I cannot stand Sarah Palin, and I freely admit it. Everything about her rubs me the wrong way, from her hobby of shooting wolves from airplanes to her cavalier dismissal of the rights of rape victims by spouting bumper sticker slogans. That she has the unmitigated gall to consider herself a feminist makes me want to throw up. But nothing, nothing has made me as angry as her notion that those who live in small towns are somehow better, nicer, kinder, more decent than the rest of us. Considering the fact that Caribou Barbie has never lived anywhere that isn’t a small town (Anchorage barely qualifies as a city, and she still spent half her time back in the Wasilla), she really doesn’t have the expertise to have an informed opinion.
I do. I have moved 30+ times in my life. I’ve lived in cities and suburbs and small towns on two continents, and visited cities on two others. I have news for La Palin. The size of the place has not a damned thing to do with the character of its people.
I went to college in D.C., taught in schools in Baltimore, worked in Manhattan while living in Brooklyn, and was a librarian in Jacksonville, FL. I have lived in Maine, in towns so tiny as to barely qualify as one and on military bases and in the rural and suburban South (so far, that’s my least favorite area and I won’t mind leaving it when we finally move out). I was raised in the suburbs for most of my life, in Conn. and Florida. Some of those suburbs were so far away from civilization as to be damned close to rural. The Kendall-Perrine area of South FL where I lived for three years had a small grocery store, a post office and a toy store; there was a bookmobile rather than a library. Cheshire, Conn. had a great library, but the nearest grocery store was in the next town. There were a couple of subdivisions, a town green with a handful of tiny businesses, the local juvenile reformatory, a couple of doctors’ offices, and a law firm. The rest of the area was small farms.
What Palin doesn’t grasp is that cities aren’t monolithic entities. Just the opposite. They are made up of neighborhoods, which are really small towns. You may technically be a New Yorker whether you live in Queens or Manhattan, but in reality, you consider yourself a part of your neighborhood, whether it’s the upper East Side or Bensonhurst or SoHo. People in your neighborhood know you. They look out for you. One librarian in a not-so-hot neighborhood learned that the local Black Muslim group made sure she got to her car safely and carried any equipment she needed. The pizza joint down the street would give you credit for a pizza on Wed. night when Thursday was payday, and if you ran out of cat the day before payday, the Ma and Pa store would make sure the kitties didn’t go hungry that night. We usually got take-out from the local Chinese restaurant around once a week. One week, we missed and they stopped my husband on his way back from the subway to see if we were okay! When my husband died, I found cards slipped under my door from people in my small apt. building—people I’d never exchanged more than a few words with. When I tripped in Manhattan, three total strangers stopped to make sure I was all right—and one hailed a cab for me so I could catch the train to Baltimore to visit my parents. I saw a hell of a lot more kindness and decency there than I did on the bases I’ve lived on, or in several suburbs, where people tend to ignore you.
Something that Palin probably disapproves of is the fact that cities are a good place for minorities—whether you’re gay, an sf fan, an opera lover, a medievalist, or a Wiccan, there are always a lot of people with similar interests. You can find bookstores devoted to your hobby or religion or political bent and through those, find groups to join. No matter how oddball you seemed to your high school classmates, there will be a peer group for you to be part of. In small towns and the burbs, all too often you are a minority of one whose neighbors regard you with a jaundiced stare. In a city you can blend in. No matter how strange you are, there will always be someone dressed like an avocado to announce the opening of a new salad bar or the Naked Cowboy to draw eyes away from you. I’ve ridden the subway in full Renaissance Italian garb, without garnering a second look. In the suburbs, my neighbors were boggled and confused just watching me walk to the car in garb (and they seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering why I wasn’t dating someone or married).
Kindness and decency exist everywhere. Tolerance, however, does not. I currently live in a small rural Southern town—an improvement over the old Gwinnett County burb where we used to live—in a small subdivision. In the burb, none of the neighbors spoke to each other. Here, I know most of the closest people by name. We’ve shared a bottle of wine with a couple of them, and the guy across the street, proud father of a new baby girl, came over to see if my Dad had come home from the hospital.
But when I leave the neighborhood, I am still careful not to go really Goth outside the house. And I tuck my pentacle inside my Tee because I remember a rather unpleasant incident in Buford, GA, where the manager of the hobby Lobby closed down a check-out lane to assign someone to follow me around the store, apparently under the impression that Wiccans are evil baby-killing Satanists who will rob you blind (I knew what was going on, and I took my sweet time, paging through pattern books, examining embroidery kits, oohing over Christmas decorations and aaahing over some pretty chatchkas---before I left after saying loudly, "Don’t worry, this witch won’t be back. I don’t spend my money in stores that practice religious discrimination"). I think that in small towns, all too often, the kindness and goodness are reserved for the people who are clones of everyone else—no one different need apply, which may explain why so many people graduate from high school or college and escape to a big city where they don’t have to feel like the town pariah.
Sure, there are closed-minded people in cities, too. Gay bashing happens in San Francisco as well in hick towns. There are fundamentalist idiots who give Wiccans a hard time in NY as well as in Buford. I tended not to discuss my religious beliefs with co-workers in Jacksonville for precisely that reason. When asked (and I was, several times) what church I went to, I told them I had been raised Catholic and left it at that. I did the same with my co-workers in NYC. The difference is, you can get away from them and ignore them. It’s hard to do that in a small town, where everybody tends to know everybody else’s business (true of the burbs, too).
What I think Sarah Palin really meant by her rather nasty comments about the real America is that she isn’t comfortable with people who aren’t just like her. That she demonizes those who aren’t fundamentalist Christians, who aren’t white, who aren’t conservatives, who aren’t anti-choice and who dare to think that gays and women and African-Americans should have precisely the same rights as rich white old men. She has a very narrow comfort zone, and so does the GOP. If for that reason alone, she is unfit to be VP because she could easily end up as President should McCain keel over. Because the President of the Untied States is the EVERYBODY’S President—the president of scary brown people, of gays and bisexuals, of Asians and Hispanics and hyphenated Americans like me, of liberals and conservatives and moderates, of nuclear families and broken ones, of Christians and Jews and, yes, Muslims and Wiccans and atheists. Annd likely never will be. Go home to Wasilla, Sarah, where everyone is just like you--and leave the rest of us in peace.