Jason Aldean recently released a song about how riots would never happen in small towns because the locals wouldn’t stand for it or some kinda crap like that. I haven’t listened to the song, I won’t, and don’t care. It’s a common trope about small towns and a rosy picture painted of peaceful life in them. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
I work in a small town. All I see is desperate poverty, opiates and suicides destroying families, alcoholism, and despair, not unlike the very real urban decay that Aldean juxtiposes against the idyllic small town. Small towns like to tell themselves that everything is alright, but ignoring the very real problems does nothing to address them. So, Aldean’s quasi-racist song is nothing more than a facade for the issues in rural America.
Liberals do not help this at all by characterizing rural America as backward and racist. A couple of years ago there was a push by urban activists, mostly white, to remove Confederate monuments from town squares in small, rural towns like Albertville, Alabama. In principle, this is a good idea. Confederate symbology needs to be removed from official land.
However, in their infinite wisdom, these activists decided to protest a downtown car show, not at city hall where the monuments reside. The participants in the car show had no idea why they were being protested besides the fact that they were rural and white. The rhetoric on social media from the protestors in preceding days was all about going into “enemy territory” to take down the monuments, but they never got there. They stopped at the car show and got into a verbal altercation with car show participants with one notorious protestor telling a bystander to go see a dentist.
In my view, at this moment, the protest was no longer about Confederate monuments. It was about the classist biases of the protestors bubbling to the surface. It was about hate.
The Jason Aldean’s of the world don’t help this situation by painting an idyllic and quasi-racist narrative about rural small towns, but the fact remains that the other side has their fair share of hate and bad behavior too. There’s enough blame for the current animosity between cities and small towns to go around and I have always stated that the difference between cities and small rural towns is that cities are actively destroyed by gentrification while small towns are abandoned all together.
Cities and small towns share class-based self interest in banding together to stop the wanton destruction of our communities and build new institutions that can sustain us through the future.
Excellent piece!