re: #19 Targetpractice

This isn’t a gentle thing to say, but:

Okay, I’m arguing with myself and just going to straight up acknowledge it at the get go: I am not addressing other people, I am reflecting on the thing I just said.

I think one of the most horrible things I see regularly in the rural USA is the number of people who have just accepted that they have to suffer and be in pain because life cannot be better, and are terrified to accept help or believe in any kind of collective lifting-up of people because they view it as antithetical to being a good and whole person.

It’s not stupidity, it’s enculturated deliberately in them by powerful institutions and people, and has been for so long that it’s now self-propagating.

And…I say this as an anthropologist-adjacent thinker…it propagates because it allows them to survive. Which is almost Lovecraftian horrible but absolutely necessary to appreciate. Place and community are such powerful, positive things that create a sense of identity that leaving seems like a loss of self…but at the same time, there are people making existing in place harder and harder on purpose. We generally say “people can learn to survive anything” in a heroic way, a testament to endurance, but the flip side is that people can be forced to survive anything and accommodate terrible suffering, and are plastic enough to bend their minds around it. That’s how domestic abuse works, that’s how cults work that’s how dictatorship works: most people just want to be normal and feel okay, and are willing to do the internal work of walling off thoughts and feelings that suggest things are not okay.

There was a day when there was a rural, radical leftism that staged strikes and fought Pinkertons, and I don’t 100% understand where that went, but I think what we see in rural areas is part of the same malady we see in suburbs and dying factory cities except worse. White American culture recalibrated its expectations after WW2, leaned heavy into a hyperindividualist understanding of achievement and effort, and continued on under the assumption that nothing would rake back what had improved.

And then White American culture was convinced to demolish the infrastructure and aid systems that had lifted them up, so that black Americans wouldn’t get a fair share…and that led into “market based” neoliberal policy that let companies just eat towns and a tiny number of chains become monopolies. And at the same time, the rest of the world recovered from WW2, worldwide logistics changed, and labor markets became truly international…all of which took the legs out from under rural industry and markets.

As much as I can get pissed at individual bad actors, the vast majority of these people are subject to systems that have maimed them from birth. It’s like their grandparents broke their legs and then set them crooked, on purpose.

The reality is that we have to talk about them as obstacles to change, but at the same time…it is necessary to resist that individualistic conceit that they have not been acted upon, that there is some kind of absolute “choice” they made.

It’s fucking tragic. My town is tragic, the poor people in my town are tragic even when they frighten or anger me, because….they’ve been put where they are. And by virtue of being both a cultural outsider and member of the elite, I get to see the stay-behind cultural system that keeps them feeling trapped and uncertain and uninformed and thus looking for easy answers.

It sucks, because it would be so much easier if you couldn’t see the machinery that pins them in place.