{"id":89249,"date":"2020-10-14T22:07:03","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T19:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-stark-unbridgeable-divide-between-rural-and-urban-america\/"},"modified":"2020-10-14T22:07:03","modified_gmt":"2020-10-14T19:07:03","slug":"the-stark-unbridgeable-divide-between-rural-and-urban-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-stark-unbridgeable-divide-between-rural-and-urban-america\/","title":{"rendered":"#The stark, unbridgeable divide between rural and urban America"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The stark, unbridgeable divide between rural and urban America<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n
\"Small-town<\/p>\n

Small-town America is the real America to many, with cities seen as corrupt and violent (Adnan R. Khan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When my wife and I first drove into Bremen, Ohio, it struck us as exactly the kind of place where we would find an answer to the question we\u2019d been asking for weeks: what is Donald Trump\u2019s app<\/a>eal to rural Americans?<\/p>\n

We\u2019d assumed it was economic. The American heartland was dying, and Trump was promising to revive it. Of course the people living there would love him, even if Trump\u2019s policies since becoming president in 2017 hadn\u2019t done much to improve their lives.<\/p>\n

But in our journey through small-town Pennsylvania and Ohio, we hadn\u2019t seen much devastation. Quite the opposite: we\u2019d passed through idyllic town after idyllic town. Local economies seemed to be doing well, and had been since well before Trump.<\/p>\n

Bremen was different. The eerie quiet of its streets lent the village an air of abandonment. The local bar was shuttered; so was the local caf\u00e9. The rail yard was littered with disused and rusted machinery.<\/p>\n

There was a gun shop, the innocuously named Rushcreek Trading Post LLC\u2014which, unlike many of the other local businesses, was open: the only establishment still standing on a street clearly buckling under the weight of the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n

I was admittedly nervous walking in. The idea of a brown man bouncing around places like Bremen asking people why in the world they would vote for a man like Donald Trump had already struck me as crazy. To then tempt fate and wander into a Temple of Second Amendment fanaticism felt, well, downright suicidal.<\/p>\n

Inside was the owner, Rick Moyer, who looks a bit like a Hell\u2019s Angel enforcer. Bremen, he said, was doing fine economically because of its proximity to Lancaster and Columbus, where many residents commute for work, as well as to local companies that employ skilled labour. All the chaos and the devastation was playing out in the cities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s where all the problems are,\u201d Moyer said. \u201cOut here we\u2019ve been saying that for years, and now we finally have a president who\u2019s doing something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others in Bremen, a deeply religious place, spoke in Biblical terms about the corruption of American cities. Their impressions of urban life echoed what they thought of America\u2019s political elite: corrupt, sinful, money-obsessed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t ever want to live in the city,\u201d Tina Groff, a 51-year-old dog groomer, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s never gonna happen. I don\u2019t want to hear gunshots. The Bible says to stay out of the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Moyer, she has fully absorbed the Trump-propagated and Fox News<\/a>-amplified myth that the Black Lives Matter protesters are actually Marxists in disguise, bent on demolishing America. \u201cI feel sorry for people who live in the cities,\u201d Groff said, \u201cbecause of everything that goes on there.\u201d<\/p>\n

For rural folk like her, the city is where social<\/a>ism and feminism and all manner of ideological insanity has run amok, where this dark, ominous force called \u201cAntifa\u201d threatens to undo centuries of hard-earned American greatness. The countryside is the real America, where hard-working, God-fearing people make an honest living and live in peace together.<\/p>\n

For city folk like me, it\u2019s rural America that\u2019s the scary place. It\u2019s where Trumpism blooms in all its cruel glory, where yokels dream of walls to keep brown people like me out and the term \u201cGod\u2019s country\u201d has an ominous, end-of-times ring to it. The city is a safe haven, the place where people are open to new ideas and new ways of living, where I feel safe and secure, where I can talk to people and they can talk to me; we understand one another.<\/p>\n

Both views weave together fact and fiction. I was clearly mistaken in my fear of Moyer and his gun shop. Throughout rural Ohio and Pennsylvania, I met people who were kind and articulate. But what was consistent about their world views was how thoroughly they misunderstood the cities.<\/p>\n

In Moyer\u2019s gun shop, a customer who had been listening to our conversation, a small business owner, complained about the shortage of skilled labour in Bremen.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo young person wants to work for less than 20 bucks an hour,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

It struck me as odd that he was so unaware of how little a $20-an-hour wage is, especially in coastal cities. It reminded me of a caf\u00e9 owner in Lehman Township in Pennsylvania, who also complained that young people didn\u2019t know what a hard day\u2019s work was anymore. For her, a hard day\u2019s work meant waiting tables for 12 hours. But work in the 21st century has changed dramatically, and will continue to change for the foreseeable future. \u201cHard\u201d today looks very different from what it looked like in the last century.<\/p>\n

The disconnect between the rural and urban runs deep in America. Social justice has made some important strides in the cities. Issues like gender identity, sexual orientation and systemic racism are much better understood than they were even 20 years ago. But I wonder if the pace of change has been too much for rural America to handle.<\/p>\n

Moyer can\u2019t understand the anger of Black Americans toward the police; he has no experience that can help him grasp the Black urban experience. From his perspective, the only kind of racism that exists is the overt variety. And he says that simply doesn\u2019t exist in Bremen.<\/p>\n

And here is perhaps the unbridgeable divide: how do you give rural Americans the kind of urban experience that will convince them that the cities are not the chaos and anarchy Trump is making them out to be? How do you convince them that Trump is manipulating their fears for his own personal gain? How do you convince a person like Moyer that crime rates are down in the cities when he doesn\u2019t trust statistics or experts? How do you explain to the small business owner that demanding affordable health care, education and living wages is not a call for socialism but a plea for survival? And most importantly, how do you get rural America to engage with its urban counterpart when you have a president in the White House intent on stoking divisions and perpetuating misperceptions?<\/p>\n

But there is also the other side. How do you convince urban elites that rural Americans are not the gun-toting halfwits of the Hollywood imagination? How do you convince social justice warriors to engage with rural fears and suspicions rather than dismiss them? From the rural perspective, something is being lost in America, and it may be rural life itself.<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the November 2020 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cThe unbridgeable divide.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\n

For forums sites go to Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

If you want to read more News articles, you can visit our General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#The stark, unbridgeable divide between rural and urban America” Small-town America is the real America to many, with cities seen as corrupt and violent (Adnan R. Khan) When my wife and I first drove into Bremen, Ohio, it struck us as exactly the kind of place where we would find an answer to the question…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":89250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/US-ELECTION-KHAN-SEPT30-766x431.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4941,67806,75795,75796],"class_list":["post-89249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-donald-trump","tag-editors-picks","tag-u-s-politics","tag-urban-rural-divide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}