CULTURE

I Know Why Rural Populations Are Vulnerable To The Lies Of Tyrants

Our whole social hierarchy creates an exploitable mechanism

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

I grew up in an unincorporated town in Northern Wisconsin. My school district served many small communities within a large geographical area. Every morning we took a 45 minute bus ride to a metropolis of 2,000 people. It was the nearest town with facilities that came the closest to meeting the state’s basic educational standards.

I grew up surrounded by wilderness and dairy farms. Our nearest neighbor was several miles away.

I’m often confused when people talk about “rural life” because the social dialogue never matches up with my lived experience. What I’ve come to realize is that almost all discussions of the “rural mindset” are either fabricated or they’re made up of commonly believed but baseless assumptions.

The simple fact is that I know what American rural life is like and most people don’t. I was raised in the reddest of the red. There’s a chasm of difference between an unincorporated town and a town of 10,000 or 50,000 people. “Stadium” country music singers don’t know what country life is like. Almost everything in their songs is wrong. Media personalities have no clue. Politicians don’t know because none of them have ever been there.

But I know, and I also know we aren’t going to make progress as a society until we make an honest effort to correct the wrongs that nobody wants to see.

I made it out, but it was a close thing

Few people make it out of the type of place where I grew up. Of my graduating class of 100 people, I can think of two others that have managed to integrate with the modern world. Many of the members of my graduating class who are still alive remain in my home town. Far too many of them are dead.

At the end of our senior year, our guidance counselor gathered up all the high-performing students and told us that college was a waste of our time and money. He said we were most likely going to fail out. At the time, his words irritated me. Later, I realized he was right.