Yeah, there’s a lot of different rural types. I’m mountain rural in Colorado. Way different than farming in Iowa. But, I do get to Denver a couple of times a month and spend the night. In Fact I spent a good part of my life growing up there.
Plenty (too many IMHO) of people come up to the mountains to get away. But even if camping they are not really aware what it’s really like LIVING here.
You don’t get mail delivery?
No trash pick up?
You plow your own snow?
You have to watch for bears?!
Now I think I do understand the basics of city living. I don’t put it down, I just don’t care for it.
Stupid knows no boundaries, in my experience.
This is super true. Based on what some suburban acquaintances of mine have said, you’d think I live in some kind of dystopian Mad-Max style hellscape because I live within the Dallas city limits and not in Preston Hollow where the super-rich live.
Again, though, there are differences between city living and city understanding.
City living is easy. It has to be easy. It is designed to be easy. There are too many damn people living in a city - if city living was complex and difficult and all of those people needed a great deal of assistance transitioning in and staying there, the city would drown under the requests they made for help. Among the issues that cities face are keeping things that logistically easy for its residents. A number of those issues are invisible to the people who use them every day - they’re harder to see for people who only see the results when they visit the city.
I grew up in a rural area, and I voted that rural people understand urban life better. But it should plainly noted that the biggest issue with politics isn’t rural versus urban, it’s ignorance versus ignorance.
A rural person is constantly seeing urban life in every TV show and movie and, from that, getting some sense of what city folk are thinking and are concerned about. I think it would be difficult to find a rural person who doesn’t have at least a minimal sense of urban life though, like I said, that’s running up against the question of how much people really understand much of anything outside of their own small corner of the world. Most people don’t, regardless of anything. It’s like reading a book with words you don’t know. Mostly you just skip over those words and they don’t enter your subconscious. You fill in the gaps with something that makes sense to you.
Someone who is a skeptic will dislike those gaps in their understanding of what they see and try to fill them in by finding patterns in what he sees and make inferences about what life is like in the city. Most people won’t.
And while I’m sure that some percentage of movies that are set in a rural setting were written by someone from the countryside, there’s a whole bunch of producers and whatnot from the city who are influencing the end result, to force a PC, urban viewpoint onto the end product. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen any film that seemed to be realistic that was set in the countryside, outside of maybe David Lynch’s Straight Story.
A skeptic isn’t going to fare very well.
But most people aren’t skeptics. They’ll just fill everything in with their own assumptions, based on their small experience of life, and be happy there.
And to the extent that a rural person might gain a little more sense of life in the city, regardless of all attempts at ignorance, ultimately that runs up against the issue of tribalism. At the end of the day, tribalism wins over reason. And that’s true on both sides.
I agree that people in rural areas understand urban areas better than the reverse. Why? More people in this area are from out of state, often having come from cities in Massachusetts, than are born here. After living in them for a third of my life I understand cities just fine, and that’s why I no longer live in one.
I don’t presume to know how it feels to live a rural lifestyle, since I’ve never had that experience.
I am fairly certain I would be bored out of mind, though.
One misconception that I’ve encountered from some rural folks who post on the internet is that urban = trash-laden, gunshot-riddled concrete jungle. You hear from these folks things like, “How can you possibly raise a children in the city?” I’ve never lived in a city that didn’t have its fair share of quiet, clean, tree-lined residential neighborhood with parks and fenced-in backyards. Also, there’s a vast diversity contained by the “city” umbrella. NYC is a city. So is Macon, GA. I can totally understand not being able to adjust to a megacity. But most cities are not “mega”.
The reverse of that is that a large number of people in urban areas relocated there from non-urban areas. A few posters here identified themselves as having that background. I too grew up in a non-urban area and moved to an urban area. My contention is that there is a chance that a lot of urban people have personal experience as non-urban dwellers, whereas the reverse is less likely. Consequently, non-urban dwellers mostly have concepts of urban life that are abstract as presented by the media, whereas many urban dwellers have concrete notions of non-urban life.
I would also submit that what makes an urban dweller “think different” is exposure to vast diversity in all things, which generally leads to tolerance and acceptance. A non-urban dweller just doesn’t have that exposure, and isn’t called upon to develop the tolerance and acceptance. Hence the wedge issues of immigration and “identity politics” that work so well on them as voters. I would further submit that the exposure and tolerance and acceptance that are a regular part of daily life for urban dwellers, as a venn diagram, include exposure to non-urban worlds. The reverse is not as likely.
I don’t think either rural people or urban people, as a group, have a better sense of empathy. That’s what we’re talking about; the ability to appreciate the circumstances that affect people other than yourself. Some individuals, rural or urban, can empathize with how the other half lives and and some individuals, rural and urban, cannot.
