Here, from the First Things site, is a lovely, realistic and at times melancholy reflection by a Lutheran pastor on what life in a small town is like -- versus the way small town and rural people were talked about during this election season. Excerpt:
Land and family inevitably bring one in contact with the past. The past lives here in ways that are inconceivable elsewhere. To go to the grocery store is to potentially encounter your entire past life and even ancestry: your grandmother, your first grade teacher, your girlfriend from high school, your cousin, your boss from years ago. When one lives in the place where one was raised and when that place is small and self contained, the past is its own character in the drama of life. Memories are resurrected often and in many ways. The memories are also associated with place: a childhood accident there, your grandfather's farm there, a marriage proposal there. All of it is just around the bend. People in small towns do not escape the past by moving to some other place. They confront it daily. They inhabit it.They not only encounter a generic past but also the specific dead. One cannot live long in a place like Catawba and drive the same old streets and not mark the departed. That Setzer boy wrecked his motorcycle on that spot of the road and died there. Mrs. Sigmon moved in with her daughter in that house before she died. Old Mr. Smith owned that grocery. My mother is buried there just down from my place. For those who have grown up here, the streets are crowded with ghosts, with reminders of those who are gone. They stare out at you from almost every house or vacant lot. Millions of Americans go to great lengths to escape the thought or remembrance of death. They surround themselves with young people like themselves, never go near a hospital or a funeral home. They scatter their remains and, if there are graveyards holding their dead, they move far away and rarely visit. But for the small town person, death is like the air you breathe. It surrounds you. You do not need to visit a cemetery to remember the dead; they go with you down every familiar street.
It is this sort of connectedness to place and people and the past that that makes small towns different. It is not an easy set of slogans that can be trumpeted by a political party or captured in a sound bite. It is the shape of the small town itself which has embedded itself in its people. That shape takes the form of a web that connects that person to a multitude of places and people and past experience. That web becomes the stuff of that person; it is his identity.
Please, please, please, read the whole thing.
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Happy Thanksgiving to Rod, Julie, Nora, Lucas and Mathew and hound & chickens:
As part of my life experience, I have lived in more than one small town. And the value of that experience was transformational, whether it was rural Alabama or north costal California. Yes, in trade for everyone ‘knowing when you’re sick and caring when you die’, as LBJ said of his hometown, everyone was aware of your private business. To the point you had no privacy except in the larger sense of ‘don’t ask / don’t tell’. It was a world where secrets were gossiped but still pretended to be ‘secrets’. But I loved the sense of intimate caring and community support. I remain in touch with those people to this day.
That said, many people (and I suspect this describes Rod) live in cities like Dallas where their contact with the world outside their homes, unless work related, is family based and insular. Reading about your life in East Dallas’ Lakewood proximity, I do not see anything about Homeowner’s Associations, PTAs (since you home school) and other aspects of ‘community’ that is so often credited to small town living vs. urban. You do not go to church in your part of town, so that disconnect is also relevant.
There is no doubt that the city is many times massed persons living private lives, but is more working class neighborhoods like the one I have lived in for 25 years, there is a far greater connectivity. On election night, for instance, I walked down two doors to my neighbors, one of many African-American who own homes on my street, and joined them in their open garage as they watched on lawn chairs the returns from first Pennsylvania and later Ohio. I took a bottle of champagne, and we toasted to their 6 adopted children (two with special needs, all black) as they watched a family that looked something like they did become the First Family of our land.
I could easily over romance it. But we do know each other, we do share food and watch each other’s homes when we travel, we do care about those fighting abroad who were once our neighbors, we do know each other’s children and even each other’s animals. It is a very stable street of black, brown and white people, old and young, all sexual orientations and work profiles. It’s America far more than most upwardly mobile areas where ‘urban pioneers’ buy their first homes en route to the upward American affluent dream.
Small town America… and certainly farming communities…are critical American DNA that, no less than regional accents, is quickly becoming lost in time. But it also represents resistance to change that can be counter-intuitive, even as it holds the flame of tradition. We see the best of America’s small town ‘values’ when we watch a veteran’s parade. We see the lowest when it all becomes about ‘us vs. them’ in an ongoing mock of education. For every crack the ‘MSM’ supposedly made this year about rural ‘values’ there was ample evidence that those who chose to not become self-taught beyond that of their parents, blamed others too quickly for their having little traction for the future opportunities/challenges.
