You’re going to see me and mine as people, and as Americans, and I’m going to keep shoving those two facts into your face, and into our national conversation, until you do.

That might sound kinda aggro.

Consider it my last ditch at diplomacy before the election, and after a lifetime of shouting back at editorials that all say the exact same thing:

I don’t matter.

I’m what’s wrong with the country.

And I should thank you for the privilege of enlightening me to that truth.

I recently came across an op ed from the New York Times entitled “The Mystery of White Rural Rage” after finding out that yet again, rural America is getting handed the consequences of your decisions.

This time, it was that our mail — which is already barely being delivered — is going to be delayed even further because the post office needs to cut costs, and rural areas are just so damn inconvenient to deliver mail to. Sucks to be the people who live there, I guess.1

It could be basically be any of the same articles that come up periodically when someone fancy and Northern publishes a book about how backwards, confusing, and, dare I say, elegaic the South is.

The argumentation is intellectually lazy and deeply contemptuous throughout, erasing once again the personhood of anybody who lives outside a major metro area. The author starts off with talk of the “devastating, terrifying, and baffling” book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.2

“I say “devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.”3

But then we get to the heart of the rural rage, which is that technology has taken jobs away from rural areas, thus insulting the dignity that rural people used to find in their rural jobs and from … being rural?

“While these transfers [of money from rich states to poor rural states via federal programs] somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected…”

Misdirected towards who? And why is it misdirected? Unclear, but the underlying reasoning is that

“rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities,”

and thus that loss of perceived dignity hit us … especially hard?

The author is quick to fact-check away any actual grounds for dignity by talking about how “prime-working-age-men” in rural areas are substantially more likely to be unemployed than those in cities —though that’s not their fault, because technology took the jobs — and how rural areas tend to have much higher rates of homicide, suicide, and single motherhood, though that’s not our fault either, because that’s just “what happens when work disappears.”

But still this leads to the “baffling” result that white rural voters — who are, in this article, one solid monolith — vote for Trump:

“The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear.”

Including, in the author’s words, “Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.”4

So we’re …

1. Mad because technology took the jobs. “Technology,” not, you know, people making decisions about policy that they can be held responsible for. “Technology” did it.5

2. The lack of jobs is threatening to our sense of dignity and culture.

3. But we shouldn’t feel that dignity anyway because … the men are largely unemployed and lots of people die unnecessarily and there’s lots of single moms. So you can still feel bad for us, even while fortifying your superiority that you live in an area where men can work and women don’t have as many babies by themselves.

4. And that leads the monolith that is “white rural people” to make the “baffling” choice to vote for the politicians who appear to actually give a shit.

I’m going to say this in as understated a manner as I can muster: what in the fuck are you talking about, you Yankee bastard?

As someone who grew up in rural Appalachia in the 90s and watched the whole entire world fall out from under people’s feet over and over and over again, allow me to enlighten you.

The mystery of white rural rage is a mystery in the same way that the bad guy in a Scooby Doo episode is a mystery. Just like it’s always the shady real estate developer, it’s always because some core, fundamental element of life has been dismantled, allowed to decay, or outright shit on, causing legitimate anger.6

From healthcare to mail to grocery stores to community centers to roads to taxes to emergency services to housing to gas to jobs, it feels like every single element of everybody’s life in rural areas has gotten worse for decades on end, and in many cases, it has.

The plural of anecdote is not data. But when everybody around you, and all their parents, and all their grandparents, have had basically nothing but bad news for decades, it creates a pervasive mental landscape where, even if someone shows you on paper that some study says your life is getting better, you’re still confronted with the hundreds of thousands of daily interactions that say otherwise.

When every story you hear is about…

The lady in your PTA whose kid died from an opioid overdose because your local pharmacy was banned from selling suboxone, or taxi driver whose wife died because he couldn’t afford to buy her asthma medication…

The way property taxes keep going up, even as the roads leading to that property become more pothole than road day by day…

Your friend who’s husband was fed nothing but saltine crackers and jelly packs when they did a month in county, or the news article reporting that the average response time to a 911 call in your area is now over two hours…

Your kid’s school closing, so you have to drive them an hour every morning and afternoon, or learn how to homeschool,7 your grocery store getting gobbled up by a Wal-mart 45 minutes away so your shopping now becomes a weekly event, never knowing whether the check you mail to the IRS is going to get there or not…8

… even if you haven’t experienced these things personally, it’s hard to believe, much less give a shit, about high-level numbers, because that’s not your lived experience. Even if it is true, it doesn’t feel true.

And, it doesn’t help that those feelings are often backed up by facts that show that, as a rural person:

- You’re substantially more likely to die from a preventable or treatable disease, or simply bleed out in an ambulance (that you can’t afford) because the nearest hospital is multiple hours away. What’s more, even those people you do know who can afford healthcare are more likely to die young.

