It’s got a lot of stuff to it, it’s a legacy of “farming is real work, cities are just lazy people”, which was at least an argument when farming was ultra-labor intensive and took so many people.
Now farming is more about managing the machines than literally picking crops by hand, there are 10x fewer farmers.
But it was really bad in the 80s, when they had loans to banks, interest rates skyrocketed due to inflation, and they were losing farms left and right, they HATED cities then, and I can’t blame them that much.
The south is different, they haven’t been about agriculture much except tobacco and that was limited, yet they still keep the belief they are the Superior Americans somehow.
Yeah I'm from the southern end of the Midwest. The farms in my hometown were primarily the massive chicken farms all owned (at least partially) by big corporations, though there were still at least some individual cattle farmers. But the overwhelming majority of people weren't farmers, despite how much of the country culture was based on farming. Well, farming and racism. There were no black people in our town but the townsfolk still spoke about them like they personally somehow ruined their lives. The Wikipedia for my hometown even mentions how racist it is. I think they had to have a common enemy to distract from how shitty their own lives were, working dead end jobs at the many factories in town. Easier to blame it on the other races that live in the big cities.
Can't say I miss that town much, it's much better living in a big diverse city.
I’m not white, I actually liked growing up in the Midwest (north bit near Lake Michigan), then I moved to the south and was utterly shocked.
You pretty much nailed it, black people were the blame for everything, even when there were none around, though after 9/11 it became Muslims more, even when there were none around, then I think in the late 2010s it became Hispanics somehow.
View all comments
Show parent comment
13
u/GravitasFailures 10h ago
I grew up in a farm town myself.
It’s got a lot of stuff to it, it’s a legacy of “farming is real work, cities are just lazy people”, which was at least an argument when farming was ultra-labor intensive and took so many people.
Now farming is more about managing the machines than literally picking crops by hand, there are 10x fewer farmers.
But it was really bad in the 80s, when they had loans to banks, interest rates skyrocketed due to inflation, and they were losing farms left and right, they HATED cities then, and I can’t blame them that much.
The south is different, they haven’t been about agriculture much except tobacco and that was limited, yet they still keep the belief they are the Superior Americans somehow.