I've had it with Sarah Palin and her repeated insistence that only small town Americans are hard-working real Americans. Why? Because her version of small town is about geography and some fantasy in her head, when the real small towns are about people. In fact, I've finally concluded that Sarah doesn't fully know what a "small town" is. She leaves "heart" out of it and uses a map to define America and patriotism by isolation and her preferred version of ignorance. Great balls of fire!
Given a list of the addresses of the first responders on 9/11, Palin would conclude they weren't small town people (they lived in New York City, by G-d) and thus they aren't real, hard-working Americans. Wrong on both counts.
Those of you who live in "cities" and "suburbs" know what I mean. Most Americans are small town Americans. Come with me past the fold as I introduce Sarah to the lifestyle of those of us who live in the "small towns" of the lower 48.
You don't have to live in Wasilla, Alaska, or Happy's Inn, Montana, to live in a small town. Most Americans live in a small town. Now, we may not be separated by the miles that Sarah counts in Alaska, but we still live in small towns.
Clearly Sarah Palin knows nothing about us. If Wasilla is her touchstone for small-town America, then it's high time she visited Chinatown or Little Italy in any one of our major cities. Hell, she should come visit my little subdivision, with 640 houses. We have our own taxing district, run by our neighbors, and our own government association. We might not be incorporated on any map, but we are indeed a small town with all that implies. Our 640 houses are a group of families who vote on issues that affect us, from who will represent us on the board of our taxing district, to who will represent us on our association government. We have town hall meetings and get pretty heated about things like roads, taxes, and whether our desires for our community are being properly handled.
So, Sarah, let me take you on a tour of REAL small town America, a place you have obviously never been.
In New York City a number of years ago, having taken the subway south from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I got lost. I found a very nice cop and asked directions to the station where I could catch a train back to Manhattan. This very nice police officer apologized because he had no idea how to get to Manhattan. He'd never been there. His life (and he appeared to be in his middle thirties) had been spent entirely in a four or five block area of Brooklyn. His neighborhood. Everything he needed or wanted was right there.
Another time I rode the Long Island Railroad with a fellow who nearly fell out of his seat with excitement at the open space he saw as we got farther and farther east, and almost hopped with glee when he spied a cow. I was a little amazed, having moved to Long Island from a rural farming town myself a year before, and said, "You haven't seen a cow before?" His answer: "I've never been out of the East Village in my life until today." His small town.
I had friends who, to my out-of-town eyes, appeared to live in New York City. What I learned from them was that they lived in small towns called Canarsie, or The Village, or Flatbush, or Bedford-Stuyvesant, or Harlem, or... Gee, I can't even remember them all. They were aware that the rest of the world said they lived in New York, but in their own minds, they lived in "the neighborhood." The neighborhood had a name, and sometimes even local government entities. Certainly they had their own community organizations and organizers. Recently I read about a Sephardic Jewish Community in Flatbush, Brooklyn, which has taken over a large area simply by purchasing houses near to each other until some 40,000 have created their own village within Flatbush. They call it the "Erub", and within its confines, Jewish law is strictly observed. They also take care of one another, and someone who falls on hard times will be quickly helped by his "village".
Traveling around the country and living in many places, I found this to be true everywhere. The bigger the urban area, the bigger the suburban area, the more likely it was to be divided into a much smaller community by the people who lived there. We make our own small towns wherever we go. Sociologist Andrew Greeley famously noted that European immigrants transplanted their villages to U.S. cities, often clustered around the local Catholic parish, often with its own schools. A Chicago resident was as likely as not to say he lived in St. Patrick's, St. Peter's, or St. Joseph's, naming and treating his parish as if it were his hometown (and this included people who weren't even Catholic!).
So consider this, Sarah. My small town of 640 homes with its own government abuts another subdivision with its own government, about 1200 homes. Then across the main county road, there's an even bigger subdivision of about 8000 homes, and growing. But it's still divided into neighborhoods of several hundred homes, and separate governmental and taxing districts of about 2000 homes. Small towns by any measure.
My friend Vicki, who lived in Los Angeles until she died of cancer a few years ago, once told me: Los Angeles is 100 small towns in search of a city.
Small town America is not merely small rural communities (I've lived in quite a few of them) but also the small-town mentality we bring to our neighborhoods and lives. We are intensely concerned about our small parts of the world, and about our neighbors. Heck, that's why we have those terrible people called "community organizers" who try to make our lives better when the bigger governmental agencies don't listen.
So wake up, Sarah. Many of us you dismiss may not hunt moose on somebody else's license, but we DO share that wonderful human capacity to create a "neighborhood", a small town, where we practice politics on a daily basis, help each other out, and know who lives down the street, or upstairs.
Most of us in this country live in small communities like these, not communities like Wasilla. And we are both hard-working Americans and patriotic.
So now that you're out of Alaska for one of the few times in your life, check out our other small towns, the ones you so cavalierly dismiss.
I realize that having a museum within twenty miles, or a planetarium or a zoo may make us seem to you to be some kind of weird elite. But you know what? Your support for hunting wolves from an airplane makes you look like a Neanderthal to me.