One thing that a lot of liberals don’t understand is “How could people in rural areas have such wrong ideas about Trump and Clinton?”
I lived in a rural area for some years. One thing that rural areas lack is access to information. Internet access is slow or non-existent. There might be a weekly newspaper published in the county seat, but it is mostly advertisements for people’s services. If I want to know who to call to dig new field lines for my septic tank, I’ll get that out of the weekly newspaper (plus by talking to my neighbors, of course, which is how I actually found the guy to dig my field lines). But real news about what’s happening in the world? Nope.
Without information, it’s impossible to make informed decisions. Without information, notions of what the rest of the world is like become vague and distorted. I had an example of that after I moved to California. A few years later a relative from back home came to visit. I took him to San Francisco on the train, and took the Muni light rail downtown and then the cable car to Fisherman’s Wharf. We then walked west towards the Marina District towards where the next bus, the one that was going to haul us to a museum, was going to stop. At one point, we’re walking past million dollar townhouses and Fort Mason. Suddenly he turns to me and says, “why are you taking me into this kind of neighborhood? We need to go back.” And I say “why?” and he says “look around?” I did, I just saw a typical San Francisco street scene, people of all races and colors walking along. I said “What?” And he said “This is a bad neighborhood!” I tried to reassure him that these were million dollar townhomes we were walking past and that most of the people he saw on the street probably made more money in a month than he made in a year, but he was absolutely convinced that brown people in big cities all wanted to rape / kill / murder white people and that we were going to be set upon at any moment by these well dressed ordinary citizens of San Francisco. We were, of course, perfectly safe — this is an affluent neighborhood with pretty much zero crime.
I have other stories like that, like when I took him to the beach in Santa Monica and he freaked out over the homeless, absolutely convinced they were going to attack us in broad daylight. But the point is that the distorted view that he’d gotten in rural America was that our cities were nightmare lands of crime and violence, and that he had to be on guard every moment or we would be killed by dark-skinned people who wanted everything we had. Granted, there are neighborhoods like that. But they aren’t the kind of neighborhood I would have ever taken my relative, and they’re fairly easy to avoid since there’s no reason for me to ever go to those neighborhoods in the first place.
When people have such distorted views of reality as that, I don’t know if “uneducated” is the word. But “ignorant” definitely is. The question is how to remedy that, given the limited sources of information in rural areas — and worse yet, the lack of desire on the part of people in rural areas to learn about the outside world, given that they already think they know what everything outside their insular bubble is like. I don’t know how, but I do know that if it’s not done, things are going to get even worse. The Bible says “The truth shall set ye free.” But if there is no truth to be found in an insular bubble with few sources of information, it’s hard for that to be.
– Badtux the Knowledge Penguin
Unless there is something created like the REA for the internet – call it the Rural Internet Administration (RIA), and have the same goals that the REA had to bring electricity to areas lacking it, I doubt there will be a solution by the ‘free market fairy’. Plenty of bleating (and lobbying $$$) by businesses about government overreach, but no action by them either.
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This may come as a shock to you, but rural America does have access to the Internet. I live in the middle of nowhere in the U.P. We had better Internet service there through the local phone company than we had in Atlanta. IMHO, access to the Internet has made people more ignorant, not less. They form circle jerk bubbles of shared prejudices and pass around their urban myths and right wing lies and paranoid fantasies and just reinforce each other. It’s the same deal as with satellite television or purchasing old-fashioned magazine subscriptions. You can chose to go looking for quality, or you can wallow in stuff that just confirms your existing biases and fears.
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That may be true in some places, Nan. But it most definitely isn’t true where I come frome. They don’t even have cell phone service out there, much less Internet. All they have is PoTS.
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That said, you’re right that those who have satellite Internet (for example) mostly just use it to stay within their own little circle of friends and relatives, and never look for information outside of that little circle of passed-around memes and misinformation.
