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Small Town People Are Bitter — Get Over It. |
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(originally posted at The Bamboo Diaries)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days (which you might be if you live in a small town), you may have heard that presidential candidate Barack Obama has kicked up a shitstorm (or more accurately, the handlers of his opponents have) for daring to suggest that people in small towns are bitter and accordingly embrace right-wing causes. Here’s the full quote:
It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Guess what, people, he’s right.
How dare I say this? As John Cougar Mellencamp sings it, I grew up in a small town. I can’t say that I will live and die in a small town, because I got the hell out as soon as I could, when I got to go to a mega-university in a bigger town, and have lived in metro areas ever since. But I grew up on a 360-acre black Angus cattle farm in MIssouri near an intersection that used to be a town (still had its own sign, even though there were only 8 people in the immediate vicinity), eight miles from a town of 629 people, where I attended the same school for twelve years with a graduating class of 26. That was in a county of 8000 people that was 98.7% white when I grew up there. It was 30 miles from a Wal-Mart (and let me tell you, that’s real distance in rural America) and 1 1/2 hours from the nearest shopping mall. The nearest major airport and metro area was 2 1/2 hours away. So I have the “midwest farmer’s daughter” cred down pretty well by now.
And let’s get this out of the way: yes, I support Obama, but a little reluctantly (I was a John Edwards fan, and still can’t quite figure out why he’s not the best candidate for president). And yes, I will generalize and stereotype in this post, and you can always find an anecdotal example to prove me wrong. We like stereotypes because they’re convenient, and often because they’re, well, TRUE.
Okay — back to the matter at hand. People in small towns generally don’t understand their economic circumstances very well. They work for a living, so they understand that when they work, they get some money. Either that money is enough to support them and their families, or it isn’t. Either it’s enough to allow them to buy a house, pay for their kids’ braces and new clothes, and maybe let them have a Harley, boat, and an occasional vacation, or it isn’t. They don’t own stock, and if they own businesses, it’s a farm, or a beauty shop, or a cafe where you can still buy lunch for less than $4.00.
And when their life falls apart (because the no-good man ran off with the blonde hussy down the street for the last time, or they get hurt at work but are told it’s their fault and get next to nothing from workers’ comp, or their job goes overseas and there’s nothing else to replace it), there’s nothing there to protect them. They’re either too proud for welfare, or it’s pretty much impossible to get it. Minimum wage jobs, especially if you don’t have child care, are next to useless — they don’t adequately pay the bills, and may make it more difficult to qualify for assistance. If your car dies, and you can’t afford to fix it, yet you live where there is not public transportation, forget about holding down a job.
Are you telling me you wouldn’t be bitter about this? If you’re not, you damn well should be. Nobody ever told you it was going to be like this. You’re supposed to have a better life than your parents. You’re supposed to live in a society that will help take care of you when you fall on hard times. You’re supposed to have a good life if you work hard and treat other people decently. You’re supposed to live somewhere that doesn’t practice social Darwinism by letting poor people die because they don’t have health care. You’re supposed to be able to have a couple of kids who love you and will protect you in your old age, but the deal is that you have to make sure you can provide for and protect them until they make it to adulthood.
The problem surely isn’t that small town people are bitter, because again, you’re going to tell me they don’t have a right to be? Now if we lefty liberals who live near a coast are being honest, the problem is that they turn to guns or religion or anti-immigrant sentiment (i.e., Obama was right.) Is the issue that they don’t turn to those things? No, many of them do. I come from a gun-owning, religious family, and I’m hardly a freak that way. (My family isn’t particularly anti-immigrant, but they’re hardly warm and welcoming either. They still refer to one of my cousins as the one who married “the Mexican.”)
Is the issue the implication they’re too dumb to see that these things don’t fix their problems? Well, they do and they don’t. If you think a hunter (usually, but not always, a man) isn’t escaping from it all when he goes back in the woods and starts shooting defenseless animals (often after leaving a hunting camp with other men scratching their privates and drinking beer), then you’re spending too much time on the golf course (and please tell me why whacking a little white ball around at a chi-chi country club who only recently decided that blacks and women could play along is any better).
