vote for him. (I don't know if she voted for Hillary, though. I've been careful not to ask, because I'm afraid that if I knew the answer, it would end our friendship.) She just truly believes that nobody listens to or hears people in Iowa, and she truly believes that because of this, people in Iowa need to have disproportionate political power, to offset the disproportionate cultural power of people on the coasts. I have tried so hard to explain why I think this is wrong, and I think she just sees it as evidence that I'm a coastal person who doesn't get it. I guess that it seems to me like a sense of grievance and entitlement is a deep, deep part of the culture here. People here believe that they already know all about big cities, and therefore people in big cities are the ones who have to reach out and be educated and learn. And I think it's true that they probably do have more superficial knowledge of big cities than vice versa, but it's pretty superficial, and they generally don't know as much as they think they do.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:05 AM on March 9, 2017 [24 favorites]


There was a similar "listening exchange" here in Alabama, where Californians sat down with Alabamians to discuss the cultural divide and political partisanship.

The effort was immediately decried by outraged right-wingers as secular librul feminazi propaganda. They were offended by the very idea of their tender ears being assaulted by such filthy concepts as empathy, compassion, and equality.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by BitterOldPunk at 8:08 AM on March 9, 2017 [18 favorites]


pointed out projects that were helped out with volunteer labor virtually everywhere

But, like, people do that in cities too? Not all the time because we have laws here where if it's city work of a certain size, then the unionized, well-compensated city workers do it, and they get paid, because, well, paying people is important. It's how you get an economy.

But the small stuff? Community gardens: check. Donating buildings? Yes, we do do that in cities. It's like the interview I was listening to the other day where rural folks were being touted as just so so very different from city folks because rural people value their families. Where I live--in the city I have lived in my entire life, where my parents and my husband's parents also live--multiple generations live on the same block, cousins are running wild in the street, we help our elderly neighbors shovel their walks in the winter. It's not some kind of asocial hellscape here. We do have families.
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:09 AM on March 9, 2017 [53 favorites]


There's so much missing here.

For starters, every concern seems centered around the impact on the rural attendees, with almost nothing about the impact on urban areas if they got everything they wanted. Why blithely discuss the gutting of clean water regulations given the terrible things happening to communities all over the country regardless of whether they're urban or rural? If wind power is such a good deal for rural voters, why not discuss the fact that they likely voted for someone who's going to get rid of it? Why repeatedly discuss only the negative impacts of laws and regulations as opposed to how they help? Why make such a big deal about "local control" and then imply that Seattle's local government is part of the problem? Why make wolf re-introduction all about gun control despite the fact that wild wolf attacks are almost non-existent, or discuss the many reasons why it's being done?

And the same with cultural issues, which also seem almost entirely centered on the rural folks. The picture of the attendees makes it look like almost the entire group, from both places, is white. Was there nothing mentioned about the rise of violent white supremacy in the Pacific Northwest? What, exactly, was the (almost assuredly anti-) LGBTQ sentiment that made Jordan Goldwarg so uncomfortable, given the rise in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes? Nothing about the rise in anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic threats and violence? Nothing on women's health, reproductive or otherwise? Why no pushback on the impression of what have been almost entirely peaceful protests that sounds like it was taken entirely from Fox News and/or Breitbart? Did nobody talk about the effects, both direct and indirect, that the travel ban will have on the economy and society of Seattle? Or how the DOJ's complete 180 on policing will affect PoC in Seattle?

Fostering conversation is an admirable goal, but the reporting in the two articles makes it seem less like a conversation with two sides speaking as equals than importing the city slickers down to Real America™ to be lectured about the intrinsic superiority of the free market, traditional values, and how everything was better in the good old days.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:11 AM on March 9, 2017 [40 favorites]


People here believe that they already know all about big cities, and therefore people in big cities are the ones who have to reach out and be educated and learn. And I think it's true that they probably do have more superficial knowledge of big cities than vice versa, but it's pretty superficial, and they generally don't know as much as they think they do.

So the reason why they think they know a lot about big cities is because the places that distribute media are in big cities and reflect them (IE, they've watched Friends and Seinfeld and therefore know about NYC). But of course shows that talk about rural life get it wrong, because it's made by people who aren't from there.

A lot of the work that needs to be done has to be about breaking up those notions, but people have got to listen.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:18 AM on March 9, 2017


She just truly believes that nobody listens to or hears people in Iowa, and she truly believes that because of this, people in Iowa need to have disproportionate political power, to offset the disproportionate cultural power of people on the coasts. I have tried so hard to explain why I think this is wrong, and I think she just sees it as evidence that I'm a coastal person who doesn't get it.

Well, my feeling is that there is a germ of truth in the argument - if we went to systems where everything was handled purely by population, rural concerns would be downgraded pretty severely, just because the urban centers have significantly more population than rural areas. So this does need to be counterbalanced. But note that I said germ - the reality is that the pendulum has been pushed too far and rural areas wield significantly disproportionate power now.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:21 AM on March 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


Like others mentioned above, I didn't see any indication that the farmers were making any effort to see life from the point of view of someone else. Only more misunderstood white folk talking about how no one gets their struggles.

The main grievance seems to be that white people are no longer in charge.

I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the northeast,” Vance writes in the book’s opening pages. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.”
posted by My Dad at 8:24 AM on March 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


Well, my feeling is that there is a germ of truth in the argument - if we went to systems where everything was handled purely by population, rural concerns would be downgraded pretty severely, just because the urban centers have significantly more population than rural areas. So this does need to be counterbalanced.