This is it, absolutely. I’ve lived in both small towns (pop. < 200) and urban areas (suburbs of L.A., suburbs of D.C.). It’s straightforward that people in rural areas watch the TV, see the movies, listen to the music, and read the websites that come from the big cities, but the reverse is not true. Further, the lifestyle of rural people is heavily influenced by politicians in D.C. and corporations in big cities, but the reverse is not true. There’s a lot of facets of life in rural America that are, in my experience, unknown to most city-dwellers:
[ul]
[li]In rural areas, corporate chains have mostly though not entirely displaced family-owned businesses. Almost anywhere you go, except the very most remote and thinnly populated areas, you can see recognizable chains like Shell and McDonald’s.[/li][li]Farming is still the biggest part of the economy in the big flat stretches of the Midwest, but has declined drastically in other rural areas. In Appalachia almost no one can make a living by farming alone.[/li][li]It’s impossible to make a living off crops unless you have several square miles of good soil. East coast farms do a lot of chickens, because that’s often the only way to profit. A few may survive by catering to niche markets, such as organic food or apple orchards. But even in the Midwest, more and more farmers can’t earn enough doing full time and are working other jobs to make ends meet.[/li][li]Employment in farming areas is seasonal. They need a lot of people for spring planting, few in mid-summer, the most at fall harvest, and none in the winter, in the midwest. Hence the migrant laborers who move around throughout the year, following where the demand for labor is.[/li][li]In the Midwest, they keep growing more and more corn and soybeans and less of almost everything else. This is because of government policy that makes those crops more profitable.[/li][li]In small towns, social life is very much still organized around church, social service orgs. such as the Lions Club or VFW, and high school athletics. Every town with pop. < 1000, in my experience, will have one and only one bar.[/li][/ul]
I bet 10 000 years ago, there was someone wondering: “Do nomadic hunter-gatherers understand sedentary agriculturalists better than the other way around?”
It’s irrelevant. The US urbanization rate is above 80%. Cities are to human civilization what our brain is to our whole body. The best way to help rural people is to give them government handouts to help them integrate cities until the rural population is vestigial.
I grew on an East Tennessee farm, lived in Brooklyn for 5 years, and have lived inside the DC Beltway for the last 20 years. I think it’s a draw. However, I think that most folks come to understand people they come into regular contact with. A hayseed has a same sex couple move in down the road, they will eventually see them as neighbors in many cases.
A cousin of mine told me an interesting story. He’s a truck driver from rural NC. He had just dropped off produce at the Brookly n Terminal Market, and decided he’d like to see Coney Island. Unfortnunately, he turned into a street that made it almost impossible to move either forward or backward. His first reaction was “shit, I’m stuck”. Not so. It seemed like everyone on the block came out to help him get back on to a larger thoroughfare. His stereotype of Brooklynites not the dust.
Wait … you think that how much water a farm needs and how to plant corn is more complex than dealing with crime, housing, schooling, zoning, and all the formidable issues of urban planning and running a big city? I think not!
On the matter of country folk finding it easy to visit or live in a big city, of course it’s easy! A city is a man-made, highly structured environment designed and built with the express purpose of making it easy for people to live in and do things. Rural living is just raw nature that takes experience and acclimatization to deal with.
I don’t really know the answer to your question or if it even has an answer, but my own bias shaped by my own personal experience is that you’ll get a better understanding from urban residents because of a generally higher average level of knowledge and education; to me “urban” implies universities, big businesses and corporate headquarters, and centers of government. Not to mention that at least some of these people do work that informs rural policies or whose businesses are involved with them, whereas I don’t think the reverse is true to any extent.
I’m going to vote rural understands more simply because on this thread, everyone thinks rural folk view cities as crime-ridden hellscapes. In the 80s, they might be right, but nowadays, the stereotypes of cities are too much traffic, waiting in lines and insane housing costs. Old people might think about crime, but they also think that about rural areas. I know of very, very few people that haven’t spent significant amounts of time in cities and noone under the age of 60 is particularly worried about crime except maybe in north Baltimore.
“Everyone”? Are you sure? Look just above. Is that what I said?
I think rural people tend to dislike urban living simply because it’s not rural, simple as that. Some may or may not believe that cities are “crime-ridden hellscapes”, but mostly I think their problem with cities is that it doesn’t offer the country living that they love, and what it does offer in abundance has never been an important part of their lives. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with understanding the issues.
My impression of rural life:
Driving 30 miles to Walmart, and having crappy Internet service.
I’m sure there must be upsides.
They certainly can with help from their parents. A similar thing is fairly common in
D.C. with low paid congressional staffers and interns who live in the city. It seems to be a thing people don’t talk about very openly - just how much parental financial support and inheritance many urbanites receive.
Rurals don’t even appear to understand rural issues very well, much less urban ones. Most of them appear to be wrapped up in the right wing media bubble and have no real idea of what is actually happening around them. Much less anywhere else.
So I think that urbans understand rurals better, mostly by default.
Neither.