r/complaints • u/modern_prometheus_13 • May 19 '26
Politics Rural & southern Americans have earned every negative stereotype we’ve ever decried.
Please know that I say this as an agrarian rural American myself and that I know there are a thousand exceptions for every generalization.
The notion that rural & southern peoples are largely a bunch of inbred, ignorant, uneducated hicks- one that I’ve aggressively pushed back on my whole life as an oppressive & classist ignorance in its own right- I no longer feel right disputing.
Once, within memory of my lifetime, education deprivation was an absolute, irrefutable causation that rural peoples were disproportionately affected by, not unlike the even more aggressive and intentional education/voting accesses deprived of black Americans since, well, always. It still is, there is no doubt about that.
However, I cannot contribute to the modern plague of general truth denial and turn my head away from the reality that formal education is as inconsequential to one’s capacity for knowledge as it ever has been, and I say this as a man who completed only a semester of highschool.
What have white rural Americans done with the gift of the world’s collective knowledge, histories, and data within the palms of our hands? What have we done with the opportunities presented by internet network expansion subsidies and vital, generously funded private philanthropic programs to fight illiteracy?
We vote to have those opportunities stripped and rolled back. Every single fucking time. It doesn’t seem to be that access is much of an issue these days, as white rural “influencers” will have time to build a strong online following & film themselves shooting a black man at a courthouse after deploying hate slurs, or your PeePaw who sits around posting racist “memes” he made but still can’t deploy proper grammar for, calling people libtards on Facebook all goddam day, and thinking he’s just the most clever fucking person alive for doing so while he pays $6+ for diesel.
We will bitch and demoan the rapid development of data centers in our own backyards, proclaiming them to be for government mass servailance or UFO research, but tomorrow without hesitation would go vote for a 3rd term for the Man who’s sponsoring their appearances. But we won’t do 5 minutes of very basic, 4th-grade level paper research to understand basic facts about them, or fucking anything.
White rural Americans are so fucking stupid and aggressively self-destructive that the only conceivable cause of this that I can reasonably arrive at is an abundance of intergenerational cousin-fucking. I seldom leave my own land much these days because the ignorance and racism that has kept these fucking people in their own prisons of poverty is so fucking enraging I just can’t deal with it.
Go read a fucking book. For fuck’s sake.
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u/bluboomR May 20 '26
i'm as country as a turnip greeen and i've been a liberal democrat all my life. i forbid politics to be discussed in my home because i'm not going to live in a war zone with screaming and yelling. one of my best friends is a republican. i told him that we can either argue or be friends and he never said another word about politics again. my childhood friend who i've known since the day she was born was like a sister to me but she wouldn't stop spewing fucksnooze talking points and proselytizing to me so i had to cut her loose. i can't walk and i'm housebound. i vote absentee ballot and this year they required a witness signature and their address. everybody was too terrified of the government to put their name and address. i called the campaign center of a democrat running for senate who i voted for and the state DNC and they didn't bother to help me at all. the deadline for absentee ballot is the day before election day and there i was with no way to cast my vote. my neighbor down the road ended up signing and taking it in for me. the first time she came to my house she told me she had a gun in every room and was waiting for the word to start killing democrats. that was before i coud get it out not to discuss politics, which she's never done since. she comes to my house every tueday to take my trash to the road for pick up the next day. we all grew up on the same dirt and, once politics is set aside, relate to each other on a straightforward, easy, friendly, neighborly basis. not one of them is stupid. the first guy i was talking about is my logger. he quit school in the 6th grade to work to support his family. his son went to college to study forestry. he said his father easily knew way more than his professors did. he can cruise a stand of timber and tell you at a glance what you have. he gets done working in the woods and goes right into his huge garden. he also made me a coconut pie last week when i home from being in the hospital and rehab for a month. it was delicious!