That is the theory. But in practice, countries with more centralized systems whose capital cities are major urban centers of gravity don't have the problem of underrepresenting rural interests. In France, for example, farmers represent a massive, powerful interest group.

The theory more than 200 years ago was that the "natural" political outcome would be for urban interests to dominate rural, and so the American system had put its thumb on the scale in favor of rural/agricultural interests to counter balance this. But 200 years of democratic experience around the world have revealed that it is in fact the natural outcome for rural/agriculture interests to wield disproportionate power, and the American political system and culture simply exacerbates it.
posted by deanc at 8:29 AM on March 9, 2017 [5 favorites]


Yeeeeah I'm reminded of a friend's boyfriend's parents who own a huge agricultural concern in the Midwest and present themselves as honest hard working salt of the earth types but who own hundreds and hundreds of acres, receive massive subsidies, rely on nearly unpaid undocumented labor, and constantly drone about coastal elites and being culturally working class when in fact none of thier four kids have ever had to work a day in thier god damned lives.

They're the bosses, the owners, the bad guys in the grapes of wrath. Of course they hate change.
posted by The Whelk at 8:56 AM on March 9, 2017 [48 favorites]


I would like to see a boxplot of the two age distributions.

They should have included a pedicure at the end, so the urban dwellers could demonstrate empathy.
posted by benzenedream at 8:58 AM on March 9, 2017


What I find both interesting and bizarre is why the Seattle liberals felt they needed to go visit rural areas all the way in Oregon, rather than the rural communities, say, one or two counties over, who are massively impacted by Seattle's voting strength. Cross the pass! Visit Eastern Washington!
posted by corb at 9:05 AM on March 9, 2017 [11 favorites]


My work used to bring me in frequent contact with the Farm Bureau. I met a lot of wonderful people through that work, but boy howdy, did I meet some shoulder-chipped assholes.

The one that always springs to mind is the woman who went on and on about how the government had no right to come in and tell her that her water and fuel tanks had to be painted different colors, and they were all out to destroy her business.

And, as was pointed out of thread comma most of the growers I grew up around counted on sketchily-imported migrant labor living in slave-like conditions.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:08 AM on March 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


So the reason why they think they know a lot about big cities is because the places that distribute media are in big cities and reflect them (IE, they've watched Friends and Seinfeld and therefore know about NYC). But of course shows that talk about rural life get it wrong, because it's made by people who aren't from there.

What's that logical fallacy where an expert reads the Wikipedia article on the area of their expertise, and sees it riddled with flaws, but then goes on to trust Wikipedia articles about issues they're unfamiliar with?
posted by Emily's Fist at 9:14 AM on March 9, 2017 [4 favorites]


ahhh, corb got in before me. but yeah why not visit fucking yelm or something, ou dont even have to to over the mts to find bullshit towns
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 9:16 AM on March 9, 2017 [1 favorite]



What I find both interesting and bizarre is why the Seattle liberals felt they needed to go visit rural areas all the way in Oregon, rather than the rural communities, say, one or two counties over, who are massively impacted by Seattle's voting strength. Cross the pass! Visit Eastern Washington!


I think I picked up on them looking for a county that was the exact reverse of King Co w/r/t election numbers? 74% Clinton vs. 74% Trump? Which apparently they had to go out of their way to find.
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:19 AM on March 9, 2017 [4 favorites]


When will we ever hear about Conservatives looking to understand the Liberal point of view? Oh right, never, because American Conservatism is cartoonishly condescending and judgmental, exactly as they accuse Liberals of behaving. This exercise again seems to be a bunch of Liberals taking a lashing for the sin of compassion while the Conservatives get their righteousness upheld unchallenged.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 9:30 AM on March 9, 2017 [31 favorites]


When will we ever hear about Conservatives looking to understand the Liberal point of view?

The liberal point if of view is that we are all in this together, and the conservative point of view is Whyshouldism.

And if you can't answer "why should I pay to feed other people's kids" then I don't know what can be done about closing that gap. At that point, you can't be reached. It's not a matter of facts, it is one of values, and you can't convince someone who thinks forcing kids to go hungry to save a few pennies on taxes that they are misguided. If the the teachings of Jesus H. Christ himself cannot reach conservatives, then what hope do any of us have ?
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:48 AM on March 9, 2017 [14 favorites]


Did I miss something about this going the other direction? I wonder what would happen if they saw the kind of work urban residents do that soren_lorenson mentioned upthread. If you asked them what they thought of "community organizers," would they scoff and grumble about Obama and Chicago despite talking up local organizing and governance? Would they cross the street every time they see PoC? Would they still swear up and down that the trans people they meet are just waiting go after children in bathrooms? Would they be upset about seeing so many happy LGBTQ families and their children? Would they still think that polluting the water is cool when they see the people who will be drinking it?
posted by zombieflanders at 9:50 AM on March 9, 2017 [6 favorites]


What's that logical fallacy where an expert reads the Wikipedia article on the area of their expertise, and sees it riddled with flaws, but then goes on to trust Wikipedia articles about issues they're unfamiliar with?

You're thinking of the Murray Gell-Mann Effect, a term coined by Michael Crichton.

