stop it, hate them equally.
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i feel like there are two types of rural in America. there's the kind that's a glorified suburb about 50 miles away from a metropolitan area and there's the kind that's out in absolutely nowhere revolving around farming. The kind near the metro areas are just as bad if not worse than the suburbs, that's the kind I grew up in so I can talk about this. Nearly all of the few hundred people in my hometown are deep fried reactionaries and driving an hour long commute is seen as completely normal. The klan runs the police department. The churches have snake handlers. That place is an artificial existence built around letting white people have cheap property so they can be little small business tyrants running bait shops or burger restaurants and yell at their teenage employees. I can't speak for everywhere, but my tiny hometown is genuinely scary to be in if you're not from there, especially if you're not white. People will come up to you visibly armed asking you what church you pray at.
The rural areas revolving around agriculture are normal and purposefully underdeveloped by capital. They don't deserve hate, because someone's gotta do it. If they're backwards or don't have proper infrastructure, that's a shame and shouldn't be held against them. They're also far less reactionary than you'd think from my experiences with them.
I also grew up in the “basically just suburbia but worse” and your description is 100% right. Trump flags as far as the eye can see, McMansions galore. The only agriculture is a small number of cow pastures.
Mostly it’s exactly like suburbia except the houses are farther apart so that the small business tyrants can buy horses for their shitty kids and enough driveway space for their boat. Oh and it takes over an hour to get to a real city.
There was a small amount of agriculture in my hometown yeah, like a few cow pastures and some pigs. One family though had a grape plantation and and a huge mcmansion. I remember them because they hilariously had an artificial lake dug out to the side of their property near the highway that was maybe 40 feet across at the most. They'd use it for jet ski races. Every Saturday if you were on the highway, you'd see two goofballs doing the tiniest little jet ski race in a tight circle.
You are absolutely right about vineyards being tacky and digging those pointless artificial lakes and building disgusting McMansions. This kind of excess is why I'm anti-rural. With the money spent on that you could do significant renovations to a school or hospital. Collectivize farming man!
Comrade, most rural areas don't have any of those things, just the rich people "rural areas" near major cities. I'm in the absolute middle of nowhere, in a village of approx 200 people, and, while one or two rich bastards do move here occasionally (usually people who used to vaccation in the area🤢), most people here are dealing with the opposite of excess. We don't have heating or ac, many of us are living in trailers, i got thrown out of the last house i lived in because it being knocked down for "uninhabitable" levels of mold and the walls fucking crumbling. Our infrastructure is long gone. What you see on tv and tiktok is not the experience of most rural people lmao.
But you are right that collectivised farming would be nice tho
This I disagree with, comrade. Rural communities have existed since the dawn of time. Plus some people don't vibe well with cities and it would be nice to have some alternative.
Farmers are cool, and also Mennonite communities aren't harming anyone either.
Part of why suburbia sucks so bad is that it doesn't have to exist, but well always need rural farming areas
Because there is nothing wrong with living rurally. Some people want to live closer to nature and be more isolated, and that's fine. Suburbia is a special kind of hell, and somebody has to farm.
somebody has to farm.
I mean, farming in US would be borderline nonexistent, if it wasn't subsidized.
Somebody has to farm but under present economic conditions farming in US is basically a make work program sustained by lobbying.
maybe it seems that suburbs are a deliberate and successful attempt to ruin communities and perpetuate segregation but rural living is just kind of a fact of life. idk if that's true but i think that might be the difference that informs some peoples opinions.
not at all saying you're wrong just thinking about what leads to that.
suburbs have chuddier shitstains.
I drove down to bumfuck Pennsylvania and passed multiple houses with massive confederate flag and one had a dude doing lawnwork. Fucker waved at me and gave me directions. If this were the suburbs, some dweeb would have called like three cop squads to arrest me and put their caralarm on ‘defcon 1’.
Unless we’re talking about mountain west ranchers fuckers. Those people are on another level.
i can't remember where i read it. probably william cronon in a discussion of metropole/hinterlands, but i've sat through a lot of political ecology of the urban/rural (specifically US) divide. suburbia was developed as a reaction to urban "crowding" (capitalist slums, poverty, disease). when rail systems were developing, commuter towns started popping up and there was this attempt to re-create "country living" for urban professionals. "safe" (re: less diverse) places to raise a family. at it's best, the promise was to deliver the conveniences of urban life, but with the clean air and open spaces of rural life. "a best of both worlds", that has of course generally become the worst of both.
even to this day, many of the traditional suburban homes have these vestigal features of country homes, shrunk down to comically unusable proportions (suburban front porches lol) with one big difference: the sides of these homes are nearly blank in terms of windows/views, to obscure the perceived existence neighbors' homes.
but, anyway, i think something that is lost in discussions of rural vs. urban life is the lack of a clear boundary between them and the interrelated processes that re-create them. rural life in america, from the near abandoned coal seems and rail spurs of central appalachia to the tribal lands of the great west are very much products, in character and use, of urban political and social processes. similarly, the world class cities of today are products of rural material and labor of communities, not to mention often populated by former rural families dislocated by the very cities they now call home.
