Here is the quote that got me thinking about the common DailyKos practice of rural bashing.
I am so damned sick of ignorant hick politicians and the ignorant hicks who vote for them who try to cram their Luddite nonsense down the general public's throat. They need to stick with mucking out pig stys, cheating on their taxes and dodging paternity suits... things they're traditionally good at.
This is a quote from 3 days ago on DailyKos. I am not identifying the poster because my only point is that here is yet another example of the urban elitism of Democrats. This is the exact position I took when I lived in the big city, which in my case was San Francisco. Having now spent most of the last 32 years living in rural Canada and rural America I see things a little differently.
I should maybe remind people I come from a farm family. I couldn’t wait to escape but I did love farming and the farm life. It was the lack of social and educational opportunities that made me want to flee, that and the provincial attitudes that surrounded me. Hey, an openly bisexual math nerd didn’t exactly have a wide social circle and agricultural college held no attraction for me.
I have cleaned out many pig sties. My Mom loved pigs with a fervor and my job was to look after them and I think it is possible she loved her pigs more than she loved me. The pigs reciprocated her love unconditionally. They would start oinking when they saw her truck coming. By the time she reached them they’d be jumping for joy (yes, literally). She’d spend hours playing with them.
I have pigs on my farm and ranch operations and I treat them like family. It turns out I am as crazy about pigs as my mom. Mind you they are a vital tool in my ongoing mission to restore native prairie grasslands. I have farrowing barns, where sows go to have their piglets (and yes they need cleaning though concrete floors and steam generation make that easy) but I don’t have sties.
Most of my pigs live their lives in open air barns that move across the fields. These barns are moved periodically, most often they are pulled by draft horses. Some of my pigs free range with access to food, water, and shelter on demand. But again everything moves.
Here comes the high tech bit. We pick where the pigs are living through exhaustive soil testing. All the barns and shelters that move are tracked and mapped as are the pigs. This is matched with detailed soil maps that are updated biweekly. Each pig is chipped and we check it’s vitals daily either remotely or in person or both. We also do extensive genetic testing and mapping in support of our breeding program.
On the other hand I have, as it happens, never cheated on my taxes. I pay every penny. A lot of people depend on me including employees, buyers, and suppliers. I do not want to risk disturbing their lives by getting caught cheating on my taxes.
Nobody has ever sued me alleging I fathered their child or children. I guess I am a really bad hick. Though I am definitely a hick. At least by this common definition:
“a person who lives in the country, regarded as being unintelligent or provincial.”
I definitely live in the country and I have lost count of the number of times people, mostly in or from the city, have assumed I was unintelligent or provincial. Just a few weeks ago at a major university I won’t humiliate by naming Lotte, Daughter #2, and I were waiting for a speech to start. We were just talking about goat breeding and fainting goats when an eminent academic had security remove us, this guy called us hicks and hillbillies to our face. Just to top of his incredible display of ignorance this fool said Lotte should “get your Black C… out of this room you N…..?”
So security duly evicted us from the auditorium. We went outside and sat in the shade and went back to talking about goat genetics. It took almost ten minutes for the Dean of Medicine and the President of the University to show up and start apologizing like they’d gotten caught rustling our cattle. Lotte and I both thanked them for their concern but shrugged off the incident. Then we went back into the auditorium and gave our speech. It was all about goat genetics.
We had been rehearsing our speech when we got thrown out of the auditorium.
Later we learned the eminent academic was a prominent member of the local Democratic Party. There was a time that I would have assumed this guy was one bad apple in a ocean of good apples. Then I started reading DailyKos.
Now, courtesy of DailyKos I know at least some Democrats are racist, misogynistic, rural-phobic, homophobic, transphobic, religion bashing, elitist bigots. I also know that those of you who are bigots are totally blind to your own failings or how those failings doom the Democratic Party.
Okay, maybe that bit about dooming the Democratic Party is a smidge overwrought but it seems to me rural bashing is another divisive distraction Democrats don’t need right now. In places like Georgia (where rural areas are often predominantly Black), and Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc. where the races are really close rural Democratic voters may well decide the outcome of Senate races. The outcome of those Senate races may determine whether America remains a Democracy or not.
I am not saying rural bashing is going to change any rural voter from being a Democratic voter into being a Republican voter. I do think it might reduce voter turnout among rural Democratic voters. And why take the chance. I am proposing a four month moratorium on rural bashing until after the midterm elections.
I see rural bashing and my and others response to it as a needless distraction, a foofaraw.
I am going to spend the extra time I save from not responding to rural bashers working on getting out the local expat Democratic vote here in Canada.