Digging in the Trash
Maybe I&#x27;m overly cynical, but I found the article and many of the comments here annoying.<p>Yes - rural people can be nice, helpful, friendly, wise, experienced, and unpretentious.<p>Rural people can also be short-sighted, rude, intolerant, gleefully embrace ignorance, and every bit as pretentious as a city-slicker.<p>This is because whether it&#x27;s city, suburban, or rural, we&#x27;re all still people. And here&#x27;s the kicker:  All things being equal, people are people, and some are jerks and others saints.  But things AREN&#x27;T equal.  I&#x27;ve lived in trailers, and I&#x27;ve owned a house - I can&#x27;t tell you about your neighbors in those situations, but I can tell you about the areas.<p>I won&#x27;t speculate the reasons here, but rural areas (more in the American South than other places I&#x27;ve been, but still in general)   have more than their share of bitter, racist, sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, self-righteous people.  This is demonstrable in a variety of statistical ways by look at different states&#x2F;counties.<p>When reviewing the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked &quot;Is it the government&#x27;s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than the citizens in the North?&quot;.   I&#x27;ve been there.   It totally is.  And the more rural, often the more racist (etc).<p>When you look at states where they are removing actual science from the textbooks, where are they?   When you find the populations of people that want to &quot;go with their gut&quot; in the face of any evidence, where are they concentrated?<p>Of course, you can&#x27;t paint with broad strokes - for me to condemn everyone in a low-population density area is just as wrong as calling them all saintly.  There are many people, many towns, many areas, where what I&#x27;m talking about is less common than in many cities.<p>But my experience says the embrace of ignorance to be more likely there.   I don&#x27;t look down on someone for coming from or being in a rural area.  I don&#x27;t admire someone for coming to or being in a city.  But the sort of &quot;noble savage&quot; picture that I&#x27;m seeing painted here utterly disregards the very real problems and social ills that many of these areas have.<p>Tell me your in&#x2F;from a rural area and I don&#x27;t care.  Tell me you&#x27;re poor, it doesn&#x27;t impact my impression of your worth as a person.  But don&#x27;t be an asshat and surround yourself with other asshats and then complain about the reputation you&#x27;re getting.