This post hits in a way I hadn’t quite figured out to myself. No wonder they still buy into the welfare queen thing. I’ve got to think on this a bit, woke me to a thing I hadn’t considered.
Comment on Where are all the successful "red cities"?
emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoTo people from small towns, everyone in a city is ‘wealthy’, they must be to afford the insane cost of living right? But thats part of the problem. They don’t realize the people spending $2500 a month on rent are spending 80% of their paycheck, or that they can’t build any savings or eger hope to own a house or even a car because of it. They make no distinction between the actual rich people who live in cities and everyone else, and the state of America right now IS them fighting back against the ‘rich’. Until these people understand the orders of magnitude the people actually fucking us are over the rest of us i don’t know what can be done. To them anyone with a college degree is a wealthy elite.
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
To expand on what @emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com is saying, I live rural because I don’t make enough to live in the city. My town is rapidly gentrifying and I might not afford to live next to cows any more pretty soon. City folk spend more on rent than I make in a month.
A lot of our ‘welfare queen’ perspective is colored by the fact that tax-funded services are usually concentrated in the city. I keep petitioning my county transit authority for better rural bus service, but the best they can do is make the city bus lines run every 15 minutes instead of every half an hour. Meanwhile, I’m paying uber $50 just to get to a doctor’s appointment and wait to catch a ride home when a friend gets off work. Food costs more for worse quality in rural areas, so food stamps don’t go as far as they would in the city. Welfare in the city feels like you could live like a queen off it. It’s not entirely true, because the amount you get is scaled to income, but per dollar, you do get more for your welfare in cities.
There’s also that city dwellers can get really nasty about rural folk. I’ve never voted for a republican in my life, but living out here makes people assume the worst of me. I get told that living rural means I’m a bootlicking hick that’s too stupid to know what’s good for me, so it’s hard to sell that they deserve sympathy and we don’t.
AA5B@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I’m sure these services are a big part of it - you can’t see all the poverty assistance spread out across a wide rural region but you can see there’s no bus service.
Certainly some services only work with higher population densities, but that’s why some of us prefer cities. Rural areas have advantages too, but either way is a compromise. We each made a choice where to live.
But turn this back to what would you do? As a liberal elite urban snob, i freely agree that my ideas are not likely to work well: maybe you don’t want internet service, education, connectivity to the modern world, infrastructure, fine. But im trying and i dont know what else to try. Step up and propose something. I don’t have any say for your county but if you say you need rural bus service, I’m all for that. And I’ll go further and say we should fund intercity rail, and rural bus service to all the towns it passes, to open more of the world to both of us. Stand up, tell us what you need, and you just might get it and more …. It’s not charity it’s a pooled resource making life better for us all.
This article pisses me off a bit, because it does seem likely, but there is no one that people on the left like, who is so corrupt, spiteful, narcissistic, destructive as Trump. We’d never vote to tear everything down, including the democratic traditions that are the foundation of our society. Plus if your strength and independence is so core to your self-image, where is it? Voting for a tantrum to knock everything off the table is no one’s idea of strength. Instead of denigrating what other people try to do for you, stand up and tell us what you need. Make a proposal we can all get behind. A big difference this article misses is that we want the best for you and will act to improve your life if you meet us half away, we have the entire resources of the country pooled to help all of us, where rural MAGA voted for lashing out, for hurting people
shalafi@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
As a middle-aged, white, gun nut in the South, I’m definitely not feeling that urban liberals want the best for me. I’m liberal to the left of Obama, many of us are! But social media tells me I’m a racist cunt who should die in a fire.
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 16 hours ago
maybe you don’t want internet service, education, connectivity to the modern world, infrastructure, fine
Okay, this is one of those weird assumptions that people have about rural folk that I do not understand. Why does everybody assume that the 2k people living in my town don’t want any of that stuff? It’s one of the barriers I keep running into with the bus service, y’all city folk assume that we don’t want it even though we’re asking for it.
Plus if your strength and independence is so core to your self-image, where is it? Voting for a tantrum to knock everything off the table is no one’s idea of strength.
My town went blue. Most of my neighborhood are noncitizen farm workers who couldn’t vote at all. Assuming all rural areas are stereotypical alabama is frankly insulting. You get a pass, because you don’t live up here, but it’s infuriating when I hear the same bullshit coming out of locals followed with “that’s why I voted against the rural school levy, they don’t deserve it”.
A big difference this article misses is that we want the best for you and will act to improve your life if you meet us half away
Except that’s not showing up in any real way. For example, I’m currently looking at the worker retraining programs, and the closest one is 70 miles away. Why should I not complain about that?
SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This in mind, why isn’t Trump a wealthy elite to them? How did he become their savior??
shalafi@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Trump speaks plainly, at a 4th-grade level. Obama spoke at 9th-grade level. Trump makes them feel smart, Obama made them feel stupid. Especially coming from a buh-lack man! The audacity of that <radio edit>!