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Hey Nan — you’re a Yooper? So was I, 30 years ago. Usedta own a cabin with 165 feet of Lake Superior shoreline in Baraga County, a couple miles east of L’Anse, and also lived in Lake Linden and Manistique when I worked for smal weekly papers there. I remember the time fondly, now, moreso than when I actually lived there, because it always felt like Nature was trying to KILL me. The 30 feet of lake effect snow each winter, icy winds that could peel flesh off my face, roads that stayed solidly iced over until spring thaw in April (remember, this is the Copper Country I’m talking about…)
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[…] Badtux tells a story. […]
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It’s willful ignorance. People in rural areas may lack access to a decent newspaper, but they’ve got satellite tv. They could be watching the BBC or C-SPAN (and some do) but instead most are engrossed by Faux News or listening to AM talk radio and lapping up every word Rush, Michael Savage, et al. say. Then when you add in the structural bias that’s existed for years in entertainment — seeing POC routinely cast as ordinary working people and white collar professionals instead of as gang members or drug dealers is a fairly recent phenomenon and still doesn’t happen as often as it should. Remember “Friends”? Or “Seinfeld”? Both were shows set in one of the most diverse cities in the world but I don’t think I ever saw a black person on either. It may have happened (I wasn’t a steady viewer) but in general when watching television for quite a few years the only time you’d see anyone black was on a police procedural like “Law and Order.” Granted, they had black cops, judges, and an occasional lawyer, but the fact those shows focused on horrible crimes happening in an urban area no doubt contributed to people living far, far away in Podunk, South Dakota, deciding they didn’t ever want to go to a city. If the only things I knew about Baltimore came from watching “The Wire” or “Homicide” there’s no way in hell I’d ever go near that city.
And it’s not just rural white people who have screwy prejudices and fears. Back when I was still working, if I lived somewhere that had decent public transit, I’d use it. In both Omaha and Atlanta white co-workers routinely asked me how I could be brave enough to use the bus because “you know what type of people take the bus.” Yes, I do. People like me, people with jobs to get to. I served on a jury in Atlanta where a 30-something tall, physically fit white guy (the absolute least likely person on the planet to ever be a victim of street crime) said in dead seriousness that he was afraid to ride MARTA. How do you undo generations of social conditioning that taught white kids to fear people who aren’t exactly like themselves? Access to decent news sources isn’t going to do it.
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“the lack of desire on the part of people in rural areas to learn about the outside world”
That is the core of the problem. Iggerent ppl want to stay ignorant. The Truth is out there. Sometimes you might have to expend a bit of energy looking for it. Even so, it’s easier now to find it than it usedta be. When I lived at my first Xwife’s house in a swamp (literally, the house pad was surrounded by wetlands) in central Florida during the late 1980s-early 90s, we could hardly get TV signals. Low-lying spot, 75 miles from the stations in Tampa and the Fort Myers station was low-powered, cypress trees blocked signals… This was before the Internet, too. But we could still subscribe to a newspaper, although it would have been stuffed into a newsbox on the mail road a quarter mile from the house. (I got mine for free from the news office where I worked.) We subscribed to magazines (it’s where I first heard of In These Times, the muckraking socialist biweekly.) We paid ATTENTION to current events.
We were in an infobubble too, being strident leftists, but we still kept track of what right-wing thought was, because we wanted to form counter-arguments to the reich-wingers who surrounded us. Most people with strongly held divergent opinions didn’t talk to us much, because we could talk ’em up one side and down the other. We were always willing to engage, though, to espouse our viewpoints (mostly environmental and anti-war.)
Now there are so many more information channels, even in spots with shitty reception. Anyone with a mobile phone can zone in, coz there’s not that many areas (at least those that have people living in them) where you can’t get reception. The few million people who literally CAN’T access info easily do not explain the rampant ignorance in Amerikkkan society.
The people who seemingly don’t want to learn DO get info. But they seek out stuff that confirms the prejudices they have chosen. Alex Jones, Brightfart, Rush Limpballs and other radio hate-mongers… They want reinforcement for the sick bile that fills their souls. They are anti-social at heart. My fondest desire is that when they are let down by Trumpitler and their lives become immensely WORSE by whatever instability he creates that fucks up the current pattern of civilisation even more than it is now, that they’ll start killing themselves with their ample supply of guns. Which they probably will, but only after murdering a few other people who they hate first.
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Had lunch with my Nephew and Niece-in-law. They’re in their upper 30’s. Decent jobs, had good grades in school, own their own place, etc. They know not to engage me with the latest Faux Newz talking points, since I’ll come right back at them (and I have in public). They have internet, 500+ channels on the tv, etc, but they stay cocooned in the right’s bubble when it comes to worldview. They are staunch 2nd Amendment types, and have absorbed the whole minorities are bad/whites are pure viewpoint – even though they work in diverse companies, have had bad encounters with management (pale as a vampire in complexion), but not so much with their fellow employees (both are in supervisory positions). While my suggestion above wouldn’t fix the information gap, it would allow those in underserved areas to have better access to information – but as it’s been said, “You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
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Yet some horses’ arses will line up to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, as long as it’s poured by their kkkult leader.
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I just got my new copy of Goodwyns history of the agrarian populist movement this week, to replace my ragged old one. Reading this post makes me want to dig in to Goodwyn some more and try to understand how the people he describes turned into the folks Tux is talking about.
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