I like the flavor of the term ultracrepidarianism myself. Not the same thing, but related.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 10:53 AM on March 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


I've been reading kahneman's 'thinking, fast and slow' lately which has a lot of space devoted to the difference in how people perceive gains and losses. People are far more sensitive to losses than gains, and there's even evidence that when you're poor enough, everything is perceived in terms of losses (eg, buying shoes is loss, and buying them at a discount is a smaller loss. So poor people are more sensitive to sales and coupons.) Additionally, people prices personal experience with a much greater weight.

This all informs the experience of race in rural, predominantly white communities. These people imagine a relative loss of racial status, which is personal. They don't have a direct personal experience of the gains other groups have had sure to advances in civil rights; it's abstract, and irrelevant to their personal experience.

Maybe nothing particularly new, there, but it helped me understand why racial resentment in these areas is so strong.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:57 AM on March 9, 2017 [9 favorites]


Thank you for posting this, gsh. I read the Crosscut article yesterday, and it (along with the comments) had me wondering what I would say to any of these Trump voters if they came to Seattle. I keep swinging between wanting to empathize and wanting to show them the very real harm their vote will cause, whether it's in my circle of writers who are freaked the fuck out about what will happen to their health insurance, at my daughter's school where her classmates who are undocumented or whose parents are undocumented and are freaked the fuck out about their safety and home stability, to the city which is freaked the fuck out about the possible loss of federal funds for mass transit or proper DOJ oversight for the consent decree against the Seattle Police Department, to the region which is freaked the fuck out about the rise of hate crimes against LGBTQ people, vandalism against masjids, and the thought of the EPA's cleanup efforts in Puget Sound going away because the new head of the EPA makes James Watt look like Rachel Carson. Oh, and you're going to have a really, really hard time growing wheat with water that's polluted and weather that's fucked up thanks to global warming.

Ever since November, I've read one pundit after another saying that the Democrats need to treat Trump voters like they're these misunderstood people just looking for a voice. Well, you've got your voice now, Trump voters, and it belongs to a failed businessman who sexually assaults women, lies through his fucking teeth, and screws over his vendors. I know Seattle and other cities will get screwed first because that's part of The Steves' plans to burn everything to the ground to create their New White Order. I wonder how long until they start immolating places like Sherman County, Oregon, assuming heat waves, floods, insects, and blight don't do the job first.
posted by RakDaddy at 12:54 PM on March 9, 2017 [7 favorites]


This also stood out to me:
Producing the raw material for loaves and noodles — feeding the people — is complex. It takes two years of rainwater, for example, to produce a crop of dry land wheat.

So essentially, you have people farming in areas that are poorly suited for farming in a world that has been slowly moving away from an agriculture-driven economy. They continue to see any regulations or rules as government intefering in their already precarious life and resent it. They, like the Kentucky coal miners, are typically doing jobs that have been in the family for generations and they are the decendents of the people who didn't give up on the farm or the mine and move away. They are severely invested in making sure a way of life that may or may not be sustainable in the current economic and actual climate continues.

Instead of taking advantage of new technologies or new resources or even finding a new path in life, they have decided, for good or ill to stay with it. And because of that they are not having the success of their forefathers and they are resentful of change.

Dude, I get it. My great-grandfather was a farmer. His son, my grandfather saw how hard farming was for himself and in the 1920s, my grandfather realized that farming was complex and he needed to find new and better ways to do it. He went to college at a time when few did and got a degree in an agricultural from one of those new land-grant colleges. He bought the land and got his farm started in 1924. Grandpa then discovered that even with a college degree, farming is an unstable and fickle thing. My dad and his brothers, even though they continued throughout their lives to keep gardens, followed their father's advice and went to college and did anything but farming. I was taught that farming, while a good thing in the abstract, is not a sustainable life choice. In fact, I believe my father told me more than once that if you wanted to be miserable, angry, and poor, then you should take up farming for a living. My dad and my uncles all romantized the time on the farm, but none of them tried to do it for a living and none of the following generation pursued it as a career.
posted by teleri025 at 1:03 PM on March 9, 2017 [14 favorites]


Did I miss something about this going the other direction?

All I've seen and heard is trash talk. I'm in Canada, and I live on Vancouver Island. The previous Conservative government lifted a moratorium on new oil pipelines from Alberta and Saskatchewan (both on the east side of the Rockies) to the coast.

New pipelines have been resisted fiercely by some people on the coast -- the goal is to increase the number of tankers leaving Vancouver and traveling up the Strait of Juan de Fuca from four a month to something like 30 a month.

The risk of oil spills will obviously increase (there is already significant tanker traffic transiting through the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the refinery at Anacortes in Washington State), but the increase in tanker traffic means more pollution in the downwind communities to the east of Vancouver. As well, the increased tanker traffic likely means the Killer whales in the Georgia Basin and Puget Sound will go extinct. I doubt that's a very compelling argument to tanker proponents, though.

Anyway, I caught a Twitter conversation where the former business columnist from the Edmonton Journal (Edmonton is in Alberta and is a center of oil services companies) was berating a British Columbia-based columnist for our opposition to pipelines.

It was pretty obnoxious stuff. I waded in and said, "gee, if you want us BCers to approve your pipelines, don't you think it would be wise to be a little more, you know, nice?"

That didn't go over well. Lots of homophobic language, use of the words "dirty hippies" etc etc.

I think for some of these Red State types, they either want their own way, and nothing but their own way, or they just want an opponent to hate.

