[_ehqz]

> Rural communities are often more religious, more conservative, lower income, lower educated, and have a lot less access to opportunity.

Hi there. I guess you are having a day of bad luck or something, cause you managed to get me to reply to you. heh.

I'm basically the walking oxymoron of your example. I was raised rurally, and am more educated than many city slicks. I'm not religious, or poor. Not rich, but not destitute. And as far as my political leanings go, I figure I'm above all of you, because the center was killed by extremists, so there is nothing left but to act better than the rest of you.

And guess what. I'm not alone. There are millions of us out there. You just have to find us among each rural location, heh.

So what I have to say to you here is this. What I am about to say obviously doesn't apply equally to everyone, but seeing as how you are generalizing, so will I.

City folk tend to be the most insufferable blow hards of egotistical proportions, that is often followed with a inability to understand their own shortcomings, because they are too focused on trying to be 'better than the bumpkins' that fucking feed them.

This single sentence from you shows much more of what kind of person you are, than anything else you wrote in front of me right now. It shows that you don't actually have any common decency for your fellow man or woman, because you are too focused on these things.

1. Not being religious. Clearly important to you because you started with it.

2. Being Left Wing, or at least center liberal. Again, importance is easy to see, since you include it right after religion.

3. Being rich, or at least not poor. Now, not knocking you on this, but your idea that people are lower income just because they live rurally is just... wrong. Think long and hard about it. Rural folk, tend to own property. That doesn't just fall in your lap unless you got it from family. This does happen often out in the rural areas because of farms and such; but that shouldn't be a knock against them, since the same happens for rich folk in cities too. Just not with farms, usually.

4. You clearly think of yourself as smarter than the rural bumpkin... but I have news for you. There are plenty of people who live rurally who are not just smarter than you, but literally better than YOU in every, single, way. But you'll never accept this, because it would mean that you would have to accept that someone you don't respect is actually better than you. Fact is, if you actually were as smart as you clearly think you are going by your huge comment thus far...

You would have never said any of this sentence, at all. You would have known better than to do something so blatantly arrogant and ignorant.

5. Less access to opportunity.

This is the ONE thing, I might actually agree with you on. At the end of the day, cities do have that pretty much monopolized. But you should reassess how you put the fact into a sentence, because there are still many opportunities available to the right people in rural areas. You, just might not be the right person. And no, it's not because they want some poor dumb religious stooge. It's because you would be too full of yourself to be wanted in those places to begin with.

[renewiltord]

Much of the condescension you have attributed to the post appears to not be present in it. Population statistics are not individual statistics. Perhaps he is wrong about the population statistics but your existence doesn't invalidate that.

Note how "Children are more often shorter than adults" is true despite the existence of Sophie Hollins of Southampton and Peter Dinklage the actor. That isn't an insult to children and it isn't arrogance on my part to say that I am likely taller than a child at my 183 cm. It's just that, absent other information, certain population measures are true about certain populations.

Anyway, I am curious as to whether rural counties vs urban counties exhibit the differences he's talking about. I'll go look at the census and Pew surveys and see what it brings up.

[TulliusCicero]

A lot of posters here aren't interested in discussing the actual data. They're personally offended, and responding off of that.

[wwweston]

I'm reading the commentor you're responding to as commenting on general social trends in rural areas they're familiar with (or merely hearing about) rather than judgments on any specific individual.

It's certainly possible that they're mischaracterizing the social state of affairs in any number of places, but general rural economic decline does seem to be a frequent form of political handwringing (including complaints from some people ostensibly representing rural voters who claim they're left out when it comes to policy). I would definitely love to hear about specific areas or general statistics that prove the general narrative wrong, though.

[hunterb123]

I'd like to second this post's sentiment and be one more datapoint of the millions like us.

GP's comment was pretty offensive and I like how you flipped the generalizations back to show that.

[selimthegrim]

I live in New Orleans, and I wholeheartedly agree with this take.