Hi, people, from the edge of Jesusland.... Ummm, while yes many--most--towns in the US midwest are culturally isolated and richly deserve critique for their homogeneity, provinciality, and fearfulness, I admit that the descriptions here are a wee bit exaggerated. And there's a whiff of class superiority to some of them: yeah, there are some rich conservative farm families out there, without a doubt, but there are more people just plain stuck, financially and educationally stagnated due to limited resources. As in most countries, but exacerbated, as some have mentioned, by the country's sheer size.
E.g., (if they have the Internet). I think pretty much the internet is reasonably available whereever there's phone service, i.e., everywhere. It may not be fast, but it's pretty cheap--all my relatives back home have it, even one who is homeschooling her 8 children in a tiny house on a single tiny income has the Internet on a borrowed computer in their home. And libraries in just about every small town have it.
And, don't forget, many people like me grow up there, go to college and leave not so much for radically bluer zones, but many for some oasis like Chicago, Minneapolis MN, Lawrence KS, Norman OK, Austin TX, Iowa City IA, or many a college town (which are often pretty liberal in their overall politics and generally considerably more open to racial and sexual/gender diversity--class/economic issues being problems there as everywhere as they all are getting more expensive). No, nothing out here is quite Berkeley, but, well, as with most cultural stereotypes....
Some open-minded souls wind up feeling kind of stuck in the more isolated places, or are somehow up to the challenge of it (although often only briefly. But even a short stay may not be without impact on some pathetic person like me, who at age 17 had a brief friendship with a troubled kid from St. Louis who passed through my town--fobbed off on relatives-- and she managed turned me on to the Circle Jerks and turned me from pro-life to pro-choice after a few conversations...).
Some people stay and figure out creative ways to survive--financially and spiritually--in a situation that is culturally limited--you go to the library a lot, subscribe to Harper's, listen to whatever alternative radio you can find, travel if/when you can afford it, and now, you do use the Internet.
Speaking of which, look, if you read that Wikipedia entry that's been linked to, this woman now has a WEBSITE (see above re: no internet out in Jesusland*), has now been on Jay Leno and other shows...Makes me say, hmmmm. I also note that they swore an awful lot for supposedly devout, Southern Christians. ("Bullshit warrior"? Indeed.) .... Not impossible I realize, and I haven't seen the whole thing, just the You Tube clip... But... my bullshit detectors are on pretty high alert. Yeah, it's possible that she is what she says she is--and I believe it's also simultaneously even more possible that she is a pretty emotionally disturbed person regardless of what the "truth" is--but, deep in my badger guts I suspect the whole thing was heavily staged with her active complicity, for the publicity. (In addition to the 50K-city....)
*Jesusland also has a virtual existence, after all, scattered all over the Internet, no? |
