Let us now bash small town America. What bullshit.

[cali]

Small town mentality varies. It's not rigidly the same from region to region.

I live in a village, but it's also part of a small town a few miles down the road. The town has about 4,000 people (my village has under 300). It's mostly white. It's poor, but there's a lot to be said for it. It's liberal. Yes, liberal. We voted to impeach bush and cheney a couple of years ago. We have a fantastic local co-op. We have an active peace & justice group. Our elementary school has a sister school in Nicaragua and groups actively communicate and go back and forth. We try to bring performing arts to the town. And we do. We have a great farmer's market. Neighbors really do go all out for a neighbor in need.

Yes, there are racists here, but guaranteed my town and the great majority of the other dink towns in my state will go for Obama.

All small towns are not the same. There is no uniform small town mentality.

[Vanje]

1. Did I miss something? Was anybody bashing small towns?

Hey! I have an idea,
Lets toss up a straw man via a brand new thread in GD, and then have a big time kicking the shit out of it.

[cali]

4. hey! guess what? you missed something..

Before completely erroneously labeling something a straw man, stir your ass and do a little search. Or is that asking too much? And the thread I'm referencing is hardly the only one that's been posted over the last few days.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3935947&mesg_id=3935947

[Vanje]

10. It was pretty easy to miss.

Easier to make sense of your complaint if you had included this link right there with your original post.

[cliffordu]

25. Anger, Much??

[ogneopasno]

2. Yes, and yes.

I'm tired of all the threads down on small towns. We chase after this all the time. Things are different everywhere you go.

[rebel with a cause]

28. what I just posted on a thread downing small towns.

The worse small towns that I have lived in are not as bad as indicated here.

There has been racism, but there has been those who were not racist. There has been narrow minded people who do not like strangers, and there has been those who would go out of their way to help a stranger. There are those that are homophobic and there are gays who are accepted and loved. There are 'red necks' and there are liberals. There are the undereducated and there are those that are highly educated. There are people of all kinds to be found in small towns in my experience.

We have always locked our doors, especially at night. We have criminals, and we have honest people. I grew up the daughter of a minister, so I knew a lot of people's secrets that others didn't know. I worked in social services years later and know secrets now that not many others know. Trust me when I say we have all kind of people in these small towns.

And guess what! I found the same kind of people in the city. In fact, I found that the city was just a bunch of small towns (neighborhoods) that sit together to form a bigger community.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I sometimes hate living in a small town, but there were also times that I hated living in the city. I forget that sometimes because it has been almost thirty years since I live in NYC. There is good and bad about both places and the same kind of people in both.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

3. I came from a really, really small town in Massachusetts.

It wasn't the best place in the world. This was a psycho town, a town where bullies reigned in the schools and the parents were white trash assholes who lacked the ability to raise kids. Where one of my neighbors climbed into a tree in the back yard, stuck a shotgun in his mouth, and blew his fucking head off. Where some asshole, on acid, placed a few sticks of dynamite in the Patton tank in the park and blew the shit out of it. Where my next door neighbor's dad didn't approve of her punk-ass bitch-ass stoner boyfriend, so he came by around midnight and set fire to his back porch.

Small town mentality does indeed vary, and I came from a small town that was a hemorrhoid on the ass of life. Some of the sterotypes are reality, some are prejudice. I can only speak from my experience.

Silicon Valley is not without its challenges...many, many challenges...but I'd never go back to that little shit hole on the east coast.

NEVER. Not even for a visit.

[Thirtieschild]

5. You're right. Small towns aren't all the same. Much depends on where the small town is.

You could be describing the small town where we now live. New Mexico, liberal, Hispanic, artistic, Democratic, miles from anywhere. The small town where I grew up is also miles from anywhere but otherwise is the opposite: Texas panhandle, conservative, Republican, brag on their web site that in 2004 they gave a higher percentage of the vote to Bush than any other county in the country. I lived in cities most of my adult life and see advantages to both the large and the small.

[Celeborn Skywalker]

20. Hello!

Yes, I love our little town here at the foot of the Gila National Forest. :)

[Thirtieschild]

26. And hello to you.

Are you the guy I saw with a DU sticker on your vehicle? (I can't remember if it was a pickup or a car, hence vehicle.) So glad to be here. Wonderful weather, wonderful views, wonderful people, wonderful politics. Except of course for Steve Pearce, and I think we can blame the part of the state that abuts Texas for him. And he'll be gone after November 4.

[crimsonblue]

6. Well where I come from

small towns are full of hypocritical jesus freaks who care more about the bedroom than the quality of the schoolroom. So I'm not backing down. Small town America is dangerous.