This is why I think efforts by "liberals" (I'm just a guy on the coast who would not like to see an oil spill, thank you very much... maybe reduce tanker traffic to 10 a month? I don't know...) to reach out to "the other side" is just a waste of time.

It's very rare to encounter someone who has the EQ required to engage in civil debate.
posted by My Dad at 1:32 PM on March 9, 2017 [10 favorites]


Well, I think the point is that the recent election basically demonstrated that if you don't win the hearts and minds of rural blue-collar white people, you don't get to be President.

This is effectively by design, and unlikely to change at any time in the near future, certainly not before the next national election.

Therefore, what those rural voters think is pretty important. That's not a value judgement, it's just a QED conclusion from both the recent election and last several before that.

From a totally cynical political perspective, it is useful to expose urban voters to rural voters not because of any wooly-headed liberal thinking about our shared humanity or whatever, but because it might inoculate those same urban voters from losing their shit when they see "their" candidate saying something that's (from the urban perspective) totally bonkers. They'll know who is being pandered to.

I don't think it would take very much of said pandering for a future Democratic candidate to split or carve off just enough rural white voters to prevent a "blue wall" collapse a la 2016. But you need to ensure that you can do that without completely alienating your urban base. I think the political function these "rural folk are people too!" articles serve is basically groundwork-laying for the doublespeak that's required to win both urban and rural votes.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:18 PM on March 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


Well, I think the point is that the recent election basically demonstrated that if you don't win the hearts and minds of rural blue-collar white people, you don't get to be President.

That's one lesson you can take from it. The other lesson we can take is that you can pander to rural blue collar white people, but racists gonna be racist and what about the fetuses, so maybe we need to assist other groups in voting to help balance them out.
posted by dinty_moore at 2:32 PM on March 9, 2017 [10 favorites]


Well, I think the point is that the recent election basically demonstrated that if you don't win the hearts and minds of rural blue-collar white people, you don't get to be President.

The lesson to me, not knowing any rural blue collar voters, was that average republicans who aren't vocally racist and generally don't think the gay menace is going to destroy America will obediently vote for a dangerous racist conman as long as he has an R after his name.
posted by deanc at 3:16 PM on March 9, 2017 [11 favorites]


I grew up surrounded by Trump voters. I don't understand why we need yet further explication of the weltanschauung of the rural white folk.
posted by PMdixon at 4:04 PM on March 9, 2017 [7 favorites]


Sorry if this is a bit of a rant and a derail, but...

“I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the northeast,” Vance writes in the book’s opening pages. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.”

Oh yes you do! You've adopted the assimilationism, the philosophy of fitting in, the keeping your head down and pretending like you're just like them. Why else would you have forgotten that it was your grandparents and great grandparents who were the immigrants and refugees and gangsters and terrorists, that were breeding like rabbits and having so many kids and going to overrun all of white waspy society? Why would you be so against the unions that started fights and raised hell to earn your ancestors' broke immigrant asses a decent day's pay and decent workweek?

Heck, maybe you bring it up to justify not caring about present day immigrants, with some vague story about your ancestors prevailed through adversity and earned you the position you have today, right before you go back to claiming your fortune was all your hard work and yours alone. You don't care. You take it for granted. You don't actually identify with being refugees and immigrants like your ancestors fleeing from famine and violence and seeking a better life. Those stories and cultural traditions, they're mostly forgotten. And as much as white nationalists want to blame brown people and feminists for attacking white culture, you can't blame them. There aren't enough other folks in your lily white county to make a lick of difference. It was apathy, plain and simple. People cared more about fitting in than anything else, playing nice, just like those good WASPy sorts told you you should.

Yet even after all these generations, you are still looked down upon, you are still the wrong sort of person. But you don't take pride in being the wrong sort of person. That sort of pride is for gays and weirdos. Even with your outward pride in being who you are, deep down you value having a place in this WASPY white ass society, and deep down you believe it when people act like you aren't worth a damn. And it cuts deep.

So you lash out. Oh, but you don't join those other folks who are the current wrong sorts of people, the Muslims and Mexicans and queer kids who haven't even yet got the barest nod at fitting in: too weird, too scary, too different - just like your ancestors were in their time. But you've already assimilated. You've already adapted. You aren't really all that different from this elite anymore. All you want to do is throw a punch because your honor's been smeared. So you attack superficial things, culture things: hippies and hipsters with their beards and thick glasses. You vote for someone because he's tacky and pisses these people off and to hell with the consequences and hold on doggedly to whatever hope there is that shaking things up might make things better, even against all reason.

So don't you think I don't understand. And don't you dare think getting a degree somehow makes me forget where my family came from. Because I remember where I'm from is why I want multiculturalism and diversity. Because the story of America I need is the one where we all are the wrong sort of people: refugees, smugglers, natives, immigrants, and slaves. It is one where we all have our own diverse ancestors and history to keep and to remember and be proud of, even if in some parts it's not so proud. That is a story where we all have dignity. And it's one that needs protecting against people like Trump.
posted by Zalzidrax at 5:50 PM on March 9, 2017 [26 favorites]


One thing that very much frustrates me about all of these conversations is that somehow it's fine in many countries to be worried about rural poverty, but if you're worried about urban poverty, then you're a bleeding heart liberal who wants to throw away hardworking citizens' tax dollars. Or you don't know or care about the heart of the country. Not all of that is down to racism, because it even occurs in countries where there isn't a significant difference in racial make up between urban and rural residents, and in many countries where there may now be a difference the rhetoric precedes that shift.

