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Gee, the last time I heard that broom story, it was a mop in a city hardware store. If you're going to repeat "urban" legends, at least get the details right. And gas hasn't been under 20 cents/gallon since 1941. Were you even old enough to drive then? You'd be 93 now. Or were you just parroting some other legend?
Gee, the last time I heard that broom story, it was a mop in a city hardware store. If you're going to repeat "urban" legends, at least get the details right. And gas hasn't been under 20 cents/gallon since 1941. Were you even old enough to drive then? You'd be 93 now. Or were you just parroting some other legend?
Gee, the last time I heard that broom story, it was a mop in a city hardware store. If you're going to repeat "urban" legends, at least get the details right. And gas hasn't been under 20 cents/gallon since 1941. Were you even old enough to drive then? You'd be 93 now. Or were you just parroting some other legend?
And gas hasn't been under 20 cents/gallon since 1941. Were you even old enough to drive then? You'd be 93 now. Or were you just parroting some other legend?
another not-true claim. I started driving late 60s-early 70s. Gas was 19 cents a gallon. If my tank was almost empty, it cost $3.25 to fill it.
and another small town resident who has gone to college, lived in cities and encountered all kinds of people of various races, religions, educational levels. No problem with any of them.
What I do resent is narrow-minded city people telling me my way of life doesn't measure up to the standard they have set.
So if people need to leave to have any measurable success as you say, then why are you still there after 10 years?
Quote:
Originally Posted by writerwife
Yeah.. I figure it's just a provocative bait post.
At the risk of being the naive one here, I'll respond - not in direct attempt to defend the OP, but from personal experience.
About a generation ago, the "Heartland" was still humming with manufacturing activity, whereas along the coasts, cities were moving towards the post-industrial service-economy. Corporate headquarters and bureaucratic bastions were in the Manhattans of the world, but the real engineering, the machine-shop floor and the reading of blueprints and cobbling-together of prototypes, was in the smaller cities, or even in the small towns beyond the exurbs of city metro-areas. Some of this was on account of cheap land, or ease of securing production-sites, or perhaps the vestiges of the pre-war American economic landscape.
What this meant for a person raised and educated on the urbanized coasts, who wanted to go into engineering and physical science, was that the best career-opportunities were often not in the glamour-cities, the downtowns or the leafy suburbs, but in the cornfields. Again, this was long before the Internet, the dominance of investment-banking and the consolidation of modern business-culture in gleaming office-parks. But it was already in a time when the Midwest was declining, and the remunerative blue-collar jobs were starting to fade.
So, relocation: big-city boy to small town. Initially this was going to be a trial-run, an experiment, a time to focus on career-advancement, before returning and resuming one's former life. But years turned into decades. The surrounding economy persistently declined, while one's own job just as persistently remained. Eventually hair turned gray, and enthusiasm flagged. The house that one bought decades ago, hasn't budged in value (and may have actually declined), while on the coasts, similar houses quadrupled. Now, one feels stuck, left behind by an urban world that's moved on, left mired in a rural world that's only retreated into greater insularity and moribund decay. The move that would have been straightforward 20 or 30 years ago, now is freighted with complications.
One is therefore reduced to grousing and grumbling; or, more charitably, to silently abiding the reality that one faces.
With the internet and all the readily available educational resources that are now available to anyone who seeks them, one simply has to open their eyes and ears to worldly evil if that's what they think will be useful to them. Most of the time it's the experience with evil people a rural person may lack over an urban dweller who encounters many more folks in an average day. I can only say that, having lived and worked in several major cities before retiring to a rural area, there are so many bad things while living in urban environments that I now sincerely regret having ever seen or experienced.
I now live in what most people, even in small towns, call the "toolies" and I usually don't comment here in the Rural Living threads since I've come to expect many more angry urban dwellers to be commenting in any thread of a forum called City-Data. I see that still remains true.
Well, I haven't lived in a small town or on a farm, but have a number of relatives who do, and I have not found rural people to be lacking in a general knowledge of life. If anything they are more grounded in reality than the city-dwellers who can hardly see beyond whatever's the latest thing that's "trending" on their cell phones.
Don't forget, either, that every square inch of the USA has TV and internet, so the days of the isolated country person who has never seen anything of city life are decades behind us.
Don't forget, either, that one of the common life paths of rural youth is to enlist in the Armed Forces - and that will give you an exposure to a wide variety of people like nothing else will. When they get out of the military, and come back home, they bring those experiences with them.
Really, the naive rube is a stereotype that was absolete after World War 1 and has mostly been perpetuated since then to serve the interests of those who would set themselves up as superior.
Well, I haven't lived in a small town or on a farm, but have a number of relatives who do, and I have not found rural people to be lacking in a general knowledge of life. If anything they are more grounded in reality than the city-dwellers who can hardly see beyond whatever's the latest thing that's "trending" on their cell phones.
Don't forget, either, that every square inch of the USA has TV and internet, so the days of the isolated country person who has never seen anything of city life are decades behind us.
Don't forget, either, that one of the common life paths of rural youth is to enlist in the Armed Forces - and that will give you an exposure to a wide variety of people like nothing else will. When they get out of the military, and come back home, they bring those experiences with them.
Really, the naive rube is a stereotype that was absolete after World War 1 and has mostly been perpetuated since then to serve the interests of those who would set themselves up as superior.
Sorry, but not "every square inch of the USA has ...internet". Our county government is currently trying to partner with a private enterprise to provide internet services to people who don't have it in our rural county. Many of these residents use the local private library to gain internet access, otherwise they wouldn't have access at all. It seems ridiculous for a county with one of the largest and oldest Naval R&D bases in the country not to have this access available to all citizens, but it's also the reality for many.
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