- The first gay person I knew personally was my college roommate — a great man who made me a better person. But that’s an experience I would have never had if I didn’t go to college and instead decided to live the rest of my life in my hometown.
That was when I realized that not supporting gay marriage meant to actively deny rights to someone I knew personally. I wouldn’t be denying marriage rights to other people; I would be denying marriage rights to Dave. I would have to look Dave in the eye and say, “Dave, you deserve fewer rights than me. You deserve a lesser human experience.”
When you grow up in rural America, denying rights to people is an abstract concept. Denying marriage rights to gay people isn’t that much different than denying boarding rights to Klingons.
I couldn't agree more. My own experience was the resident assistant on my floor in my freshman dorm was gay. I still remember someone telling me he was gay. My response was "ok." I'd never met an openly gay person. You might as well have told me he was a pretty well known violinist. I'd never met a pretty well known violinist, either. But I think the author gets their conclusion backwards. He seems to be saying Trump voters need to better themselves so they won't vote for another Trump. He's telling people to lift their morals by pulling up their own moral bootstraps. We vilify that kind of talk when it's about economics, and we should here. It's up to the "coastal elites" to show rural America what's out there. Expecting them to seek it out themselves spells many lost elections to come. It can't be forced; tell someone they're a horrible person if they vote a certain way, and you've lost. But like meeting my resident assistant, people just need to be exposed.More Americans need to see more of the United States. They need to shake hands with a Muslim, or talk soccer with a middle aged lesbian, or attend a lecture by a female business executive.
I think a lot of the problem is the "coastal elites" have been showing rural America "what's out there" for the better part of a century. Culture comes from New York. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Movies. Music. I mean fuck - the 2nd coming of Country music came about because the big hair band producers got assed out by grunge and decided to overproduce the shit out of Shania Twain and her ilk. Garth Brooks? Garth Brooks is Alice Cooper with a twang. So what are you supposed to do? Move there? We had a black kid show up in 3rd grade. He was the only one in my elementary school. He got to immediately see what racism looked like as three teachers in a row punished him and marginalized him for being black. The lesson we all learned was it was okay to pick on Carleton because the teachers did, too. AND NEW MEXICO WENT BLUE THIS ELECTION but as a white kid in Hispanic NM there were places I couldn't go. It's blue because of Santa Fe and Albuquerque but Albuquerque is only blue due to the massive influx of tech and entertainment work it's been experiencing. My normal was institutionalized racial violence. The South is so backwards manufacturers won't go there. But there are other reports, some coming from state officials, that confirm his basic point: Japanese auto companies opening plants in the Southern U.S. have been unfavorably surprised by the work force's poor level of training. There's some bitter irony here for Alabama's governor. Just two years ago voters overwhelmingly rejected his plea for an increase in the state's rock-bottom taxes on the affluent, so that he could afford to improve the state's low-quality education system. Opponents of the tax hike convinced voters that it would cost the state jobs. But education is only one reason Toyota chose Ontario. Canada's other big selling point is its national health insurance system, which saves auto manufacturers large sums in benefit payments compared with their costs in the United States. So no. the "coastal elites" have been showing Rural America "what's out there" for a hundred years.... but I have some thoughts on this. What made Toyota so sensitive to labor quality issues? Maybe we should discount remarks from the president of the Toronto-based Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, who claimed that the educational level in the Southern United States was so low that trainers for Japanese plants in Alabama had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech equipment.
People who grow up in small towns generally don't want to know "what's out there". As rude as it may sounds I have seen them struggle to comphrend to the point of flaming out how other cultures can fit into their lives beyond sushi and chicken fried rice. They either leave their small town and find this new, confusing world exciting or they move back home once it gets too much for them. Edit: The comment about California's population vs Canada's reminded me of when I landed in Calgary and was sitting in the arrivals area where you get your baggage. There was barely anybody there and it was so nice to sit in quiet after my flight. They even had little dogs that you could pet. I remember thinking I wonder what KB's experience is flying to L.A.
Yeap, can confirm. Kentucky has a program that is desperately trying to get new teachers and inject fresh blood into its rural schools. It sort of works. Young, new, teachers go teach in BFE for the required few years and then get the hell out because teaching in rural Redneckistan is depressing. You watch the kids either give up or get out as fast as they can. They did try to get non-white teachers into some of the rural districts, but none took the deal. One of the better rural counties that I do some work in, Breckinridge, has fewer than 500 black people TOTAL in the county; most of those are military associated with Fort Knox. Grayson county, where I do a library program once a year, is even less diverse. But the big numbers are as below: Grayson County, btw, 80% Trump. There are a thousand Grayson Counties out there. And every time I go down there I am both cheered on by the ways people band together to exist in a changing world, and appalled that people I consider my fellow Americans are being left behind. 15K Per Capita Income. 1/4 of the kids living in poverty. And they all voted for Trump who is arguably going to make their lives harder.The median income for a household in the county was $27,639, and the median income for a family was $33,080. Males had a median income of $27,759 versus $19,302 for females. The per capita income for the county was $14,759. About 13.90% of families and 18.10% of the population were below the poverty line, including 24.10% of those under age 18 and 15.70% of those age 65 or over.
I grew up in rural America (town of 2000, about half the students were on farms), and my mom taught in another small town. She told me this summer that her old district had three applicants to an open position. By the time they did interviews, two of them had already accepted positions elsewhere. My high school class graduated 63, including three hispanic students. I believe they were the first non-whites to graduate from my school. This was 1999.
Wow, there were 2900 people in my high school. My graduating class was 900-something. Your town was smaller than my high school. I had no clue about rural America until I got some first hand experience with it in the early 90's as I sort of wandered around a bit. Moving from one of the more densely populated areas in the country to Kentucky was... a bit of a shock. There are more people in LA county than in Kentucky and Indiana combined.