All forms of poverty are horrible, and having been raised in rural poverty, I know it's as grinding and horrible there as well as in the city, though in its own unique and unpleasant way. That said, only one group of the poor seems to get marked as worthy of sympathy by large groups of people.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:33 PM on March 9, 2017 [14 favorites]


What I find both interesting and bizarre is why the Seattle liberals felt they needed to go visit rural areas all the way in Oregon, rather than the rural communities, say, one or two counties over, who are massively impacted by Seattle's voting strength. Cross the pass! Visit Eastern Washington!

This. I mean, I totally get the desire for the precise mirror image of the ballot results, but there would be a lot more relevance in the same conversations within a single state -- people in Moro are a lot more impacted by the population centers in Oregon than they are by people in King County, and vice versa. I've been to Moro lots of times and I really like that area, but I wish the organizers had made the perhaps riskier choice of finding a county closer to home where the conversations might have had more relevance.

I would like to see a boxplot of the two age distributions.

Pretty much all of the rural counties in Oregon like Sherman are losing population, and the people who stay are aging. It's a serious and complicated problem for rural counties with tiny population bases (and, to my way of thinking, only made worse by voting for "small government" politicians but I recognize that perspectives vary).

So essentially, you have people farming in areas that are poorly suited for farming in a world that has been slowly moving away from an agriculture-driven economy.

That's a really weird criticism of dryland agriculture. As noted in the article, Oregon and Washington export an enormous amount of wheat, largely grown without irrigation and these days almost always using best management practices like no-till farming and GPS-linked equipment. It's a high-tech, expensive, and export-oriented industry that relies on federal crop insurance and public investment in agricultural research and extension, adding some irony to the voting results.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:50 PM on March 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yeah, the hick dump I grew up in was graying fast when I lived there, and I assume it's only gotten grayer. Cooking in the only restaurant in town it was a course in Advanced Cooking for Grumpy Old People.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:02 PM on March 9, 2017


“I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the northeast,” Vance writes in the book’s opening pages. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.”

A people with a long history of tolerance, peacefulness and getting along with others.
posted by fshgrl at 9:49 PM on March 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


“I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the northeast,” Vance writes..

I'm a Scotch-Irish/NDN hillbilly, and I do not identify with Vance.

In France, for example, farmers represent a massive, powerful interest group.

France is a small country where 7% of the population is farmers. The US is a large country where 2% of the population is farmers and agribusiness is a massive, powerful interest group.

With the major seed, pesticide, fertilizer, fuel and equipment companies located in urban areas along with the banks, insurance companies, regulatory agencies, universities, telecoms and media, its amazing the 15-18% of the US population that is rural can be responsible for how bad the state of union is. It seems like if they cared to make the effort the cities and suburbs could at least control the White House and House of Representatives.
posted by ridgerunner at 10:59 PM on March 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


Seriously inspiring.

Did we read the same article?

It's good to see that rabid PNW passive aggressiveness is alive and well </s
posted by humboldt32 at 1:57 AM on March 10, 2017


France ain't that small – it's the size of Texas and home to 65+ million people. Farming is strong-ish here but also suffering; currently there are programs where if you get a degree in farm management, the government (yep) will quite literally give you an abandoned farm because that's how many of them there are. There are conditions of course, you have to be an independent farmer (i.e. not a corporation/conglomerate/etc.), live and work on it for a certain number of years, plus a few other conditions no longer in my memory, but you get a farm. This is also to encourage independent farms, in part as it's become increasingly clear that massive farming is contributing to animal health epidemics. The latest has been a duck flu epidemic that started on a badly-run conglomerate farm. There are other reasons behind the support as well, such as encouraging biodiversity, but in short, government can and does indeed support independent, biodiverse farming.

Why does this Paris-inhabiting, skyscraper-working manager with a Masters degree know how to get a free farm? As so many others have shared in similar stories – I come from a family of immigrants. Poor Irish farmers form half my background. Norwegian multitaskers (farmers-carpenters-builders-fishers-traders) form a quarter of it. The remaining quarter were Dutch and French farmers so poor we only know they came from those countries because their grandkids, of whom my great-grandfather was one, knew that. And I'm the only person in the last generation in my branch of our family who will have all this knowledge.

How could that happen? Because my parents and their siblings, on both sides of the family, decided to slash and burn their history in order to be WASPy. Back in the 80s they called this sort of behavior and mindset "yuppies". I'm the only grandkid of roundabouts twenty cousins who held an interest in my grandparents' and great-grandparents' stories. I am also the one the family no longer talk to (grandparents have all passed away save one) because according to them, I am a horrible person who thinks herself superior to everyone and has terrorist leanings due to always talking with "the wrong sort of people," including as a kid. Y'all know who they mean by the "wrong sort of people." Not WASPs. That about covers it.

This farming/rural/city/empathy/division thing is utter effing nonsense. It is bullshit. It's yet another smokescreen to move attention away from the real issue, which is that they want to be seen and treated as superior with all the benefits (namely unquestioning agreement and adulation while not having to actually do anything themselves) that go along with that.

