Fuck this entire line of thinking. I am ten years older than the author and it has been obvious since before I could read that cities were where the good stuff was. There's this litany that "it didn't used to suck in the country" and it's abject bullshit. It's always sucked in the country. We're just in a place where the suckitude of the country is more obvious than ever. And thanks to the electoral college, the choads too stupid to move get to pick the president. So spare me the sanctimonious "urban elites" bullshit. Getting the fuck out has been the goal of every rural thinker since "the city" was fuckin' Crete.The people I’d grown up with were missing that information. But the liberal people I met in college often were missing another sort of information: what it feels like to pee in a cup to qualify for public benefits to feed your children. A teenager’s frustration when a dilapidated textbook is missing a page and there’s no computer in the house for finding the lesson online. The impossibility of paying a citation for expired auto insurance, itself impossible to pay despite 50 hours a week holding metal frying baskets at KFC.
The entire piece is written as if her anecdotes and broad views of others can somehow be reconciled into a single conclusion. Yeah, well in my experience my family's Catholic faith meant my uncle voted based on two things: abortion and guns. It goes on and on. "My experience was (blank), and I perceived all (blank) type of people to (blank), thus proving my point."In my experience, there was no evangelism about my family’s Catholic faith in the 1980s and little overt cross-pollination between our church and our politics.
That stuff was always around when she was growing up, the people just never felt like anything was under threat. Now they’ve all worked themselves up into a frenzy and bam we get dumb t-shirts. Nobodies racist when the entire towns white. Everybody is just friendly country folks unaware of how terrified they are of anywhere outside their town until the suburbs start creeping in.
... on the other hand, that means that we won't be getting rid of the electoral college any time soon, so letting them have their fantasies of rugged independence and moral rectitude so us degenerates with our functional society and cultural marxist educations can sin in peace is the best chance we have of not being dragged down with them.And thanks to the electoral college, the choads too stupid to move get to pick the president.