Sounds like the (very red) county in which we’ve lived for almost 50 years. If you weren’t born and raised here, you’re never “one of us.” In fact, this county is practically famous for shunning outsiders. There are people here who have never set foot out of this county, not for vacationing, not for shopping, not for anything. And certainly not for higher education. I’m not exaggerating.
In the 1990s I had to visit customers in smaller towns and cities in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas. I’m of South Asian origin. I would be traveling with one, two or three white colleagues at all times.
We encountered all manner of hostility from people that my colleagues reported they didn’t experience when they (college educated “city slickers all, mostly from DC-Boston corridor, Chicago or Bay Area.
There may have been an urban-rural divide. But it was 90% just garden variety racism/xenophobia.
Urban-rural divide us what people like to say to avoid facing the reality that so many people in the US are just plain horribly racist.
There are zero people in our town worried about the Russian and Serbian immigrants here. They are freaking out about Asians (even second and third generation) moving their “changing the semi rural character of the town”.
It’s just a bullshit fig leaf.
I’ve been to Goldendale with my kids. Camped there and then down into Oregon for the total solar eclipse.
I was born in Rapid City because there were no other hospitals within a 2 hour drive of where we lived in Moorcroft Wyoming (made a cameo in Close Encounters). The lived in northern Idaho timber country, Northern California rice country. All places that were insular and you were probably an outsider.
Ya know what? It depends. You’d have the biggest redneck Okie transplant that would be fiercely outspoken and supportive of a special needs niece, would happily feed hobo’s coming through town, and others that would want their nephew to beat the shit out of you for being an outsider and uppity. Gay or transgendered can be okay if you’re kin and protected, or it can really suck. You break the ice, get off on the right foot, let ‘em know you ain’t a threat nor look down upon them, and they can be just good ol’ god fearing country folk. Get off on the wrong foot, and it’s going to be difficult if not bloody. My experience isn’t that black and white, and you can still find common humanity. That said, I won’t let my trans son go east of the Cascade mountains in Washington State unless it is NYC. YMMV
I just watched the video, and I have a different reaction having grown up in small insular towns. They are afraid of change, and afraid of the boogey man they have been hearing about their whole lives. If you can connect on a personal level, then the good ol country folk part can start to shine through. If you can’t, then you’re some outsider ramming something down their throats they viscerally know they don’t want. It may be more of the latter than the former these days, but It think it’s that simple.
I remember my middle brother, circa mid 1980’s, convinced the LA Crips gang was coming to some fucking bumfuck town outside of Spokane WA that was 99.9% white Christian at the time. This fear of outsiders ain’t something new.
Well, see- there is not sharp divide about guns. Lots of Democrats own guns. Now sure, nearly all of them are in favor of common sense gun laws, but only a few Repubs are members of the NRA. So there is a large middle grey area. That is why Biden got a Bipartisan gun control bill passed.
Abortion is much more of a sharp line, but the GOP has found out that most Republican voters dont want a complete ban.
Right.
Other big divides are aid programs for the poor. That is a clear divide.
I live in a truck stop town. The hatred for the basis of the towns economy- big rigs- is common.
Yeah, but they actually thought they were gonna get shot?
And in Sask, at least sign in french get shot up- a lot. Now, there is a sharp divide.
I did some consulting in Birmingham, and everyone was really nice. Helpful, making suggestions as to the best “Q” etc. And I was clearly a Californian.
Yes good point. What I did not mention about my story is I have long black hair and a ponytail. A lot of people assume I am native.
What is mystifying is why on earth anyone would care.
Take any small, rural town that is distrustful of “outsiders.” What do they think will happen? You (general “you”) stop in the local bar to have a beer and then corrupt the town?
This kind of xenophobia/racism is not ok anywhere and is just stupid.
Would they rather the tourists don’t visit? What do they want more? To be left alone or tourist money? (willing to bet the latter)
Yeah, look at Bolinas CA.
Abortion may no longer be a winner at the ballot box, but if they can drive people who would vote D out of states that are in danger of becoming potential swing states, like Texas, then they get to keep those states in the Senate and the electoral college, when they would otherwise be in danger of losing them.
The latter, because tourists bring not just money, but whining rights.
There are plenty of places across Europe where you might the get the “local shop for local people” treatment. Obviously small and remote villages, but when I moved to a part of London which for all sorts of socio-geographic reasons had been quite a self-contained community but was rapidly gentrifying, there were more than one pub where outsiders were definitely given that feeling.
This has nothing to do with the current political divide in America. It’s just a matter of human nature, and is notbing new.
I experienced it 40 years ago, way before today’s rabid hate between blue states and red existed.