The subsection of people who want to be seen as superior exists everywhere in humanity. It always uses a smokescreen so people – conscientious people, the ones who don't think in terms of superiority – will pause long enough to question their consciences, so that the ones driving for superiority can punch the gas and empty the tank before others realize it. And by then it's too late because there's no gas left, the car has been wrecked, and the superior folk have moved on to some other thing to devour.

Bonus points when they succeed in demonizing the very people most likely and able to point out their hypocrisy, greasing the road they're accelerating on. Part of the solution to this sort of thing is not believing demonization, but goddamn, for the bajillionth time in the history of humanity: when we're still capable of demonizing half of our own species, we're not going to get any better at this any time soon.
posted by fraula at 5:13 AM on March 10, 2017 [8 favorites]


[I]ts amazing the 15-18% of the US population that is rural can be responsible for how bad the state of union is. It seems like if they cared to make the effort the cities and suburbs could at least control the White House and House of Representatives.

It's almost as if one political ideology has used both racist and anti-urban measures across every level and branch of government and sanctioned (or even encouraged) violence for centuries to easily maintain power, while the other has to expend enormous amounts of political will and fight an uphill battle against overwhelming socioeconomic odds. Meanwhile one of the country's major urban areas, including several major universities and the seat of almost every federal regulatory agency, is prevented from having any real say in its own self-governance (to say nothing of that of the nation) while being held up as an example of everything wrong with urban life by the same people who are attempting to strangle it.

But yeah, sure, maybe it's because they're lazy freeloaders or ivory tower elites combining forces with a shady coalition of bankers and media, which is totally not a problematic insinuation.
posted by zombieflanders at 5:40 AM on March 10, 2017 [7 favorites]


Actually, in retrospect, the 2nd paragraph is a bit heated, I apologize. But the point of the 1st paragraph still stands.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:32 AM on March 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


its amazing the 15-18% of the US population that is rural can be responsible for how bad the state of union is

There's a real disconnect between what people mean by "rural" in normal conversation and what the Census and related agencies mean by rural, and many of the rural people who turned out for Trump aren't technically rural. Someone who lives in a town of 5,000 people in Kentucky where the closest conurbation with more than 100,000 people is two hours away... is an urban dweller, because they live in that small town instead of outside it.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:18 AM on March 10, 2017 [3 favorites]


It seems like if they cared to make the effort the cities and suburbs could at least control the White House and House of Representatives.

The city where I live has an amazingly high voter turnout, and has always been very politically engaged. But our Congressional district is gerrymandered AF, and our representative never comes to his office here or even visits the city. I've been writing and letters for years comma and he sends back snide, passive-aggressive boilerplate replies. We've been fighting for years to get came out in favor of somebody who will bother to represent us, too.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:52 AM on March 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


For me however, I do think that rural areas do deserve some protections. Having cities get a total say in how, for example, a rural area/part of a larger region deals with tourism and development because of that seems incredibly unfair, even if there are more urban residents. But that doesn't get to include giant farming conglomerates, polluters, and idiots who want to dump pig manure in rivers.

But the bigger question for me is where are the bills protecting small farmers from these people's representatives? The bills allowing them to get healthcare at something approaching a reasonable cost even though farming is a risky job? Where are the bills protecting farm workers so they can be productive and healthy and educate their children, who will further contribute to their local communities? Where are the bills expanding treatment for optiate addiction? The bills building up public schools and rural education at all levels? If their representatives really feel the rural working class are getting a hard deal, surely they should be doing something that actually helps, instead of ripping apart the social safety net further?
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:13 AM on March 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


Having cities get a total say in how, for example, a rural area/part of a larger region deals with tourism and development because of that seems incredibly unfair, even if there are more urban residents.

Why? This seems to be a widely shared view that I just can't make any sense of. Especially when the urban residents are more likely to be black and especially systemically disenfranchised.

Land shouldn't get a vote. If land does, why not the rest of the capital base?
posted by PMdixon at 9:23 AM on March 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


Land shouldn't get a vote. If land does, why not the rest of the capital base?

I could go on about how it's not actually land getting a vote, but let's skip the moral arguments and skip straight to the realpolitik. The reason that broad swaths of land, with culturally homogenous but sparsely populated occupants, get an outsized amount of power compared to their population, is because without that power, they don't have any reason to peaceably be a part of the government.

We don't just protect large minority interests because it's the morally right thing to do. We do so or have done so, at least in part, because if those people don't feel like they're getting a fair shake, they don't want to be a part of your government, and the only reason our government exists in the form it does is because currently, the overwhelming majority of its citizens don't question its existence and right to rule over them. Sure, they may complain, they may say they want less government, but they are, by and large, picking up ballots, not hardwiring IEDs to explode on the highways leading to major metropolitan areas.

And it worked pretty well for a long time. Everyone had a good run. But the current alignment of the Democrats into densely populated urban interests and the Republicans into sparesely populated rural interests, whether or not they actually serve those interests, is good for nothing but a hard leadup to civil war.
posted by corb at 12:10 PM on March 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


The reason that broad swaths of land, with culturally homogenous but sparsely populated occupants, get an outsized amount of power compared to their population, is because without that power, they don't have any reason to peaceably be a part of the government.

