. . . 62% of those living in urban areas wanted to see the U.S. Supreme Court legalize gay marriage, while a plurality of rural residents (47%) opposed it, according to the latest NBC/WSJ poll. In Urban America, 57% believe the federal health-care law is working well or needs just minor modifications, versus 63% in Rural America who wanted it overhauled or totally eliminated. And 50% of rural residents think free trade has hurt the United States, compared with just 27% who believe that in urban areas. . . .Indeed, the same NBC/WSJ poll finds 55% of urban respondents identifying as Democrats, versus just 31% of rural respondents who are Dems.
David Wasserman, who analyzes politics at the Cook Political Report, measures the change by examining how Democratic presidential candidates performed in counties with a Whole Foods—the upscale grocery store that stocks organic goods—and in counties with a Cracker Barrel, the homestyle restaurant featuring chicken n' dumplings.
In 1992, Bill Clinton won 60% of the Whole Foods counties and 40% of the Cracker Barrel counties, a 20-point difference. That gap that has widened every year since, and in 2012, Mr. Obama won 77% of Whole Foods counties and 29% of Cracker Barrel Counties, a 48-point difference.
"Politics hangs on culture and lifestyle more than policy," Mr. Wasserman said.
Apparently speeding and giving youngsters and oldsters guns is hazardous to one's health if trauma centers are understaffed; who knew?
Contrary to what many believe, living in the city is far less risky than in the country, according to a study released on Tuesday that takes into account all major forms of death from injuries.
Although homicides in cities far outpace those in rural areas, overall the risk of dying from some form of accident or injury is 20 percent greater in the most rural counties of the United States than in the nation's biggest cities.
Later in the article:
The most common causes of injury-related deaths were motor vehicle crashes, which occurred at more than twice the rate in rural areas as they did in cities. Overall, car crashes caused 27.61 deaths per 100,000 people in most rural areas and 10.58 per 100,000 in most urban areas.
That may be because people in rural areas are more prone to drive on highways at high speeds, and some studies have shown people in rural areas are less likely to comply with seatbelt and child restraint laws than are individuals in urban areas.
When the team looked at firearm-related deaths, they found no significant difference in the overall risk of death between urban counties and rural counties, but there were significant differences in the trends by age.
In rural areas, for example, children aged up to 14 and adults over 45 had the highest risk of dying from a firearm injury, but among adults aged 20 to 44, the risk of a firearm-related death was much higher in urban areas, and the risk was about the same for youths aged 15 to 19, regardless of where they lived.
There’s a long tradition of shotguns and spare-prose fiction
depicting America’s working class, and right now the Midwest is having a
literary moment. Dennis Lehane, who anchors his crime novels in Boston,
once told an interviewer that “in Greek tragedy they fall from great
heights. In noir they fall from the curb.” In books by a small but
growing number of authors—besides Bill, Donald Ray Pollock (Ohio),
Bonnie Jo Campbell (Michigan), Alan Heathcock (Illinois)—there are no
curbs. The roads are gravel and dirt, but the people still find a way to
fall.
This makes for more than just good noir. Sometimes the rural Midwest,
and rural America more generally, can seem to drown in
don’t-bother-locking-the-doors nostalgia. The frustrations of groups
like the Tea Party suggest that, in many ways, this near mythology
remains as powerful inside the region as out. Against this ideal,
consider Bill’s new novel, Donnybrook, whose title refers to a
three-day bare-knuckle fighting tournament held every August on former
farmland. Fans come to watch, gamble, inhale, imbibe—“like a Dead
concert with fists,” a mostly toothless meth head calls it. It’s not so
easy to be nostalgic about that.
Contemporary American storytelling has a funny relationship to small-town America. On the one hand, we can tell stories that show a great love and deep understanding for it, as in NBC's marvelous Friday Night Lights. And yet in my own state of Nebraska, it's become something of a rite of passage for students at our flagship university in Lincoln to bemoan small-town life and vow to flee the state as soon as possible upon graduation. They'll settle in a big coastal city where they'll achieve all sorts of success. They'll finalize their divorce from their small-town roots—and in most cases they'll do so rather happily, as they find opportunities to mock and belittle "flyover country."
The same kind of brain drain is happening in Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, and North Dakota, and it is wreaking havoc on our region. Worst of all, because the majority of people talking about small-town life are the "leavers" now working in New York, Chicago, D.C., and San Francisco, the image that often emerges is unflattering at best. In contrast, we seldom hear the stories of the "stickers," . . . .
A place where I walked into a store over twenty years after I had left and conversed with the cashier like I’d been there the week before and would undoubtedly be back sometime soon. Folks generally don’t greet one another with a handshake where I am from, and I think that’s because handshakes are for people who enter and leave your life rather than for those who are part of the community and therefore always around.
The people of this community – my people – are by many measures deeply conservative. A lot of what I took from growing up is that you work hard and you don’t complain and you say the Pledge of Allegiance and mean it and you go to church and mean it. But I also learned that education is important. (To refer to it as public education would, in this context, be redundant.) And that while you don’t ever want to be seen looking for a handout, if you see that somebody’s car is stuck in the snow you stop and help push them out. . . .
