What do Dems need to do to win the rural vote

[hunter]

104. Short answer: Nobody listens to it.

My adult children, nephews, and nieces (for example) pay no attention to radio or traditional television. They stream everything. On longer car trips they listen to music, podcasts, audio books, and other content they've previously recorded.

When they are deciding where to live one of their top concerns is the quality of their internet service. If there's no high speed internet or spotty cell phone service they simply wouldn't live in such a place.

I think "brain drain" in rural areas is a very real phenomena. All the interesting kids leave. If they can't leave then they kill themselves, often slowly with drugs and alcohol and too frequently with reckless gun or automobile "accidents."

They best thing "We Democrats" could do is provide easy escape hatches for kids who are trapped. In the past that's been military service or college, and that's been the case for a long time. My grandfather joined the Army Air Corp to get the fuck hell out of Wyoming, which is where he'd landed after running away from home in Montana. He was an officer in World War II and ended up as an engineer working on the Apollo Project. I doubt he'd have survived into his thirties if he hadn't fled rural U.S.A..

From all the bullshit they teach us in grade school we are supposed to romanticize rural U.S.A. as a place of pastoral beauty and good people, but it's actually a fucking wasteland of ignorant genocidal maniacs. We know what they did to the Native Americans and other peoples who were not White and the same flavor of Christianity as themselves.

This nation is never going to solve its many problems until we are willing to take an honest look at our own history. It's an unfortunate fact that White Supremacists, people who wanted to own slaves and kill off Native Americans, were given disproportionate political representation in our Constitution.

As for AM Radio, I think all religious, commercial, and political content should be evicted from it.