I genuinely am unsure of how glib the following is: then why not let them not be and rely on that trade thing that's supposed to mediate between groups with high levels of mutual distrust? (I'm the guy who would be perfectly happy to let downstate secede and leave Chicagoland alone, so)

(And I understand the pragmatic argument, even if I think it has more status quo bias than is usually realized. But this is frequently presented as a moral claim, and in that sense I really just don't get where it comes from.)
posted by PMdixon at 12:33 PM on March 10, 2017


Having cities get a total say in how, for example, a rural area/part of a larger region deals with tourism and development because of that seems incredibly unfair, even if there are more urban residents.

I think you're getting at a tyranny of the majority argument - is that the case?
posted by R a c h e l at 12:57 PM on March 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


But tyranny of the majority requires actual tyranny. Where is it? What horrible things will be forced on people living in lower density areas if we don't put a thumb on the scale for them?
posted by PMdixon at 1:00 PM on March 10, 2017 [3 favorites]


But tyranny of the majority requires actual tyranny. Where is it? What horrible things will be forced on people living in lower density areas if we don't put a thumb on the scale for them?

Read up on the history of water rights in the West sometime.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:09 PM on March 10, 2017 [4 favorites]


What horrible things will be forced on people living in lower density areas if we don't put a thumb on the scale for them?

The DAPL pipeline is a pretty good example, I think. It's not all white people in the countryside, even in the US, and in many, many countries the people living in the country are either the same ethnicity as the people in the cities. And sometimes they are ethnic minorities or indigenous peoples who don't have very much power, and need protection against being the one bit of the countryside where you can shove that power station without losing too many votes.

But even if that were the case, I think people who have to live with the consequences of any development - whether urban or rural - should get a large voice in any development decision that affects them. Even if you're shoving a ski run in somewhere it can have serious consequences locally that might not be welcome; that's obviously much more so for a mine, pipeline, or dam.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 1:11 PM on March 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


Read up on the history of water rights in the West sometime.

Fair. (I have.)

That's a much much much more complicated story than numerical majorities there.
posted by PMdixon at 1:11 PM on March 10, 2017


Even if you're shoving a ski run in somewhere it can have serious consequences locally that might not be welcome; that's obviously much more so for a mine, pipeline, or dam.

No one wants any of those things near them, tho. Accepting NIMBY as a general interest is how you wind up, eg, with the Bay area housing market.

And rural overrepresentation clearly didn't stop DAPl.
posted by PMdixon at 1:14 PM on March 10, 2017


No one wants any of those things near them, tho. Accepting NIMBY as a general interest is how you wind up, eg, with the Bay area housing market.

And strangely enough the things no one wants end up in the areas where the poor live. That's especially true if they're not white, and many, many rural residents are not white.

And rural overrepresentation clearly didn't stop DAPl.

It was rerouted away from Bismark, specifically because people in the city didn't want it fucking with their water supply. It isn't always Seattle versus white, rural Trump voters. That's what I meant when I said above that thinking of the countryside as one homogeneous entity is not a good. And it also ensures that when people think of rural needs they elide pretty much everyone else who isn't some sort of stereotype out of the picture.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 1:55 PM on March 10, 2017 [3 favorites]


That's what I meant when I said above that thinking of the countryside as one homogeneous entity is not a good.

I grew up in rural NM. There are plenty of power struggles in unurbanized areas. But as you keep alluding to, when Bismarck said "move the pipeline" it didn't end up on some rancher's govt subsidized land. It fell on the rez. Yes, inhabitants of rural areas are heterogeneous. That's why it's dumb to think overrepresentation across the board furthers justice - all it does is make local power brokers more locally powerful. You want to give everyone under the poverty line a 10x vote multiplier, go for it. All the current system does is empower milder versions of the Bundys.
posted by PMdixon at 2:05 PM on March 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


then why not let them not be and rely on that trade thing that's supposed to mediate between groups with high levels of mutual distrust? (I'm the guy who would be perfectly happy to let downstate secede and leave Chicagoland alone, so)

I honestly don't know. Human busybody nature? But also, I think, the permeability of borders. Gun control, for example, plays out differently in cities than it does in places where police don't have evening hours or don't come into the back woods. But you can transport guns across interstates, so it's hard for people to live and let live.
posted by corb at 2:07 PM on March 10, 2017


also giant quantities of ag subsidies
posted by PMdixon at 2:27 PM on March 10, 2017


Sorry in advance, this is a bit of a ramble - I've always lived in cities and I despise how rural districts votes' have affected me. To be honest, because of my life and my family and my community, I don't even really know any rural voters but in real life but I've met plenty of racist ones on the internet (and some lovely ones on mefi, but it's easy to see how outnumbered they are). And from what I know of Ag subsidies and pandering and blue state -> red state federal money transfers and everything else it's easy for me to be angry at how they act toward people who are different than them. At the same time, though. If I take this test of things - if I ask myself "would I want to switch places with a WWC voter" - the answer is unquestionably no. For all the "advantages" they have I would never in a million years want to be reborn there. I'm sure that's not true for everyone - a big part of my answer hinges around my love for dense places, which is clearly not universal - but still, I try to draw on that to temper my anger and condescension.

I'm not saying I'm right, but that's where my attitude on a macro level about advantages and disadvantages lies. That doesn't mean I excuse the fact that too many members of the rural white working class seem to have next-to-no empathy or curiosity about people who are different on any axis. Fuck that, of course.
posted by R a c h e l at 2:44 PM on March 10, 2017


That's why it's dumb to think overrepresentation across the board furthers justice - all it does is make local power brokers more locally powerful. You want to give everyone under the poverty line a 10x vote multiplier, go for it. All the current system does is empower milder versions of the Bundys.

