Articles keep being published about rural living people and their general refusal to conform to society rules regarding Covid 19. Well, I see your Rona Risk and I raise you our lifestyle and our livelihoods.
Plenty of us have close calls every year, closer calls than any Rona. We drive hundreds of miles, at 80 mph, just to a job site and back. We get on young horses that are actually reincarnated WWII kamikaze pilots and go “cruise around” the warmup pen at a roping or a rodeo, “because he’s gotta learn someway”. We walk across grain bins, climb windmill towers, we run heavy equipment without formal training, and we loophole CDL licensing laws when we’re 16 years old.
We carry firearms on our personage that may or may not be registered, and all of us have looked in the mirror and asked what would happen if ourselves or someone else was under violent threat. We run through border towns and walk on foot through hot zones the Border Patrol is working, because the pipeline is under construction and that’s our job. There’s us that go out in -50 because the livestock needs fed, and we who go out in +115 because the livestock need fed. We sit out on a drilling pad alone for 16 hours to watch the flare and take care of the pumps.
We don’t give a thought to hauling loads of horses or cattle cross country alone, we just get in the truck and go. Have you ever watched a crop dusting plane????? Those guys are insane. We strap up and dangle from helicopters to repair the power lines in Corpus Christi Bay, because it’s too wet for ground equipment. We hunt bears in the Rocky Mountains, with bows and arrows, for fun.
We like our rattlesnake roundups and our Brahman cow roundups (same things really), and we have the odd cousin that raises alligators. The point is, all of us out here already take risks every day. Whether it’s driving 40 miles across ice and snow highway to the grocery store, or just walking out to the barn to doctor that mean bitch cow’s calf again. Dealing with race horses and stallions of any flavor should be considered and extreme sport. Some people then actually train those things to jump 12 foot water jumps...
We’ve seen those risks, looked them in the eye, sometimes been shaken and shocked when they’ve touched us and our own. But we’ve stood back up, acknowledged those risks, and decided to keep living our life to the best of our ability.
Living life to the best of our ability does not mean this suspended living stuff that is being demanded by people of other walks of life. I mean, “Have you really actually lived until you’ve almost been killed by an angry bovine, while your friends catcalled you?”
Yes, we know that Covid-19 is real. We know it’s dangerous, but we’re headed outside now, and we signed all disclaimers decades ago. Like I said, we see your Rona, and we raise you our lifestyle and our livelihoods.
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It’s all one big coping mechanism for life under capitalism. I have a job that, if a machine decided to not work right anymore, would smoosh me Loony Tunes style and I’d either be a crippled husk waiting for death or I’d be, Yknow, dead. I can’t dwell on that otherwise I can’t do my job, which means I can’t pay for stuff which means I’m SOL. These people cope by saying that “yes its dangerous, so what’s one more danger in my life? I’ll just keep on keeping on until something gets me.” Sadly, if you told them, “It doesn’t have to be this way,” and you explain how, they would recoil at the very notion. Rural America should be a hotbed of communist action, but it’s not, and I sincerely do not know how to turn the tide. America is a failed state that just doesn’t know it yet.
When it comes down to it, rural America is reactionary because of the high level of property ownership among working class people. They're not peasants, they're kulaks. The only way rural America becomes a hotbed of Communist activity is if factory farms literally bought everyone out and forced once proud independent farmers into wage slavery. So far, the state has been smart enough to prevent that
What do you mean? Small scale farms have virtually disappeared, and they have to pad the numbers by counting rich peoples' yards as "farms" in order to keep up the illusion. And the state doesn't prevent that, it subsidizes factory farms while smaller farmers tend to get screwed over by the tax code. Small farms are economically viable without intervention (due to higher yields per acre), but have been disappearing in the US because of the state. That's my understanding at least.
I think it has less go do with class interests and more to do with propaganda and culture.
That's kinda what already exists.
I'm surrounded by those huge houses were chickens are raised for meat. The people who "own" the property/houses are in debt in the millions, are considered independent contractors by the company that picks up the chickens every few months, and don't get to set the sale price of the birds that they raise. All while taking 100% of the financial risk of paying the debt. One of my neighbors sat down with is wife, realized that the money generated from the poultry wasn't even starting to touch the principal of the mortgage and then went back to fixing people's cars/trucks in his yard while his wife handles the day to day of the poultry facilities.
The big difference is they're still property owners, they're just being exploited by big capital and especially finance. When middling property owners feel exploited by financial capital, they don't tend towards Revolution or even social democratic reforms, they tend towards fascism. They will see the banks that they owe money to as (((cosmopolitan))) elites and the big poultry companies will be grouped in with them. They will want to return to a mythical era where people like them can live like kings.
It might be because there's not a visible alternative to moving right.
