The difference between urban and rural people is...

[formerlurker]

lumberjack_jeff (23,448 posts)

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The difference between urban and rural people is...

Last edited Mon Jan 28, 2013, 11:40 AM USA/ET - Edit history (4)
... nothing.

What differentiates us are our experiences. Urban (and suburban) people generally tend to be exposed to different people, different cultures and more cultural history. Rural people are more locally interdependent, and have a broader set of skills cultivated through necessity.



A rural person must learn to keep his or her house, family, car and community running because there's no one to fall back on. Even if money was plentiful (in rural areas it is generally not) then there's no tradesman nearby to fix whatever is broken.

Urban people have a large collective infrastructure (public and private) to draw upon to fulfill these needs. The time that they don't spend "baking bread and fixing tractors" can be spent at school or the library or the museum.

If this thesis is accurate, urban people are more skills illiterate, and rural people are more culturally illiterate. Both forms of illiteracy are liabilities, but neither form of illiteracy is more or less "stupid" than the other.

It is abundantly apparent that the more prominent gap at DU is the ability for urban people to understand the implications of rural self-reliance. For the same reason we are not close to the museum, we are also not close to the police. If a stranger with ill-intent wanders onto the property, the cops aren't just a phone call away, they are a phone (land line, no cell service here) call and 30 minutes away.

For the same reasons that I don't want anyone taking my chainsaw, tractor or wrenches away, I don't want anyone taking my guns away.

... not because I love them, (In a sense, I hate all of them because they represent unpleasant things) but because I need them - even if I never have to use them.

Where I live, I AM the primary local mechanic, equipment operator, plumber, electrician, carpenter, accountant, librarian, repairman, EMT and cop.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022272568

My experience with rural areas are the residents have a tremendous sense of community.   Should you fall, there will be no less than a dozen people there to help you up. 

Personal responsibility while generous of heart and spirit.   You misfits should try it sometime.

Perhaps we should develop an award for the misfit who is most deserving of forever banishment to Skin's island.   Sekmets Daughter would be hard to beat:

Response to bvar22 (Reply #15)

Mon Jan 28, 2013, 12:57 PM

Star Member Sekhmets Daughter (3,221 posts)
34. No one is coming to grab his guns...

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Nor yours. The moment someone decides to take the debate to the extremes, the debate becomes ridiculous. Rural Americans seem to only appreciate that they 'need' guns, with no appreciation of the fact that because they resist any and all attempts to keep those guns out of the hands of criminals and crazies, they end up in our cities and suburbs where they are used to hunt people...not deer, turkeys or varmints.

I live in Palm Beach County, FL, where every single year we lose children, some as young as 2, to gun violence. Bullets from guns in the hands of gang members and drug dealers come flying through windows to kill them. Or as they are walking home from the school bus stop, caught in a cross-fire. Mandatory registration would go a long way to curbing this...eventually. Would it end gun violence the week after instituted, no of course not...but 10 years down the road it would go a long way toward reducing the number of gun deaths...20 years out, even fewer gun deaths.

Less than 30% of the population lives in rural America...and that percentage is shrinking as people move and suburbs expand. A continued refusal to enter into reasonable measures to ensure gun safety, will eventually translate into the very thing that no reasonable person today wants...a ban on all guns. Not in my lifetime, perhaps not in yours...but eventually. That's what happens when the discussion is carried on at the extremes and no middle ground is ever found....One extreme or the other eventually wins, and demographics are stacking up against guns.

Wow, who knew that rural gun owners lose their guns so often, ending up in the hands of those poor disenfranchised urban gang bangers.    BASTARDS!!! [insert a shaking your fist at social injustice smilie here]

[thundley4]

I grew up in a small town or village, where almost everyone had a garden and a front yard.  Neighbors knew each other, and most of the kids knew each other.

Even today you can drive down the street and people will wave to you even if they don't know you. People still help out their neighbors.

OTOH, I've lived in a town of @70k people, and I've yet to call any type of repairman.  I learned a lot from my dad.

[Freeper]

The difference between urban and rural is the rural folks won't die after a week without power.

[thundley4]

The difference between urban and rural is the rural folks won't die after a week without power.

and they don't wait on the government to help them.

[Freeper]

and they don't wait on the government to help them.

Yep.