In 1980, I worked in a very very rural area up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I was in a group of students working for the US forest service for the summer.We were given housing by the government. The forest rangers told us to buy groceries in the nearby small town -population 1000, because they were used to serving tourists. The rangers specifically warned us NOT to go to two other nearby towns-each with a population of 200-because in those towns, strangers were not welcome.
We were all 20 year old white males from the midwest.
In there for some national parks and such, on and off. The tourist traps are friendly enough for us.
SD has some of the poorest counties in the country. All on Indian reservations. Roads around them are paved but not in too good a shape.
Best to just avoid Edmonton completely. 
I’d call it conformity. That’s the real thing at work here- it seems to be a “fit into the community or else” kind of thing, and “the community” is the sort of crowdsourced values and norms of everyone involved.
Like you say, Ed Earl may be perpetually single, like that Rock Hudson guy, and everyone may know he’s actually gay, but as long as he doesn’t actually act like those city gay guys, everyone’s more or less willing to tolerate him. Same thing for the football coach who’s one of the “good ones”- he’s tolerated as long as he and his family don’t rock the boat about racial issues, etc…
Strangers are feared because they’re not inculcated in those community values and norms, and that’s disruptive- both in an immediate sense of they don’t know how to behave, and in a longer-term sense of they introduce new ideas that could change those values and norms.
As to why they would fear/distrust/dislike tourists, I don’t really think that’s the case. I think that billboard is much more of a political statement than anything explicitly directed at outsiders. I mean, what cultural contamination is going to come from a gay couple eating in their diner with their liberal values and all? But the townspeople as a whole feel threatened by these liberal values because they run counter in many ways (but not as much as they think) to their values, and they feel like they need to put a billboard up to show their small-town conservative bona-fides. Meanwhile, there’s probably a not insignificant proportion of the town’s population who are rolling their eyes at the absurdity of it.
For 3 years I worked in a smallish (25k) Indiana town, and regularly played music at jams in much smaller towns in the area. The Klan had been active in this area not long prior, and Pence was governor. The folk I played music with and for were extremely pleasant and welcoming - although I was certain to keep relations/discussions as superficial as could be without specifying the nature of my job of my views on just about any political/social issue.
Church membership was expected, and I have never before/since lived in such a lily-white area. I am not certain what my experience would have been if I didn’t have the “correct” skin color. I could imagine they would have been superficially pleasant to my face - especially if I attended church.
Over time, it would have been wearisome to continue living on such a superficial level, but I could have tolerated it if there were no other alternative. Fortunately, I got transferred back to an area that more closely reflected my values - tho my current bluish-purple area tolerates conservative values/speech far more than the rural IN area would tolerate liberal values/speech.
There have been a few responses to my original response to the OP, saying things like:
And now you, bump, are saying “I’d call it conformity”.
I don’t think we’re in disagreement about that, though. Whether you call it homogenity, or tribalism, or conformity, I think we’re all saying pretty much the same thing there.
But the point I was originally trying to make was that the OP is using the video as an example of what’s wrong with America, and I disagreed with that premise.
Yes, America definitely has its own unique problems that are causing a deep divide. Two notable uniquely American problems are: our insane gun culture, and the notion that’s been brainwashed into large swaths of the populace that any form of government assistance is tantamount to Communism. “good, affordable health care, even for the unemployed? Why, that’s damn Communism!”.
But people in a small town saying “we have our own values, and we don’t want outsiders bringing in their own values different from us.” is not a uniquely American thing. You’re going to find those attitudes in any small, rural town anywhere in the world.
How bad it really was for these rural folks’ great-grandparents in the Great Depression. At least in the cities people could find day-labor or comb through garbage, but out in the countryside there was nothing to live on. My mom remembered seeing entire families walking in the middle of nowhere when she’d go on long drives. The only thing that kept rural America from becoming a desert was government relief, public works projects, specialist from the Dept of Agriculture, etc.
“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”
- William Jennings Bryan; dead wrong
Well, my grandparents were dairy farmers in Wisconsin in the Depression. They had no money but because they, like all their neighbors, grew almost all their own food, they did not feel it nearly as much as city people. They grew wheat and corn and potatoes, apples and berries, tapped maples for sugar, milked cows, raised chickens and pigs, and had a huge vegetable garden – that was just standard practice. My grandfather also hunted and fished as well as farmed. My grandmother also made soap, yeast for her bread, sewed her familiy’s clothes … just like she did before and after the Depression.
The idea that there is nothing to live on in the country is bizarre. Where do you think all your food comes from? The store?
The refugees your mom remembers were fleeing the Dust Bowl, which affected vast sections of the US. It was caused by truly stupid farming practices coupled with a major drought. Look it up.