At no point did I say that I wanted to do that. Nor do I want to empower Bundy like people. I just don't want to see a system anywhere - rural or urban - where we roll over people because there's not that many of them or they're not considered important or economically critical. If you want to call that dumb, I'm totally fine with that.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 3:39 PM on March 10, 2017 [3 favorites]


France ain't that small – it's the size of Texas

France plus Connecticut and Delaware are as big as Texas, if you add all 4 up they are as big as Alaska. The US has a rural population almost as large as France's total population. So relatively, I'm standing pat, but if you want to call France large and the US empire/super-sized, I'm good with that too.

Farming is strong-ish... to encourage independent farms, in part as it's become increasingly clear that massive farming is contributing to animal health epidemics.

Yep, France and other countries where there's a market for two wheel, 12 horsepower tractors and the average farm is less than 150 acres were smart not to get suckered by agribusiness' promises of cheap food while we decided the Archer Daniels Midland Company was the ideal way to produce food, ethanol fuel and high fructose corn syrup.

This farming/rural/city/empathy/division thing is utter effing nonsense. It is bullshit.

Gotta disagree with that. I recently told my kid, I'ld blow my brains out before I'ld consent to spending my last days cooped up in a town. That's not ignorant provincialism. I lived in San Francisco, 4 blocks off Castro St. in the mid 70s, had a hell of a good time, but that city ain't there no more. Then delivered boxed meat to Hunts Point Market in NYC twice a month, moved to Southern California in the late 80's to work for a few years and hated it, would have rather been in Singapore or British Hong Kong. My last excursion into urban life was Tucson in the early part of this century, it was okay, but I spent most of my free time up on Mt. Lemmon, out in the desert or visiting on the Rez. I was very happy to get back to the hills and creeks of the Ozarks.

Economically I'm dependent on cities for sales, purchases and healthcare, lifestyle wise, cities are irrelevant. I've seen the museums and prefer a day on the creek, restaurants don't appeal as much as a fish on a stick seasoned with local weeds. Back when nightlife was important, skinny dipping in the lake or a bonfire up in a hollow with the pickup's stereo cranked worked just fine and no cover charge.

I could go on and on why the country is better than city and none based on politics and if none convinces a dedicated urbanite, that's fine. I'm happy on my dinky-assed little farm across the creek from a winter hunting camp some of my ancestors maintained for hundreds of years even if the county is deep red.

I do want to note, way less than half the county voted for Trump and even less for Bond over Kander. Like many other places the number of people that feel voting is pointless has been growing. The major employer in the county has been bending over for Walmart for years because they've gained a controlling share of the market. That means unpredictable mandatory over time followed by layoffs repeatedly. A Monsanto rep threatened to sue the local custom seed cleaner for patent infringement so now no one is planting landrace seeds anymore. Need to use your old IH planter while waiting on parts for the John Deere, too bad that would involve hacking JD's intellectual property, you may own the steel in the field, but the code to make it run belongs to the Deere. I could go on and on about the shit parts of living out here too, but what's the point? Its all been said repeatedly.

This country is in a hell of a mess.
posted by ridgerunner at 9:29 PM on March 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


There's a real disconnect between what people mean by "rural" in normal conversation

Well I guess so. The five counties I spend most of my life in cover about 3200 square miles and contain exactly 1 big town with over 5000 people, none of the rest are even half its size. Even here we have town/country tensions.
So what should rural mean here(MeFi), anywhere outside the 500 counties that went for Clinton?

but they are, by and large, picking up ballots, not hardwiring IEDs to explode on the highways leading to major metropolitan areas.

I've been trying to get a kid that pulled 5 tours in Afghanistan and Iraq to write that nasty dystopian alt-history starting with Comey not talking about emails. It would be a good counter to Tom Kratsman's "A state of disobedience"

I genuinely am unsure of how glib the following is: then why not let them not be and rely on that trade thing that's supposed to mediate between groups with high levels of mutual distrust?

Me neither, I've been trying to think how the blue areas as semiautonomous region/s would work.
posted by ridgerunner at 10:03 PM on March 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


And rural overrepresentation clearly didn't stop DAPL.

What makes you think that people there, aside from the ones whose backyards it was literally going through, didn't want it?

A few years back I was in Oklahoma in a town that Keystone XL was going through, and while there were a smattering of "Stop the Pipeline" yard signs, most people seemed to be pretty supportive. Even though it was a temporary thing, as the various work crews moved through it had created a hell of a little boom. I'm reasonably confident that if you'd taken a vote just in that particular CDP, and certainly in the county, where the pipeline was going, it would have won by a significant margin.

Likewise there are a lot of places in W. PA and WV where people are very supportive of coal mining, and it doesn't necessarily imply that they enjoy living next to a coal mine per se, or that they're entirely ignorant of the risks of living near one. But some people may legitimately believe that the environmental degradation and health risks are worthwhile tradeoffs for the economic impact, particularly if they're not in the wrong-side-of-the-tracks part of town that always seem to take the brunt of things.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:37 AM on March 13, 2017


What makes you think that people there, aside from the ones whose backyards it was literally going through, didn't want it?

I don't. That's why I think rural overrepresentation has no redeeming features - it's just forced on us by history.
posted by PMdixon at 9:51 AM on March 13, 2017


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