Reply #313: great post

[Two Americas]

Thanks Runcible Spoon.

"...she gradually became accepted into the community..."

Rural people are slow to accept outsiders, and fiercely loyal to neighbors.

There is a paradox here. While there is initial resistance to outsiders, and it take a while to be accepted, once accepted there is an amazing degree of egalitarianism and an acceptance of eccentricity. It took me about two years to be fully accepted, but once I was it was more solid than I ever got in more "enlightened" areas.

One little story that illustrates the difference...

There is one farmer I know who is a strong FDR Democrat - not uncommon among farmers - and we were talking about the war in Iraq. Activists from the city, identifying him as an ally, asked him to put up an anti-war sign on the road along his property, and he refused even though he is very opposed to the war. They accused him of not having sufficient courage or commitment or whatever. He said that his farming neighbors had children serving over there, that some had been seriously wounded or killed, and he would never want them to think that he didn't respect their sacrifice. He said it was irrelevant whether they were Republicans or Democrats or did or did not agree with the war - they were his neighbors, and neighbors stuck with neighbors through disasters and bad harvests and hard winters and that was more important than anything. What he did do however, was he sat down at the kitchen table with his neighbors one on one and expressed his opposition to the war and the Bush administration.


...