Fuck you John Mellencamp

So do we really need small towns? I mean, what do they provide these days that is a benefit to society as a whole? Let's expand that, what do any communities that live outside the cities provide? Because as near as I can tell they are the breeding grounds for hopelessness at this point. We don't really need farmers right? Robots could probably manage it fairly well at this point, and then we wouldn't have to listen to their opinions on gay marriage, immigration, or really, well anything, as if they were something to take seriously.

Surely the candidates would be for this, I mean they can't really like sitting in yet another shitty diner in a town full of people who's idea of a good time is to roll coal, or persecute minorities, or sexually assault someone. and have to act like they care about these people's concerns and also like their cherry pie. "Mmm" they say as they chew through a thick, dry, flaky crust to the indifferently warmed canned filling,"Nothing like good down-home cooking!" while in their heads they think "If I didn't need the votes of millions like you I would burn this place to the ground and salt the earth, fuck me I am glad I didn't say the word cuisine back there, no one would have understood it."

These places are breeding grounds for ideas that should have been left behind decades ago, they have their reasons, oh yes they do, as the economy changed their employers up and abandoned their homes, shuttering factories and laying off thousands, local employers are limited to a few service industry jobs and maybe farming, if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer then you better move, because the town can only support a couple of those and the old ones won't be going anywhere until they die. Their way of life has changed and they don't know how to change with it, they can only flail about and grasp at anyone who can promise to return things to how they were, or failing that give them someone to blame for it.

They see the cities take their young people and when they come back, with less and less frequency, they aren't recognized at home, they have tattoos, speak faster and with unfamiliar slang, and appear uncomfortable during grace or when gramps starts talking about "the damn wetbacks". They are told the cities are hellholes and they believe it, they don't know why anyone would want to live there and the fact that people seem to care about cities saddens and infuriates them. They are increasingly marginalized and scared about being left behind.

I don't give a damn, their reaction to being scared is to embrace conservative ideals and resist change on all levels, they think they can return to the old days but they can't, those jobs aren't coming back, you can't pay for college by flipping burgers anymore, and gay people and minorities actually do deserve the same respect you would demand from anyone else. But rather than confront even a fragment of this reality, rather than consider that they might try to adapt to it, they demand the world appease them, and every four years they get their chance to make that happen. So the candidates pander to them, assuring them that nothing more will change, that their factories will reopen, that the world will make sense to them again.

That doesn't happen, the progressives want them to educate themselves so the world makes sense, the conservatives just want their vote and will do the minimum needed to buy them off, neither group actually wants to help them in the way they want to be helped, and here's the thing, they shouldn't. They want to live in an idealization of America that never really existed unless you were a middle class white man and that America is never happening again, we are a gigantic, riotous, melting pot of races, creeds, and politics that careens along at a breakneck pace, our ideas batter each other, mutate constantly, and develop in ways that are hard to predict, society moves along and that is as it should be.

Seriously it is hard to comprehend just how big this country is, how many people live here, the fact that we even function at all is a testament to the will of the founders and the efforts that went into expanding us, it is also a testament to how many people we were willing to kill in an effort to create an Empire to rival anything in history, but that to is a kind of determination. With so many ideas, so many people from so many cultures, and I am not even talking about foreign cultures, I mean the difference between Seattle and Lincoln, Washington DC and Phoenix, New Orleans and Bangor, these might as well be different countries, with their own dialects, foods, music, and traditions, yet we all call ourselves Americans as if that alone is enough of a similarity to unite us.

And somehow... it kind of is, so with all that, why does one particular subgroup, albeit one spread around the country and drawing from other subgroups as well, get to be so influential? Why do the rural communities in their crumbling towns and their sprawling farms get to decide who becomes president when the country is never going to be what they want again, and probably never really was?

There are just too damn many of them and they vote, they can't die off soon enough, I for one will welcome our new robotic overlords if it means I don't have to see their values pandered to anymore.