This is a guest post from Andrea. Andrea lives in the backwoods of northern Virginia with a small menagerie, where she fritters her life away reading, hiking Civil War battlefields, and surfing the internet when the weather allows her primitive satellite connection to stay up. She’s involved in social justice, battlefield preservation, and is foolish enough to try going to school full time while holding down a full time job that requires a 100 mile daily commute. You can catch her blogging this idyllic life over at the Manor of Mixed Blessings (posts there have no redeeming social value).
Introduction
Back during the 2008 election cycle, then-candidate Obama took some flack for a comment in which he said that people in depressed midwestern towns were “bitter” and “clinging to guns and religion.” People in depressed regions took exception to the characterization, with its whiff of desperation, while a great many urban liberals nodded sagely and basically responded to complaints of condescension by saying “Well, you are.”
So let’s break it down. Rural populations often feel themselves marginalized in any number of ways. For one, rural dwellers are more likely to be elderly, disabled, poor, or all of the above. Being a person of color is another risk factor for poverty no matter where you live, and your chance of living in poverty is much worse, across the board, for rural populations. People with disabilities, people of color, and the elderly are populations that are already marginalized by institutionalized discrimination; add poverty on top of these factors and you wind up with people who feel that their lives are significantly impacted in a double-plus ungood kind of way by forces totally beyond their control. Rural populations may feel isolated by the distance to resources such as medical clinics, law enforcement, and entertainment options. They’ve heard of all the cool stuff you can do with reliable, high-speed internet but they also know that it isn’t going to come to their communities and that no one cares. Websites and internet-based games are designed on the assumption that everyone has access to cable or DSL and if you don’t, screw you.
So how does all this come down to guns, Jesus, and right-wing politics? Let me use my little unincorporated township as an example. I shall affectionately dub it “Nowheresville.” And I do mean that “affectionately” because despite the problems of rural living, I really like living there. What you should know about Nowheresville before we get started is that it is an unincorporated township with 450 people in the entire ZIP code, and about 150 of us living within a mile or so of the general store (which closed, a victim of the recession). It has bigger towns about 15 miles to either side. The fact that it is a township and does have access to bigger towns (one has a 10K population, the other 20K) means that the problems of rural living in Nowheresville are less severe than you would find in, say, Montana. Nowheresville is, however, located in a county that is firm in its dedication to preserving its rural character, and has mandated low population densities in an effort to keep it from being overrun by subdivisions.
Jesus and Right-Wing Politics
So what is there to do in Nowheresville? Well, we’re at hugely increased risk of larceny and property crimes as compared to the US or Virginia averages, so at least some people get their kicks that way. But if you’re of a more law-abiding bent, you have three options: weekly services at the Methodist Church or the Baptist Church, or the monthly fund-raisers at the Nowheresville Fire and Rescue Station. Yeah, you read that right, we have two churches in a town of 150 people (don’t forget about those fundraisers, though, we’ll come back to them). In fact, they stagger their Sunday services because some people attend both. There’s both cause and effect going here. Religion has been a refuge for marginalized populations since, well, we started keeping records of abusing other human beings. It’s human nature to want to believe, in the face of overwhelming forces that are keeping you poor and your life difficult, that there is a force yet more powerful that is going to even things out one day, even if that day only comes after you die. Otherwise there’s no reason for your suffering, and if you honestly believe that you’re trying to eke out a miserable living on SSDI, struggling to feed your family on food stamps, and it’s all just because the world is shit and when you die, well, you just disappear and there’s no reward, then why the hell would you even bother getting out of bed?
And here comes some smug city bastard who has a grocery store right down the street, who can probably even go to the doctor without having to take a whole damn day off work because everything is right there and furthermore isn’t going to have to struggle to find a doctor he can afford to go to, telling you you’re clinging to religion like that’s a bad thing. Some guy in a clean suit with soft hands, someone who’s never tried to figure out how to eat and buy gas to get more food, and he’s judging your beliefs like that? Shit, at least God is on your side. At least when you go to church on Sunday (or both churches on Sunday) what you hear is that you are important, you are loved, someone bigger and more powerful than even the US government is watching and keeping score and some day there will be justice. Maybe not in this life, but justice is coming and one day, it will all be all right.
Speaking of the US government and its role in people’s lives… All you see, when you live in the rural parts of the US, is taxes coming out of your paycheck, which is already small. You don’t see services in return; here in Nowheresville we’re the last to get plowed out in snowstorms and it will take a deputy 20 minutes to get here under ideal conditions if you call the police. Your property taxes pay for school for your kids, but where exactly are your federal taxes going? You pay them in and if you’re lucky and stubborn you can get some back in the form of SSI, SSDI, or Medicare should something happen to you, but none of those benefits pay you enough to provide for your family or even just for yourself, and God knows Medicare ain’t perfect. It can be very difficult to find a doctor you can get to at all when you live in Nowheresville, let alone a doctor you can get to who will accept Medicare. So what the hell are you paying taxes for?
