No rural monopoly on decency
Since the founding of this nation, the rural lifestyle has been promoted as a virtuous ideal, with rural folk deemed more honest, more hardworking, more God-fearing, both self-reliant and neighborly, independent but also generous. Those myths loom large in our politics even now, as Republican politicians insist that the rural heartland embodies “real America” and journalists flay themselves for their supposed failure to portray the beliefs and practices of those voters without condescension.
As a native of a very small town in southern Alabama, I know something of the views and values of that part of America. And I know that small towns throughout “flyover country” — from the Deep South to the Kansas plains to the snowy Dakotas — are populated, just as big cities are, by flawed human beings, no more honest or hardworking or independent or God-fearing (though perhaps more churchgoing) or generous than residents of San Francisco or New York City or Chicago.
In fact, the political sorting of populations that has accelerated through the early 21st century — with better-educated workers clustering in cities and suburbs — has left small towns and villages throughout the country more vulnerable to a dangerous narrow-mindedness. Though COVID -19 is now sweeping the entire country, many rural residents have abandoned science, disputed medical experts and joined the conspiracy hucksters who insist the pandemic is a hoax.
Consider the experiences of Dr. Kristina Darnauer, who quit her job in July as county medical director in tiny Sterling, Kan. She told National Public Radio that despite the myth of a small-town ethos that encourages generosity and compassion toward others, she was confronted with a hostility toward public health regulations, especially wearing masks, that would protect neighbors and friends.
“The values of hard work, the value of community, taking care of your neighbor, that’s what small towns shout from the rooftops, this is what we’re good at. We are salt-of-the-earth people who care about each other. And here I am saying, then wear a mask because that protects your precious neighbor.
“We say this is what we value. And then when we actually had the chance to walk it out, we did it really poorly,” she told reporter Frank Morris.
Darnauer was not the only rural medical expert to encounter such resistance or the only one to quit in despair. In Kansas alone, more than a quarter of the public health administrators got fired, retired or resigned over the past several months, some after receiving death threats, according to NPR.
In October, Michelle Walker, administrator of the Carter County Health Center in the Ozarks area of rural Missouri, told CNN, “I feel like people really hate me right now.”
Rural America has long engaged in a conservative politics that has joined it almost exclusively to the Republican Party, which has cynically marketed itself as protector of the values celebrated in small towns. But just a few decades ago, rural Americans still listened to their local doctors. That was before so many of them embraced President Donald J.
Trump and the lies that he spews. Trump and his allies made minimizing the pandemic a tenet of his presidency. That has had heartbreaking consequences.
Trumpism, happily, has not entirely ended neighborliness in small towns.
My mother, a nonagenarian who still lives in her home in Monroeville, Ala., benefits from the small-town friendliness that inspires people to wave even to strangers they pass on the street. And I am grateful for the friends and neighbors and church members who volunteer to act as my mom’s driver, who bring her fresh fruits and vegetables, who drop off homemade treats during the holiday season.
But rural America holds no monopoly on neighborliness or human decency. Having spent decades in Atlanta, I can testify to the generosity and kindness there, sometimes from unexpected quarters. When my car wouldn’t crank one night as I tried to leave the employee parking garage, a stranger whose politics were certainly different from mine not only jumpstarted my engine, but also followed me home to make sure I got there without incident. I was grateful.
If there are lessons to be learned from the awfulness of the year 2020, one is surely this: No matter what part of the country we live in, we’d be better off if we could all be a little less selfish.