As for religion, yes, some people do end up voting against their economic interests by paying too much attention to issues like abortion and homosexuality. We’ve all read What’s the Matter with Kansas? Does that mean they’re not that bright? (First, let me say that I’m not a religious person, so there’s admittedly the temptation to just say “yes,” and move on.)
But to be fair, there are a couple of reasons why that happens. One is that in many small towns, the churches provide the only safety net that there is. I can’t tell you how many kids my parents have helped over the years, making sure they have Christmas presents, lunch money, and new pairs of shoes and jeans here and there. Yes, the price is that the kids go to Sunday School as often as my parents take them, but when you’re a kid, that may be the only time all week you feel like anyone really cares about (or frankly even notices) what your life is like.
And another reason is that most small-town religions (they don’t branch out too far from evangelical Christianity there) have a belief in the hereafter as a central tenet. Is it that crazy to think that when your life sucks, and you don’t have that much of a reason to believe it’s going to get better any time soon, that you should just cut your losses and start focusing on getting to heaven? After all, you’ve followed the rules here, and that and a buck will get you a cup of coffee (it’s not Starbucks, so it’s cheaper.) It costs a lot less to read the Bible, forgo the vices they want you to forgo, and judge other people who don’t have your self-restraint. (You conveniently forget that you wouldn’t have any self-restraint either if it wasn’t imposed on you by your life circumstances.)
As for not liking anyone who’s different…that’s a small-town way of life. Forget it if you haven’t lived someplace for at least three generations. To this day, I can tell you which of my school classmates was “from” my hometown (which means they were in my classes for 12 years) and which were not. I can probably even remember when they moved there. After all, most people live there because they haven’t had the wherewithal to get out, so they can’t possibly imagine why someone would choose to move there voluntarily.
The anti-immigrant stuff is a whole other post, but where I’m from, people don’t resent the immigrants for taking their jobs, because the immigrants do the jobs that nobody else wants to do, and keep the small-town economy and family farms alive. It’s just that the people are different, with a different set of cultural values, and often a lack of English skills, which make communication and understanding more difficult. When you’re down and out, the easiest way to cope is to find someone to feel superior to, and the immigrant community is a convenient target.
So the issue isn’t that people in small towns aren’t bitter, because they are, and rightly so. The issue isn’t that they turn to guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiment, because they do, and it even sort of makes sense. So what is the issue, really? That Hillary Clinton and John McCain are oh so sensitive to the plight of the working person? Puh-leeze. That Obama might not get elected if he appears to be elitist? Okay, we’re getting warmer.
Is it that Obama told the truth? Surely a politician who speaks truth to power won’t be crucified, right? Only if it helps someone else get elected.
Paula Brantner is a lawyer, nonprofit manager, and blogger currently residing in the Washington D.C. area, after stints in San Francisco and the Midwest. She has devoted her career to promoting and protecting the rights of people who work for a living, and regularly blogs for Today's Workplace, a Forbes.com Best of the Web Career Blog.
About time someone wrote this article.
Well said.
It is so great to hear the voice of a real, successful person from a small town out in the sticks lend credibility to what Obama said. it's one thing for him to say "hey, I'm not elitist, i used to have to scrape ice off my windshield in the morning!" and almost lampoon himself, and quite another thing to hear you say "Nobody ever told you it was going to be like this."
On a separate note, it gives me hope to see that there really are people getting out of small towns and accomplishing things they set out to.
Having grown up in rural Indiana - more cows than people, truth be told, and a lot more corn than we knew what to do with - this rings so very true.
I returned this last week to take care of some family details; the sheer number of abandoned, collapsed buildings and closed businesses is enough to make you depressed. Thankfully, I made it out of there.
Thanks for the article; I'll be pointing it out to others. It articulates what I've been trying to say ever since this artificial tempest was stirred up.
Some people choose to stay in the small town where they grew up, not because they don't have the wherewithal to get out, but because they want to help change things for the better. I love my Alabama small town and have no plans to "get out." When you generalize about everyone, you miss knowing the individuals who have an interesting story to tell.
That said, I agree that the comment Obama made is a non issue that has been made an issue by people who do not want to see him win. Personally, I hope he does.