One thing this community has a hard time wrapping its collective head around is the urban vs. rural divide. Urban elitism is real and we need to figure out how to get around it. Now, when I say this, I am NOT region bashing. It's a real problem that we have.
I'll give you an example. My mom sent me an e-mail the other day complaining about the elitism in the New York Times. Don't get me wrong, my mom is a die hard true blue liberal, but this got to her:
"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland."
"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.
His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say."
"They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."
Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.
"People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities," he said.
Now, I realize that some of this is just New York snobbiness, but this sort of talk really gets under the skin of people who live in rural areas.
Let me give you another example. I grew up in Humboldt County, California (far north coast). It's a very liberal area. If you look at the county by county, blue vs. red maps, it's one of the few rural blue counties. Arcata, the town where I went to school is host to Humboldt State University, one of the best environmental engineering schools in the world. Suffice it to say, Humboldt County is a friend of the environment.
So, you would expect Humboldt to be very supportive of protecting the old growth redwood forests that grow in the area and the spotted owl that makes its home there. For the most part, we were, but we were not as supportive, however of the zillions of environmental activists who swarmed all over the town to stop the logging companies from logging those forests.
They did two things wrong. First off they got violent. They started doing things like spiking trees, which if you're unfamiliar with the practice, drives a large metal spike into a tree so that when a logger goes to cut it, it breaks the saw spraying broken saw shrapnel everywhere. Second, they didn't bother to learn anything about the area, they basically just showed up to raise hell. One of my friend's father was responsible for walking through the forest and tagging trees that had spotted owls in them so they wouldn't get logged, but one day he goes to work and finds someone chained the the gate to his office making it impossible for him to do his job.
My point in all this rambling is that if we are going to start making inroads into these rural areas, we had better cut this sort of stuff out. We all had a lot of fun making jokes about John Edwards being the son of a mill worker, but it spoke volumes to me. He knows what it's like to grow up in a town with only one source of income and jobs. He also knows what would happen to that town if that mill were to close down.