All this talk about small-town values at the Republican convention, and the Daily Show's hilarious lampooning of same, got me thinking about what I learned about values from the people in the town I grew up in. What follows is a stream-of-consciousness memory dump of some of the 'highlights' of my 1960s-1970s childhood.
The first 12 years were spent in a community with a population of about 5,000 or so; from age 12 to age 20 we lived in a nearby town with a population of somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.
At age 20, I got out, and I've never been back.
I learned that law enforcement is not to be trusted unless you're one of them. Some of the most fearsome drunk drivers (and, in retrospect, I suspect, wife beaters) in my town were members of the Sheriff's Department, the local police department, and the Highway Patrol. My parents used to say about some of the local cops that "It's a good thing he joined the force because if he hadn't, he'd be in prison by now."
On the other hand, I learned that if you're the daughter of a cop, you can get caught red-handed at the age of 18 with a supply of dope and a bong in your mom's car with two 17-year-old friends, stoned out of your mind, and as soon as you give the cops your name and they realize who you are, they let you go with a warning. At the time that realization was a source of relief, but now, years later, it's just a source of disgust and embarrassment.
I learned a little something about sexual predators and sexual harassment in the high school in my small town. I had an English teacher, a very creepy man, who at the outset of the school year assigned his sophomore students an essay. We were to, basically, write erotica for him. No, he didn't phrase it exactly like that, but that was, in essence, the assignment. It creeped me out to the nth degree. I didn't tell anyone or complain about it, but neither did I do the assignment. Interestingly enough, this teacher never called me out for failing to turn it in. Not a word was ever said about it, by either of us.
I learned, also in high school, a little bit about what it's like to have religion taught in the schools. I had another teacher, a freshman biology teacher. The man was a devout - and I mean DEVOUT - Mormon. The entire class was taught more or less from the creationist point of view, but the kicker was the section on human reproduction -- you know, the part of the class our parents had to sign a permission slip for us to attend. To his credit, he did cover the basics of human anatomy and the whole sperm/egg business, but once he'd touched on the basics he turned the entire section into a discourse on the Mormon views on sex, marriage, sex before marriage, and unwed pregnancy. Unsurprisingly, sex before marriage = bad. Unwed pregnancy = bad. Abortion, however, = worse. Adoption = only acceptable solution. I know all of this because it was on the test at the end of the section. No, I'm not kidding.
I learned about racism and interracial violence. I went to high school in the seventies. My high school was made up of (guessing here) 40% whites, 40% Latinos, 20% blacks. (Yep, in a small town.) The Latinos -- they called themselves Chicanos back then -- hated the blacks and the blacks hated the Chicanos and everybody hated the whites. White girls didn't go to the girls' bathroom alone, ever, for fear of being jumped and beaten to a pulp. One time a couple of black girls jumped a Chicano girl in the girls' bathroom and stabbed her. She recovered but she never returned to school. I didn't hate the blacks or the Chicanos, but I was afraid of them.
I learned about other kinds of violence. My small town had its first school shooting in the late 1970s. A disgruntled and unbalanced white kid took a gun to the high school where my younger brother was a student and started shooting. Didn't kill anyone, but managed to injure a couple of people.
I learned that, with only one or two exceptions, every single one of the half-dozen or so lawyers and judges living in my town were alcoholics. I learned as a teenager that on those rare occasions when I needed to speak to my father about something, I'd generally be able to find him in the afternoons at one of the local bars with his cronies, drunk.
I learned that the preponderance of the cases tried in the local courts were either divorce cases or drunk driving cases.
I learned that if you became desperately ill, your best chance of getting well was to have someone drive you to a hospital in the nearest city, some 100 miles away, because the quality of health care in the local hospital was not very good. Good doctors didn't live or practice in my small town. There was nothing there to entice them.
I learned that, if one's father is considered (however inexplicably) to be a pillar of the community, and if that father decides to leave the family and divorce your mother, and if he decides to make the divorce as nasty as possible, the good people of the town generally feel like they have to choose sides, and more often than not they choose his side, presumably because of his status. I learned what it feels like to become a social pariah as a result, by watching what my mother went through.
I learned that incompetence isn't just tolerated, it's rewarded. My town elected the equivalent(s) of George W. Bush for mayor on a regular basis. I never understood why, except that of course it's not like the voters had all that much of a choice. Because, in my small town, the people who had real abilities and talent and potential did what I did -- they got out, and they never went back.