[cali]

7. Yep. New England is super scary. Filled with small town. Filled with

rural areas and villages. You better never come to my state of Vermont. It's all rural areas and small towns. Boo.

[crimsonblue]

14. small town Kansas is quite different than small town NE.

[cali]

15. no kidding. that was the point of the OP.

[crimsonblue]

16. and I think it is implicit that talk of small town America

refers to right wing towns in red states. That's the way i've interepeted it.

[lumberjack_jeff]

19. "That's the way I've interpreted it" - the operative phrase.

Stereotyping is what separates us from the lesser animals.

[Thothmes]

27. Shall we forcable relocate them to Chicago

or LA or New York. Maybe liquidate them because they are 'dangerous"

[roody]

8. Many small towns are downright friendly

and nice to you-------- if you are white.

[SmokingJacket]

9. I'm from a small town too, and lived in many others, and I have to

say... the liberal small town is an exception.

Nevertheless, bashing "small town values" isn't going to help bring any of those citizens to our side.

[cali]

11. It's not the exception in New England.

And you can find liberal small towns throughout most of the country. It's just not that much of a rarity.

[SmokingJacket]

17. College towns are awesome.

I can't speak for New England, but in the majority of the country, the only liberal small towns are college ones.

College towns don't feel like small towns, to me.

[Odin2005]

22. A town with a college is most likely NOT a small town.

In my mind a small town has less then 5,000 people and a place with more then 10,000 people is a city.

[SmokingJacket]

24. I grew up in a college town of 11,000

It would be a stretch to call it a city. It was a town -- we didn't think of it as a small town, since it was much bigger than its neighbors -- just a town. I also lived in a town of 300. We thought of that as a village.

[Fumesucker]

18. "Most of the country"...

Not true for the Southeast where I live..

I've never seen a liberal small town in the Southeast and I've been here going on sixty years now.

[EC]

12. Palin in her round about way is bashing them

not us...many of us live in small towns or towns that used to be small and grew and we wish were small again...like mine...

It's another Straw man arguement...

[tomg]

13. My wife teaches in a

small town that is, to put it mildly, right-wing-o-rama. She and I live in a town just on the other side of the river that is, I'm proud to say, pretty left. Maybe it's the river, I don't know. Still one thing that seems to link the two places, regardless of political persuasion, is the concept of community, even though the two communities might handle it from very different perspectives. Some tend to see it in a very inclusive almost xenophobic sense, others see it in terms of exclusion and expansion. One of the things I love most about Obama is that he is addressing the idea of community at a very deep level.

Cali, your town sounds a lot like ours. I wouldn't live anywhere else.

[Odin2005]

21. I grew up in a small town and I totally agree with you.

Yes, we have our problems, but so do urban areas. The bashing of small towns is little more then thinly-veiled bigotry from upper-middle class urbanites and suburbanites that think they are better then us.

I'm from rural NW Minnesota, we are all very friendly. The people tend to be socially conservative but they are very progressive economically. Many small towns, at least in my area, have went Red simply because of "God, Gays, and Guns," were it not for the culture war BS they would be solidly Blue. This is, after all, where the great Mid-Western "Farmer-Laborer" socialist political movements emerged. In Minnesota they became so powerful that even after they merged with the Democratic Party in the 40s the MN Dems are still called the "Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party."

[Selatius]

23. The majority of Mississippians where I live, most of whom live in small towns, will vote for McCain.

I know it because I live in Mississippi. The mentality in this part of the country has no bearing on the mentality of the people who live in your state. Vermont isn't what a lot of folks here think of when they think of small towns. To many folks here, Vermont is a extremely liberal, and in their eyes--yes they stereotype as well--small town America resembles Mississippi more than Vermont.

Am I bashing small town America? Nope. But what I will tell you is that this nation has a lot of cultural variation from region to region. It's almost like separate countries.

[kath]

29. Did you watch last night's John Stewart (full show available on line) -

I think many of you are missing the point here - With S. Palin on board, the Repukes are hitting this "small town values" thing real hard, as if small-towners are the only "Real Murkans". I think some of the threads here, like the Daily Show bit (near the end of the show) are trying to counter that particular line of Repug bullshit.

Get. A. Grip.

[lonestarnot]

30. Yes. Point taken. Thanks.

[Marr]

31. Oh, stop it.

We live in a country where politicians can get on national television and openly mock 'northeastern liberals' and use 'the left coast' as a short hand for immorality. That thread seemed like a response to the self-righteous moralizing and blatant insults that are hurled at city and coastal types as a part of regular political discourse in this country.

Seriously-- when candidates for political office start mocking small towns and using you and your family as a synonym for degeneracy, I'll sympathize. So long as it's acceptable to openly suggest that the only "real Americans" live outside the cities, I'll just invite you to grow a thicker skin.