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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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.