5 Reasons to Stop Talking Sh*t About People From the South and Midwest [View all]

[YoungDemCA]

1. It's dehumanizing. Think about what the terms "flyover country" and "flyover people" mean. They say, essentially, that people on the East and West Coasts are worth engaging with -- and that people in the Midwest and South are not. They say that people in the Midwest and South are time-consuming annoyances, to be flown past on your way to the important people.

This is dehumanizing. And progressives should not be dehumanizing people. Nobody should be dehumanizing people -- and progressives especially are supposed to be fighting for the dignity, equality, and humanity of everyone. It is hypocritical for us to claim to be doing that, while treating hundreds of millions of people as placeholders.

2. It's classist. One of the distinguishing features of big progressive coastal cities is that they're often expensive. If someone lives in Columbus or Memphis instead of San Francisco or New York, there's a reasonable chance that they're doing it because that's where they can afford to buy a house, put their kids through college, work for a small business or a non-profit, start a small business or a non-profit, even simply pay rent. Living in San Francisco is becoming increasingly impossible for anyone who isn't a tech millionaire.

So dismissing people from the Midwest and South, to a great extent, means dismissing people who aren't rolling in dough. Progressives should really not be doing that. Again -- nobody should be doing that, but it's especially hypocritical when progressives do it.

And of course, the assumption that every decent interesting person would want to live in the big coastal cities if only they could -- that's classist in its own way. Some people don't like crowds, prefer a slower pace, care more about access to wilderness than access to foofy restaurants. I don't happen to be one of them myself. Foofy restaurants mean a lot to me. But we need to recognize that a taste for foofy restaurants is not the marker of decency, compassion, or even progressive politics.

http://www.alternet.org/culture/5-reasons-stop-talking-sht-about-people-south-and-midwest