Digging in the Trash
Maybe the urban poor are completely invisible.  It was a collection of stories about poor people that we&#x27;re told are rural but like bad soft sci fi the setting didn&#x27;t matter a bit.<p>I grew up with&#x2F;near rural people, and will probably retire to the country, and I&#x27;ll tell you four anecdotes that are genuinely specifically rural, although not necessarily poor:<p>1) Rural folk understand balance sheet vs income statement like urbanites don&#x27;t.  There are a lot of people who suffer from being land poor, where they own the land but struggle to finance day to day operations on and for that land.  Life can be complicated when your septic tank breaks and all you have for income is SS and it would take 15 years of SS payments to pay someone else for a new septic system even if you had no other expenses for those 15 years ... also consider prop tax for example.  If you own the land there is no building superintendent and the closest urban contractor is a 2 hour truck charge drive away, so you make do as best you and your neighbors can.  There&#x27;s a lot of rural paper millionaires who can&#x27;t afford to fix their rusty truck.<p>2) Rural folk, unless they live in the upper midwest and therefore speak newscaster English accent, are generally not terribly interested in your opinion of their accent or the stereotype you think it implies.  You think you&#x27;re holier than thou because you&#x27;re not from rural Louisiana, how nice, but sorry we don&#x27;t care at all.  Sort of like the stereotype of poorly socialized rural folk trying to save your soul, that&#x27;s how we look at poorly socialized urbanites trying to &quot;save us&quot; from the wilderness that is our home.  How cute, you came here to tell us we&#x27;re doing it wrong, that&#x27;s so funny, come back when you grow up.<p>3) Some rural folk are very lonely because you have to spend a significant amount of money on gas to drive a couple dozen miles to do anything.  The phone is nice, but as you know a fraction of the population has an uncontrollable urge for physical presence.  Those folks, especially the old ones, have a rough time, especially when their local peers die off and they literally can&#x27;t afford to visit whoever is left.  There is a filtration effect such that the survivors are the type who can be alone without being lonely, but as its a spectrum there will be lonely people, although not as many as if urbanites were air dropped into the wilderness.  Almost stereotypical for a new teen driver, who&#x27;s parents can afford it, to be assigned to drive old uncle whatshisname all over the place.  Unlike urbanites this leads to rural youth learning much younger that old people have wisdom, or at least respectably interesting stories.<p>4) Rural areas are beautiful.  Urbanites don&#x27;t understand because they live without beauty, somehow.  No one ever daydreamed about seeing the grease trap at McDonalds back by the overflowing dumpster on a crisp winter morning.  Or watching the daily migration of the homeless as the wind blows trash past them down the street.  Or inhaling diesel bus fumes on a hot summer afternoon.  Living in beauty is in itself an addiction that is hard to shake, hard as a chemical addiction, leaving urbanites very confused about why ruralites don&#x27;t want to move into town and live in a nice gray soviet style apartment building where they can&#x27;t even see the sun and the closest green plant is miles away.  Sorta like asking, &quot;so... why not just stop shooting heroin&quot; its not quite that simple to break an addiction...  If you live essentially in a national park your whole life its very difficult to get people like that to leave.