I wrote this as I prepare to drive to small town East Texas where my sister and her husband have lived for two decades; Canton. Where they still call the French Fries ‘Freedom Fries’ at Rod’s fave, the Dairy Palace’.
Re: Yes, in trade for everyone ‘knowing when you’re sick and caring when you die’, as LBJ said of his hometown, everyone was aware of your private business.
This can happen in other situations too. In Akron Ohio I had a very large "friend" group, quotes around "friends" because most of these people were mere acquaintances, some of whom I didn't particularly care for. One member of the clique was extraordinaily gossipy. I once made the mistake of telling him about a problem I was having with a roommate. Less than an hour later the roommate called me (from work) to take me to task for it!
Re: You do not go to church in your part of town, so that disconnect is also relevant.
For those of us who are Orthodox, unlike Baptists and Catholics, we cannot find a church of our faith on every street corner and we are often stuck with a bit of a drive. (Happily mine is just under three miles and has never been more than ten)
When I was 12 we moved to Olivet, Michigan, a town of 2000 people. 20 years later, my parents are still the "new kids." It was hard to jump into that cold river, and after high school I couldn't wait to get out. (I was the artsy kid.) So, I did. Now I live in the Washington Metro area, nice and annonymous. I miss so many things about that small town. I'm getting ready to move again, to a small town in rural Pennsylvania. Not by our choice really. My husband's job is sending us there. Moving is a better alternative to unemployment. I'm about ready to jump in that cold river all over again. I'm a little nervous about that!
Re: telecommuting... I am all in favor of this, yet what about all the extroverts in the world? I work as an artist, which is a very lonely job. I nearly went insane from being a lone all the time, so I got a job at a local college to be around other people. Maybe we could set up telecommuniting offices in each neighborhood that people could walk to and not have to drive, but could still be around other people. Or people could stay home if they wanted to. I couldn't stand being home with the computer all day long. P.U. Stinky, no thanks.
I'd like to say that the farther east you go in this country, the most "closed" the communties are culturally. That sense of being "new" and taking a long time to get past it.
Not a hard and fast rule, as there's plenty of exceptions, but it's a very obvious trend. Out here, in a coastal state, I've noticed that there is a very obvious resistance to welcoming strangers... You need to prove that you're not there as one of those "activists" coming to town to wreak havoc in people's lives. There wasn't really much or any of that before, say, 20 years ago. You could join a town and be "part of it" in no time if you were open and friendly.
Today, much of the rural west has been burned by Easterners and Californians and even just big city people moving in and then finding out they're part of the political movement that destroyed all the jobs and businesses and still actively working to kill the rest.
It was many years ago when Enterprise, OR, lost the last mill, and with it died nearly all the logging industry. The resentment toward the "artsy fartsy" types who came and supported that devastation to so many people's lives is still palpable.
Worse, is that those who came in as activists arrogantly told those who were displaced and financially ruined that they were... evil and deserved what happened to them. That story is repeated across scores of towns across the rural part of the state. Now the same type of people are running DC and claiming they're the answer. Is it any wonder that there's no "unity"? Memories are much longer in rural America.
I agree with what the Lutheran pastor said, but it's not the whole story.
Recently my wife and I watched "Stand By Me". River Phoenix played a small town boy whose family had been negatively pegged by the rest of the town. His own primary teacher thought he was scum.
I tried living in a small town in Southern Colorado. Folks there were pretty unforgiving and loved to gossip. It seemed like when somebody did something goofy in the town, the rest of the population wouldn't really let them live it down.
I also did my undergraduate degree in Nebraska. When I went to fraternity brothers' towns I'd get stared down in places like bars. Didn't really seem like folks had that "small town hospitality" with outsiders.
If people love their small towns, that's fine with me. And I had a lot of positive small town experiences.
But, I don't think small towns are the only places where you'll find the salt of the earth. In fact some folk's isolation downright becomes, for them, a license for prejudice and stupidity.
Cities aren't perfect by any means, and you'll certainly find your share of dumb people, snobs, idiots, etc. I have to say that I'm not sure it's a virtue that small town people meld themselves to these kind in their communities. Maybe they just lack the means to move away.
There's a lot to be said for the ability to be anonymous in the suburbs or city.
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