- You almost certainly know at least one person who’s killed themselves or otherwise succumbed to a disease of despair.

- You’re more likely to have to drive an hour or more to get to school, if you can get to one at all, and if you do manage to go to college, you most likely will find it difficult to afford student loan payments after you graduate, unless you move to a city.

- If you own a house, your equity in it will likely be far lower and grow at a slower rate, and you’re more likely to live in a house that’s overcrowded and not suitable for habitation, despite requiring a higher percentage of your income for your mortgage or rent.

- You make less money at your job, if you can find one at all, as rural areas have still not recovered from the 2008 recession.

- And speaking of jobs, you’re more likely to have a job that requires you to drive a lot to get to it, but you also still have to pay the same high gas taxes that people in cities do.

- You’re more likely to have a harder time getting access to groceries, and both you and your children are more likely to go hungry.

- The infrastructure in your town is often literally falling down around you.9

There are so, so many more facts I could throw out here — but the long story short is that rural America gets the shitty end of the stick every damn time.

If this is hard, unbelievable, or relentless for you to read, just imagine what it feels like to live it, and to see everybody else around you live it, every day, forever.

So that “baffling” political choice? Let me walk you through it.

Its really hard to care about the bigger picture when you and everyone you know is struggling to pay for their groceries, and has seen every part of their life, their family’s life, their neighbor’s lives, and their social circle’s lives get worse for decades while simultaneously being mocked for being stupid and blamed for being the problem.

When you have a foundational, life-threatening problem, and someone promises you an immediate and concrete solution, of course you're going to be drawn to them. And that’s what Republicans offer: solutions.

They see the people who are mad because they’ve watched their lives crumble around them for decades, and then capitalize on that feeling to mobilize a voter base by (1) actually listening to them, (2) giving them a concrete target to blame for all the shit going wrong, and (3) promising useful, impacts-your-daily-life-tomorrow change. They get in there and yank on those levers of power, they fuck some shit up, they put that stimulus check in the mail.

Whether or not any of that is sincere, true, or ever actually happens, it feels better than what we get from the other side, which is a persistent swiping at “the rural poors” or “the hillbillies” or “the South” as being just so inconvenient, so backwards, so stupid, so bigoted.

Sure, lots of what Republicans do perpetuate existing power discrepancies and very often the root causes of these issues, but they look like they listen and actually do something.

Democrats, on the other hand, offer policy change. Measured, technocratic solutions and thought that are explored to the point of apparent paralysis, and that will almost certainly actually help with those real problems in the long-term.

The problem is, those dots are never connected for people on the ground. If you’re worried about being able to afford medicine for your baby, you’re not going to give a shit about the nuances of policy, particularly if it’s presented in wonk-speak. What’s more, these people feel abandoned by Democrats, largely because they stopped caring about them a long time ago. After all, they’re the stupid, sad hillbillies, the bigots, the racists, the transphobes, the white trash. And we can’t have those kinds of “problematic'“ people in our party.

Never mind whether or not these people actually align with those identities, their two solid middle fingers up in the air at the requirement to conform to identity politics is enough to put them outside the circle of Democratic care and belonging, which often appears to be predicated on purity of theory and praxis. To put it another way, if you gonna say we’re the outsiders, let us show you just how outside we can be.

(At which point the Republicans come in and say, “Hey, those people are calling you an outsider! But I get you and care about your problems, and I don’t care whether you’re “problematic.”)

And I think that's the ugly underlying assumption on that side of the spectrum, or at least the message that’s getting passed down here: that everybody should benefit from society, but it's OK for the people we don't like or understand to be hurt. In fact, they probably brought it on themselves.

Professor Marc Edelman coined the term “sacrifice zones” for areas that are economically strip-mined and culturally abandoned — and damn if that’s not the approach both sides have taken with rural America.10 One just pretends to give a shit while systematically destroying our lives, while the other tells us they really, super care about everyone, while letting us fall into ruin and then telling us we deserve what we get because we got their pronouns wrong.

Rural areas are continuously asked to eat shit for the good of the country and at the same time demeaned, belittled, scolded, mocked, and declared to be “the problem.”

In light of that, maybe this “baffling” mystery isn’t quite so confusing after all, huh?

How can you possibly expect rural Americans to want to be a part of the American experiment when they're continually put on the wrong side of the velvet rope while being told their problems don't matter and they're what's wrong with the country?

Rural Americans grow your food, provide your water, generate your energy, build your goods, and fight your wars11, all the while watching their children go hungry12, fighting to find work and getting paid less when they get it, watching their towns collapse around them, dying faster and younger13, and serving as the national punchline.

Rural America is America — and if we want this American experiment to continue, we have to make a space for it at the table, not begrudgingly, not when it starts looking like urban areas, not when it “gets in line” or “pays its dues” or learns the right vocabulary. It belongs as it is, right now, as complex, and flawed, and generous, and beautiful as it is.

Learn to love it, or risk losing everything.