[Karin]

   Here she goes again!

patrice (45,057 posts)
30. We could mix better if we had better passenger rail. City could visit rural for the small town festi

vals that they are famous for and rural could visit city for our shopping, entertainment, clubs and restaurants.

What a dumb moonbat.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Response to patrice (Reply #30)
Mon Jan 28, 2013, 02:44 PM
lumberjack_jeff (23,449 posts)
78. With all due respect...

... this is what I'm talking about.

It is completely irrational to talk about light rail as useful goal to connect areas with population densities of 20 people per square mile.
 

[Gina]

Even today you can drive down the street and people will wave to you even if they don't know you. People still help out their neighbors.

Me too.  Hubby when he came here from L.A. California was like  with everyone waving at him when he was driving towards them.  Sometimes I don't get my hand up in time to wave at oncoming traffic and I feel really shitty for that 

[thundley4]

patrice (45,057 posts)
30. We could mix better if we had better passenger rail. City could visit rural for the small town festi

vals that they are famous for and rural could visit city for our shopping, entertainment, clubs and restaurants.

People in small towns live there because they don't want urbanites tramping in and messing things up.  If they want to visit the stinking cities for entertainment, they will just drive their big honking mud-splattered SUVs to town,

[ChuckJ]

Response to bvar22 (Reply #15)

Mon Jan 28, 2013, 12:57 PM

Star Member Sekhmets Daughter (3,221 posts)
34. No one is coming to grab his guns...

View profile
Nor yours. The moment someone decides to take the debate to the extremes, the debate becomes ridiculous. Rural Americans seem to only appreciate that they 'need' guns, with no appreciation of the fact that because they resist any and all attempts to keep those guns out of the hands of criminals and crazies, they end up in our cities and suburbs where they are used to hunt people...not deer, turkeys or varmints.

I live in Palm Beach County, FL, where every single year we lose children, some as young as 2, to gun violence. Bullets from guns in the hands of gang members and drug dealers come flying through windows to kill them. Or as they are walking home from the school bus stop, caught in a cross-fire. Mandatory registration would go a long way to curbing this...eventually. Would it end gun violence the week after instituted, no of course not...but 10 years down the road it would go a long way toward reducing the number of gun deaths...20 years out, even fewer gun deaths.

Less than 30% of the population lives in rural America...and that percentage is shrinking as people move and suburbs expand. A continued refusal to enter into reasonable measures to ensure gun safety, will eventually translate into the very thing that no reasonable person today wants...a ban on all guns. Not in my lifetime, perhaps not in yours...but eventually. That's what happens when the discussion is carried on at the extremes and no middle ground is ever found....One extreme or the other eventually wins, and demographics are stacking up against guns.

You are a stupid piece of shit.

[Gina]

You are a stupid piece of shit.

LoL I don't think I have ever seen you cuss 

[Chris_]

Newsflash, dumbass... gang members and drug dealers don't buy their guns legally.

[ChuckJ]

LoL I don't think I have ever seen you cuss  

As part of my job I'm sometimes around construction workers so I know all of the words. I try not to use them in polite society. I consider y'all polite society.

The members of the DUmp are the farthest thing from polite society. When you're dealing with a 'thing' that is the farthest thing from polite society sometimes regular words aren't strong enough to get the point across.

Besides, they are pretty ladies here, and I've been taught not to be crude with pretty ladies in public.

[jukin]

Like the low IQer said, rural people know how to do basic things and urban people know only how to mooch.

[franksolich]

Like the low IQer said, rural people know how to do basic things and urban people know only how to mooch.

I've never been exactly sure how to classify myself; around here, I'm the "city boy."

When sectioning out my life, I find that I've spent exactly half of it in congested urban areas (Lincoln, Omaha, Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, Wilkes-Barre-Scranton, and around Paterson, New Jersey), and the other exactly half of it in small towns.

But even the "rural" part needs differentiated.  I spent my childhood in a small town alongside the Platte River of Nebraska, the Highway of America, near other small towns. 

I spent my adolesence in a small town exactly the same size (population circa 3000), but way out in the middle of nowhere, no other towns around.

And currently I live out in the country--far out in the country--not in a town, even an itty-bitty one-horse town.

Three utterly different sorts of "rural" life, each of them distinctive in their own ways.