What most normal people out in the wild view as "the left" is the Democrat party and hippies. Sanders has been the closest thing these folks have seen in .. well.. ever.
And... to "live like kings" for lots of rural folks is the same thing us damned dirty commies want. A secure and comfortable place to live, to have a family, enough money to pay for the necessities of life (or that shit to just be there) with enough left over than you don't feel like you're on the edge of losing everything.
That’s a very astute observation, but many rural Americans of the working class type work in manufacturing or some other non-agricultural capacity. I completely agree that the problem with rural Americans is that they see themselves as a propertied class, but that stems more from the settler mythos of going into the wild and carving out a slice of civilization. It’s the issue of blending land ownership, hard and dangerous work, and a strong sense of individualism that has led to this mentality which makes it so hard to combat. It’s a mix of finding self worth and desperation in the worst possible way. Mind you, it’s not bad to take pride in working with your hands (I’m college educated and I love working with my hands) and it’s not wrong to have a strong sense of self, and it’s not wrong to want your own little corner of the world, but it is wrong when all of that surpasses a basic sense of empathy and reason like we’re seeing with the pandemic. That is collective narcissism and sociopathy on display and it leads to nowhere good. That’s what I find so hard to combat. It almost becomes a psychological and spiritual issue at that point which is really tricky. It’s like combatting addiction, sure, take away the addictive substance but you don’t get to the root of the problem. We can collectivize and unionize every workplace in the country, but how do we deal with the root problem of uniquely American selfishness??
Rural Americans see themselves/portray themselves as salt of the Earth, humble people. It's big city libs who claim that random white trash are "rich" because they own (instead of rent) a falling-apart doublewide, some broken trucks, and $5k worth of guns.
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It sounds like you're personally offended, but literally nobody is saying that they're rich. We are making a Marxist analysis that their relationship to property differs significantly from the urban proletariat and that affects their class character.
Like, obviously you're not rich for owning all those things you just mentioned, but you objectively do own property and have a stake in the system. Chances are if the government decides to build public housing you would oppose it as a waste of your tax dollars, while someone making the same income as you in the city might think it will lower rent and contribute to an overall alleviation of social problems in their community.
Also, the idea that rural folks are mostly living in dilapidated shacks with four broken down cars in the lawn is an overblown stereotype. Those people exist but on the whole they're about as likely to live a "middle class" lifestyle as suburban whites.
Owning property that's worth less than what an urban techbro makes in a year does not mean that you're higher on the class scale than the techbro.
No, but it changes your class character compared to someone who makes the same income with no property. The government started subsidizing mortgages specifically because they wanted to give the Proletariat a stake in the capitalist system.
Also idk why people keep bringing up techbros. When I talk about urban workers I mean service workers, laborers and other low-status/low-pay jobs. Techbros are PMC and take on a bourgeois class character out of pure aspiration lol.
this is fucking delusional, rural people aren't rich. the people they work for are, they're the ones who actually own the land
The vast, vast, VAST majority of rural Americans are homeowners, often with multiple acres of land. Even if you're a working stiff, property is very cheap outside of major cities.
A major contradiction in the American class structure is that you have tech workers and lawyers in NYC, SF, Boston, DC, who make $150k a year who think that it's impossible to even own property along with rural people who've never seen more than $50k who own a large house and 3 acres. Are they both workers, both petty bourgeoisie, one of each, something different?
Live in a rich rural area, can confirm. It’s almost impossible to live out here unless you own property, and most of the property owners out here inherited everything they own from the settlers who stole the land from Native Americans centuries ago. Even so, this place is being hollowed out by a combination of billionaires buying up investment properties and AirBnB for the last of the petite bourgeoisie. If not for climate change exterminating humanity, this place would be completely depopulated within 50 years.
Exactly. "Owning property" is not a sign of substantial wealth in rural America because they are still resting on old laurels where there was lots of free land for the taking.
There's an argument to be made that people who aren't rich, managed to get enough money to buy/mortgage some property or inherited it. Now are just sitting on it until they need to retire and they'll try to sell it.
That's basically what I'm saying. This is a common phenomenon in the US in a way that it isn't in other industrialized countries, but it's way way more prevalent in rural areas.
Idk why you think I said rural people are rich. I know that kulak definitely conjures up images of massive estates worked by basically slaves but I just mean that they are rural petit bourgeois. Even if you don't have a high income owning property drastically changes your class character. You have a stake in the system. Property ownership rates in even very poor rural areas is astonishingly high compared to urban areas. Even suburban areas generally have lots of renters concentrated in big apartment complexes. Sure some people rent in rural areas but generally homeownership is the norm. In a lot of these places you can get a small 2br house with a yard for like $60k and pay a mortgage smaller than the rent of any urban studio apartment while building equity.
If there's any equivalent to peasants in America they're migrant farm workers or immigrants who work at feed lots and slaughterhouses