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.