I write this from a distance, with all the advantages and disadvantages that confers. . . . [M]y direct experiences as a resident featured me as an insecure, self-absorbed, and generally disagreeable teenager. But even accounting for the distorting effects of my perspective, it is clear that the people . . . .have cared about their community. They kept their houses up. They paid enough in taxes to have nicely paved streets with curbs and gutters and sidewalks, and to build what in retrospect was undoubtedly more water tower than they needed when the old one started leaking. They funded a school system that punched well above its weight in terms of fancy degrees earned by its graduates, even though getting fancy degrees was not the point, and even though that good school led to opportunities for their kids that were almost always somewhere else. . . .
The lone remaining grocery store has been through a couple periods of municipal ownership to keep it going. (Some might call that socialism. I think the folks back home would call it doing what needs to be done.). . . .
Too often, in the circles I now tend to find myself in, I am part of conversations in which I hear a casual disdain for rural people. I find the prejudice inherent in these comments every bit as misguided as the prejudices the speakers seem to imagine all rural people harbor. No doubt there are small places where many or even most – it is never all – of the people hold views that we should rightly condemn. But I can assure you they are not all that way, and I am skeptical of the suggestion that there are even all that many that are that way.
I don't want to wax too idyllic about small town America. Like Dreher, I understand that Mayberry never was real:
It won’t do to replace one flawed vision with another. This is one reason I find Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories so interesting is that he manages to write with affection about the people in his fictional small town without sentimentalizing them (well, without overly sentimentalizing them), or ignoring their flaws and foibles. I find that people who denounce the “Mayberry” view of small towns (charming, folksy, etc.) tend to do so with some sort of agenda. Of course Mayberry is a lie! But who actually believes in Mayberry? Nobody who actually lives in a small town, unless they’re some sort of kook.
Even with that caveat, small towns seem to give more than they demand of their expatriates.
The Front Porch Republiclinks to this Daily Yonderpost about a southern Ohio effort to move from logging to value added and eco-friendly wood production. As a creature of the Plains, I know little about logging and forests, so I won't comment about the particulars. These paragraphs from early in the article seem spot on.
It’s pretty clear that old approaches to rural development (like issuing tax breaks to attract factories) don’t work all that well – but what else is there?
A lot of folks all over the country have been working on that question, and a group involved with the Ford Foundation has been trying to pull it all together and explain emerging practices as a single process. This group of Ford folks didn’t invent something new. They have tried to explain an approach to development and to create a system for how communities can better themselves and their economies.
We can call it a “wealth creation approach” to development.
Instead of trying to “attract” jobs over which rural communities have little control, this approach is about creating durable livelihoods by developing the assets that rural places do control. That includes natural assets like forests, farms, and wind rights as well as workers’ skills, social networks, and innovation. When rural communities develop these assets in response to market demand, when they connect with urban areas in ways that benefit both places, and when they focus on creating multiple kinds of wealth – that’s when they begin to create wealth and livelihoods that benefit rural places over the long haul.
It does strike me that South Dakota's political leadership hasn't gotten the memo that attracting factories may not be the best way to build "durable livelihoods." Further, I can't remember the last time I heard any South Dakota Political leaders discussing "developing natural assets like forests, farms, and wind rights as well as workers’ skills, social networks, and innovation." I guess they don't remember Joni Mitchell's warning in "Big Yellow Taxi."
They must have missed the irony in the pop nature of this Counting Crows cover too.
Two studies examined the hypothesis that the culture of honor would be associated with heightened risk taking, presumably because risky behaviors provide social proof of strength and fearlessness. As hypothesized, Study 1 showed that honor states in the United States exhibited higher rates of accidental deaths among Whites (but not non-Whites) than did nonhonor states, particularly in nonmetropolitan areas. Elevated accidental deaths in honor states appeared for both men and women and remained when the authors controlled for a host of statewide covariates (e.g., economic deprivation, cancer deaths,temperature) and for non-White deaths. Study 2, likewise, showed that people who endorsed honor-related beliefs reported greater risk taking tendencies, independent of age, sex, self-esteem, and the big five.
The article contends,
research suggests that men (White men, in particular) in the southern and western United States who have been influenced by an ideology of honor are especially driven to achieve this goal (e.g., Cohen et al., 1996; Cohen & Nisbett, 1994; Nisbett et al., 1995). Consequently, men from culture-of-honor regions might be more prone to engage in risky behaviors that sometimes lead to death, relative to men from nonculture-of-honor regions, because such behaviors signify that one possesses the ‘‘manly’’attributes of strength and courage (Bosson et al., 2009).
South Dakota isn't mentioned in the article. I don't know if South Dakota has a culture that has been "influenced by an ideology of honor" but I see my students as being far too willing "to engage in risky behaviors that sometimes [may] lead to death."
