I’m a dumbass and I did not read your comment very well so feel free to ignore this rant. It probably has nothing to do with your post but it’s too late meow. I’m not deleting it.
It actually seems like a mostly reasonable rebuttal from someone who might have different opinions than I do, but I’m not going to argue with you about most of it because of this disclaimer. 🙂
I’m just pointing out that stereotyping people doesn’t actually do anything but hurt the people who don’t suck.
Which is why I object to, or at least would want people to be aware of, the fact that the article promotes stereotypes of (for lack of a better word) ‘city folk.’ Writing an article about the dangers of stereotyping, but predicating it on stereotyping a different group, seems firmly in the “two wrongs don’t make a right” category to me. Especially because, with as often as I see this article referenced, I’m sure plenty of the folks he’s trying to “explain” for the rest of us have read this article and found within it someone who “gets” them - and so will be primed to accept every one of his swipes at urban dwellers as confirming exactly the stereotypes they already had.
He closes by implying anyone who disagrees with him “have gotten angry, feeling this gut-level revulsion at any attempt to excuse or even understand these people. After all, they’re hardly people, right? Aren’t they just a mass of ignorant, rageful, crude, cursing, spitting subhumans?”
My father grew up on a single-family private farm, lived in a farmhouse with a partial dirt floor that used the same fireplace for heating and cooking, attended a one-room schoolhouse, and had to walk to the outhouse to take a shit. To this day I doubt there are even five thousand people living in the town he grew up in. The author is not the only one who has had a foot in both camps, he doesn’t speak for everyone who has, and I think it’s reasonable to point out that he was at pains to paint a very fair picture of rural folks while doing absolutely nothing but promoting stereotypes of urban folks.
Bottom line - we’re pretty far past it mattering on a personal level why maga is tearing down our democracy, rolling back anything resembling equitable treatment of LGBTQ+, rolling back women’s rights, suppressing education about slavery and diversity, etc. They are doing those things. I might care about their plight, but I care about stopping them from further fucking up the country more.