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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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.