Drawn like moths, we drift into the city The timeless old attraction Cruising for the action Lit up like a firefly Just to feel the living night
There’s always been an urban/rural divide, politically and culturally.1 Instead of bridging gaps and bringing people together, new technology has only exacerbated the differences. In our binary internet discourse, you’re expected to pick one or the other.
Are you a . . .
Stupid, evil, city dwelling rootless cosmopolitan who hates God, freedom, and America, and loves crime and street-defecation?
Or are you a . . .
Cultureless, backwards conservative meth-addicted fat unemployed racist rural rube clinging to your guns and religion who probably beats women?
No cross-pollination allowed!
This gulf can be seen in the recent, so-online-it-hurts “get you a gas-station baddie” thing2 that’s almost as stupid as the sundress thing3 from a few weeks ago.4
This is absurd. As with most things in life, there is nuance. There are benefits and detriments to both urban and rural existence. Having lived extensively in both, I don’t see why people can’t be equally comfortable in either place. We have to pick? Really?
This has become yet another red America/blue America vector of division. And I get that. It does seem, especially if you’re on the redder side of things, like city people hate you and are actively trying to destroy your way of life, while you’re just leaving city people alone and minding your own business. What’s going on?
From the city perspective, my observations are that it’s an inherent problem in the Our Democracy™️ we’re told we have to wage war in foreign countries to protect here, which makes total sense.5 You see, you, by not voting the way people in cities want you vote, actually are ruining their lives and imposing your way of life on them. Every time a Republican wins a presidential election, that is an attack on an urbanite’s way of life. And so the Our Democracy™️ needs to be managed appropriately to make sure that the country way of things doesn’t impinge on the city way of things. And that involves changing the country mice’s thinking so the vote the proper way.
Given our system, the city way of seeing things is perfectly logical and understandable. I can’t even get mad at it. If we had an actual, functioning federal state where the individual states were far more autonomous and sovereign, this would be almost a non-issue. But we don’t and it isn’t.
So that’s the macro-political look at things. Let’s get back to the individual level. What’s better, the city or the country? What kind of mouse are you, and what kind of mouse should you be? And why do you put so much stock into what strangers on the internet think?
Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone
I grew up in a town of about 5,5006 in a small New England state. It wasn’t quite rural in the “country music video” sense, but it was in no way suburban. It also had a college, so there was an interesting mix of people. My town and the surrounding area—which included a venerable and expensive prep school in the next door town right across the river, in addition to towns which were most definitely “country music video” territory, as well as another town whose population was two families—was full of rednecks and the college-educated alike, right-wing gun nut sovereign citizens and left-wing kooks who wanted to teach third graders about anal sex (in the 90s). There were very few “developments.” There were still working farms. We swam in the river because few people had pools. We rode our bikes everywhere. Things came slowly to our town. We had a movie theater which I worked at for a time, but we didn’t start getting first-run movies until the late 80s; I remember it being a big deal that Batman came out on the actual opening day.
There was stuff to do, but it was all very sleepy, Mayberry R.F.D. stuff. By the time I was 14, I was bored out of my mind. I also didn’t drink or smoke weed, so many exciting recreational opportunities were lost to me.
There was a class divide even in that town. Take pastimes. You either hunted and ice-fished and rode snowmobiles, or you skied and snowboarded and jogged and backpacked (not hiked) and vacationed on Cape Cod. And the twain definitely mixed at our school. Certain types of people generally coexisted, but they didn’t necessarily mix.
That said, I thought it was a fine place to grow up. Lots of outdoor activities. We’d play in the woods without worrying about ticks or anything like that.7 We could ride our bikes to the lake or tube down the river. We even had a skate park. Crimes was so low it made news when someone shoplifted.
Eventually I drifted to the city with an intermediate stop at college. The city was awesome. Here was culture. There was always stuff to do. Concerts, festivals, sporting events, parades, parties, museums, it had it all. And people! You could meet so many interesting people. I’d love hitting up a bar in the neighborhood for a bite and just talking to the regulars, or going to the swankier nightlife parts of town to see what might happen. There was definitely a lot of the rube about me, but as with anything you adapt and learn and enjoy it. At least I did.
Not having a car was a drag, as relying on the subway and buses and trains was a new experience. But I grew to enjoy walking everywhere. I loved having my spots in the city. Jogging routes. Clubs to see shows and restaurants where they knew you. Friends everywhere. People always out and about on the weekends. Stuff happened. It was nice. I wouldn’t want to raise kids there, but if my kids want to move to a city when they’re young adults, that’d be fine by me.
Look: it’s easier to find a job in cities, depending on what you do. It’s also a prestige thing. I get why people want to test themselves in New York or L.A. over second-tier cities, because Frank Sinatra was right: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
Why is this bad?
I know everyone has different experiences. I also know this country is divided. I myself am weird because I grew up red state and I guess I have red-state values, but I definitely have blue-state tastes and sensibilities. I can get along in and with either. Does this make me a squishy, or just socially adaptable?
What if you put a gun to my head and I had to pick? You know what? I’d pick a city.