Why would you want to pay more taxes to pay for more programs that you’re never going to see any benefit from? Why would you give a damn about programs to expand high-speed internet when the government has defined satellite as “broadband” for the purposes of the experiment and you know from experience that it’s expensive, slow, unreliable, and doesn’t allow you to do any of the things they tell you that broadband should let you do, like stream video and use VOIP? Why would you support stimulus programs meant to provide federal money for road improvement and construction when you know that the terrible roads in your community are going to be at the bottom of the list, being in low population density areas, and that even if the powers that be do try to work on your roads, they’re going to wind up adding 15 miles to your already lengthy commute because they just blocked off the most direct route out of your area with zero thought for consequences? Shit, I’m practically a socialist but seeing how government spending is handled in rural communities is enough to nearly drive me into the arms of the Tea Party.
Remember those Nowheresville Fire and Rescue Department fundraisers I mentioned? The NFRD is staffed by volunteers and has to sell chicken dinners and hold bingo games to meet operating costs. The government here does not even fully fund public safety programs like the fire department and EMTs, seriously. If our houses catch fire, if we’re in a car accident or have a medical emergency, the response time required to save lives and property is dependent upon how fast volunteers can get to the station and get the truck or ambulance out. And the people responding are doing it for free.
Even state- and federally-funded programs and institutions that know they’re serving a largely rural population regularly screw up because they don’t take into account the realities of rural living. Let’s use the community college where I’m currently slogging through Gen Ed requirements as an example. They have campuses in both the cities to either side of me, they are aware of who their students are and where they live, and yet instructors regularly pull crap like expecting students taking online classes to be able to watch a 30 to 60 minute video lecture. My math teacher is a prime example, she’s recorded a 30 minute video lecture for every single week. I tried watching the first one, but by the time it downloaded it was so late that it was time for dinner and for me to actually spend time with my husband and small menagerie, so I’m struggling through math class without access to these lectures because she hasn’t bothered to transcribe them or otherwise provide a format that’s actually accessible.
Guns
I wrote a little about law enforcement response times up there, how it will take the county sheriff’s deputies 20 minutes to get to Nowheresville on a good day. A lot of us have guns, unsurprisingly. A lot can happen in 20 minutes when someone hostile has broken into your home, shed, or garage, and that’s assuming you were in a position to call 911 as soon as they broke in. Despite being so liberal that my bleeding heart has occasionally threatened me with metaphorical anemia, I own multiple firearms. Anyone who has entered my house without permission did it in spite of two Dobermans and two German Shepherds and I think I can safely assume that they’re not there just because they’d like a drink of water and a chance to make a local phone call. City-dwelling middle-class liberals may have reason to believe that owning a gun is the irrational choice of a paranoid person, but this rural-dwelling middle-class liberal finds it irrational to not be able to defend herself and her family while she waits for the cavalry to arrive.
Guns in the country are also a valuable method of adding some animal protein to the diet. Bullets are cheaper than beef in terms of the amount of food they can provide. Squirrels, possums, rabbits, and other varmints have been and still are an option for food that can be taken out of season (or doesn’t even have a hunting season) in many rural areas, and a deer in the freezer is something you can eat off for a while. Guns along with gardens and canning are insurance against starvation, a way of making sure that no matter what else happens, at least you can eat.
Finally, guns are entertainment and a way of bonding and sharing experiences. A co-worker of mine who grew up in north Alabama related how it was a rite of passage for boys and girls alike to get their first little .22 caliber rifles at around 11 years old, and be taught to shoot. Shooting, whether for defense, hunting, or sport, is a skill that can be shared and sharing skills is a way for people to demonstrate caring for one another. Some parents teach their kids to throw a baseball or football, out here in Nowheresville and similar places you teach your kids to shoot.
Conclusion
In short, there’s good reasons for the culture in the rural US to be radically different from the culture that urban USians, and particularly urban liberals, experience. The fact that progressives and liberals have had a lot of trouble gaining traction in these areas speaks more to the fact that left-wing politics and its proponents have somehow managed to remain largely ignorant of the facts of rural life, and propose solutions that simply do not work with the infrastructure and culture. Assumptions are made that suggest that the rural populations are just too stupid to know what’s in their political best interests because they’re busy with guns, Jesus, and right-wing conspiracy theories, rather than looking to see where the roots of these cultural elements actually originate and understanding them as logical, organic outgrowths of the actual circumstances of rural life, which is very different than the idealized circumstances presented to us by pop culture and politicians courting votes by referencing “real America.”