[NHSparky]

Newsflash, DUmmies--I've lived in areas where I went to a one-room schoolhouse (K-8 enrollment: 6) the second-largest city in America, and pretty much towns of every size in between in virtually every part of the country in my nearly five decades on this spinning turd ball.

You're a bunch of ****ing idiots.  Period.  Stay away from the gene pool.  You've pissed in it enough already.

[diesel driver]

The difference between urban and rural is the rural folks won't die after a week without power.

I haven't gone a week without power, yet, but we survived 66 hours without it about 2 weeks ago, thanks to a "global warming/climate change/whatthe**** snowstorm that dropped a foot of it on us in less than 8 hours.

Generator, woodstove, and frequent trips to the creek with a 5 gallon bucket to get water to flush the toilets.

No help from Uncle Barry, FEMA, or any other alphabet agency, either.  Blame my preparations on the Boy Scouts.

So,   DUmmies!

[DumbAss Tanker]

Urban people have a large collective infrastructure (public and private) to draw upon to fulfill these needs. The time that they don't spend "baking bread and fixing tractors" can be spent at school or the library or the museum.

(A) For quite some time rural people have had this thing called a "Car" that could take them to "Town" where they could visit a "Library" and read "Books" for quite some time, and as far as cultural immersion goes, except for a few years between the start of cable and the proliferation of small satellite dishes, they have as much media exposure as any of the urban sophisticates, they just aren't as easily impressed by the stupid shit they see on it.  And there is also that whole innerwebz thing, rural people haz it too.

(B) As far as the second part goes, yes the urban people could, but only a tiny and really insignificant percentage of them actually do.  People are fundamentally lazy and self-interested, that vaunted infrastructure for the most part just makes it easier to indulge those characteristics.

[longview]

(B) As far as the second part goes, yes the urban people could, but only a tiny and really insignificant percentage of them actually do.  People are fundamentally lazy and self-interested, that vaunted infrastructure for the most part just makes it easier to indulge those characteristics.

Hi 5

[NHSparky]

The difference between urban and rural is the rural folks won't die after a week without power.

I've been without for a week at least twice in the last four years.  The fact that it hasn't gone out for more than an hour or two since Hurricane Irene in August of 2011 amazes me, frankly.

Did it suck taking cold showers and hauling laundry to the nearest working laundrymat?  Yup.  My generator won't power my dryer, but it will power the microwave, fridge, well pump, and furnace, and frankly, that's about all I really need.

[diesel driver]

lumberjack_jeff (23,448 posts)

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The difference between urban and rural people is...


...Urban people have a large collective infrastructure (public and private) to draw upon to fulfill these needs. The time that they don't spend "baking bread and fixing tractors" can be spent at school or the library or the museum...

Really?

How's that post Sandy cleanup coming along?

According to DUmmie  lumberless_jethro, the Northeast should be back to normal, without a trace of storm damage, thanks to government and unions.   

[AprilRazz]

patrice (45,057 posts)
30. We could mix better if we had better passenger rail. City could visit rural for the small town festi

vals that they are famous for and rural could visit city for our shopping, entertainment, clubs and restaurants.

Most people in rural areas don't want it. We have vehicles to take us into the city and the trains tend to bring crime back to the small towns. We are looking at houses/land right now to get out of where we are. It will be nice to not live on top of the guy next door and far enough out that crime is not much of a problem.

[BlueStateSaint]

Most people in rural areas don't want it. We have vehicles to take us into the city and the trains tend to bring crime back to the small towns. We are looking at houses/land right now to get out of where we are. It will be nice to not live on top of the guy next door and far enough out that crime is not much of a problem.

Hell, my suburban area's not too hot on it.

[AprilRazz]

Hell, my suburban area's not too hot on it.

Don't get me started on the light rail crap here in Hampton Roads. Millions spent and it hardly goes anywhere.

[Vagabond]

If this thesis is accurate, urban people are more skills illiterate, and rural people are more culturally illiterate. Both forms of illiteracy are liabilities, but neither form of illiteracy is more or less "stupid" than the other.

Urban (city-types) are cultured?  Not by choice, I live in a rather urban area.  The people living near me are by no means cultured, or particularly skilled.

[Wineslob]

I live in Palm Beach County, FL, where every single year we lose children, some as young as 2, to gun violence. Bullets from guns in the hands of gang members and drug dealers come flying through windows to kill them

Blind squirrel........