I honestly prefer more urban environments. I can relate to city people better. I have never hunted in my life. I never served in the military. I am not Evangelical or Born Again or Congregationalist or atheist or pagan.8 I’m not into NASCAR or cars in general. I don’t really watch TV, and though I like sports my sport of choice is basketball, not football. I think “Hawk tuah” is embarrassingly low class and a lot of those other markers of “red state culture” embarrassing in general.9 But I don’t hate those people. Just because something isn’t my thing doesn’t make those people my enemy. Red-staters aren’t trying to impose their values on me or my kids. They aren’t trying to end my way of life.
My experience is that small towns are very limiting to a certain type of person, and actively discourage thinking big. I myself fell into this trap. We’d laugh at so-and-so who had pretensions of being an actress or a musician or whatever. How dare they? No one from our town makes it! Well, my town actually has an oddly high number of people who made it in the entertainment field. I went to high school with people you would know if I dropped their names.
, who is not a communist, expressed in an offline conversation that when she spends time living in Jacksonville—hardly a booming urban center—people think she was a communist because she read books.10 I used that exact same line of thinking when a friend of mine expressed that he wanted to be a Hollywood screenwriter: “That’s a little pink,11 don’t you think?” I said to another friend. Later as I got more into art and weird music, and especially after my first year of college, I experienced the same thing from the opposite perspective. Suddenly, I was the oddball out of step with the rest of the town. I was the one who was being told my ideas were dumb and would never happen. How dare I? I, too, wanted to go to New York City to try and make it. I was a very talented musician. So good, that one of those aforementioned people from my town who made it, one of the best musicians I’ve ever met in my life, wanted me to eschew college and go to New York with him. Sometimes I wonder, “What if?” This is a twin question with, “Why not?”Why not indeed. Why do small-town people act like the proverbial crabs in a bucket? There’s not a laser that turns you into a godless liberal when you cross city lines. It all depends on how strong your character is. I met my wife, a small-town girl herself, in the city. Neither of us changed our values by living in an urban environment. I know this is anecdotal evidence of but two people, but our experiences shows that one doesn’t have to change themselves in a fundamental level based on where they live.
Depending on what you want to do, cities are vital. I have a law degree and an MBA. What the hell am I doing in the countryside? If I were a landscaper or something, fine, that’d be a different story. But I’m not.
Cities have long been hearts of culture and civilization, as well as economy. Even now, there’s evidence that culture drives economic growth and not the other way around.12 Cities popped up when agriculture and farming made nomadic hunting unnecessary. All sorts of artisans and merchants attached themselves to the seat of power permanently, and entire communities sprang up. I hate to say it, but when we read history we read about Ur and Babylon and Rome and Baghdad and Paris and Athens and London, Susa and Persepolis, Washington and Madrid, Moscow and Beijing, Cairo and Riyadh, New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia and Houston and Seattle, not Springfield and Shelbyville. This is not to say that Springfield and Shelbyville don’t matter, but that cities aren’t the useless places their critics make them out to be.
At the end of the day, what internet strangers think of me based on the fact that I like cities doesn’t matter. Cities are where most everything happens. It’s a shame that we’ve let America’s cities become dumps. It’s a shame we’ve abandoned them largely to our enemies. But every single person living in a city isn’t your enemy. The idea of cities isn’t your enemy. I don’t know if many of our cities can be “taken back” absent actual force. Some cities are better than others so if one wants to, or must, live in a city, there are important choices to be made as to which one.
And sometimes, like with me, as you enter into a new stage in life, sometimes you do want to get back to somewhere more quiet to raise a family of your own.
Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flightSomewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights
My advice to you is timeless: get off the internet and do what you want.
- Alexander
Thank you for making it to the end of this post. I fully expect a lot of pushback on this, so please fire away. If you enjoy my writing, please check out my novels on Amazon, or if you want to toss a few drachmas into the tip jar, you can always Buy Me A Coffee. Thanks, and please share and subscribe. God bless.
For the purpose of this post, I’m not concerned with who started it.
If you don’t know what this is, congratulations: you have a life.
Or was it days? Things move very fast online.
Remember, my fellow Americans: Because Adolph Hitler tried to take over Europe in the 1930s and 40s, Russia, China, and Hamas (but mostly Russia, because they’re white and Christian) are a threat to our way of life in 2024.
Now over 6,500.
Remind me to tell you about the time I got Lyme disease sometime.
There are lots of atheists and pagans in the heartland, believe it or not.
That’s right: I’m a snob. I don’t think I’ve ever made that secret, but in case you were curious, there you go.
Thanks to Rachel for the correction in the comments.
Pink, as in pinko.
I still find the ire against gentrification amusingly hypocritical. If immigration is our strength, what is gentrification but internal immigration of a kind that actually makes things better and not worse?
I love this! Sick of the division. We are all just writers and philosophers. To clarify, I did not grow up in rural Florida. I grew up in the suburbs of Miami where everything was ultra-sanitized. Think Stepford Wives. I moved to rural Florida (Jacksonville) during the pandemic to save money and escape the lockdowns in NYC. It was here I felt like an alien even more than in the suburbs of Miami. Despite my avant-garde reactionary views I realized how culturally blue I was. Cities like Austin attempted to solve the divide yet left much to be desired.
The rural/urban divide is not just limited to the U.S. It is a worldwide phenomenon - look at even places like Iran, where Tehran is very liberal and the rural areas are very conservative. I would say most or perhaps all major cities worldwide are liberal. And as you state, this rural/urban divide regarding politics has always been there...