At the 100th Meridian Where the Great Plains Begin

I grew up around corduroy roads, so I have a little different perspective on this:

I’ve written before about the impact of kids leaving little towns in red rural areas for bigger cities. It’s the same feeling for the parents (rejection), but those kids don’t leave to attend an elite university. In a lot of rural areas, any university is “elite” in the sense that it’s a gateway to a world outside the tiny rural town where the kids grew up.

So a kid who attends a land-grant college, or even a community college that’s a drive from the hometown, will probably end up leaving town and finding their way in a bigger town or city. If the parents are lucky, their child’s new chosen home will be close enough for them to drive and see their child, their child’s spouse (who probably isn’t from the home town), and their grandkids. If the parents aren’t that lucky, they’ll have to go through the alienating experience of boarding an airplane and flying to their child’s newly chosen home. They might see some things they’ll never see in their little rural community, including people of color, the homeless, out-and-proud gay people, and other things that are new and surprising to them.

As the parents age, they find that they’ll be visiting their child less frequently, and perhaps their child will visit more, or perhaps not. In any event, they’ll be retired, home and sitting in their recliners through the long winter nights watching Fox News. And what they’ll hear is that their kid made the wrong choice. Their child got an education at a liberal university (because all of them are, not just the elite ones), which caused them to move to the big city, and due to their indoctrination, they didn’t understand that the city where they moved to raise the grandkids was actually a hellhole full of danger and possible corruption.

The younger people who stayed behind, or came home after a trip to college for an education, will also hear this message. They’ll think back to some of the education they got from not-so-nice professors, or even high school teachers, who sometimes ridiculed them for their small-minded little town attitudes. And they’ll think that they don’t want their kids to leave their home town and never come back, as so many of their classmates did.

So, between the parents resenting the loss of their children, and the younger folks who fear the loss of their children, there’s a deep pool of resentment that the Republicans have tapped and will continue to tap. The cure offered by Republicans is simple: stop teaching those kids anything that will open their minds. Offer them a curriculum where all the main characters are white and narrow-minded. Make cities and other countries seem scary and full of not-like-us people. Cut the funding for colleges so kids can’t afford it on their own without going deeply into debt. Try to keep immigrants out of the country, to somehow force the kids to take the shit jobs that are pretty much the only ones left out in the sticks. In short, put as much sand as possible into the gears of what readers here would consider progress, and what they consider decline.

This be the verse. It’s been around forever, written about by escapees of rural areas since the dawn of education in those areas. Since the dawn of time, kids have wanted to move to the big cities or join the circus, learn from hippie professors, and smoke the devil’s lettuce. Unfortunately, we’re in a place where the rage and resentment against that natural inclination has been weaponized by the party in power, and we’re all reaping the whirlwind.