If we looked upon other nations the way we look upon ourselves, we would call Ethiopia a metropolis and Middle East a thriving first world country. Similarly, if we judged ourselves the way we judge others, we would call ourselves a third world country.
After having been to 43 countries and about as many states, I noticed that most of American is in a sad state of disrepair and about as modern as the country was in 1950’s, and mostly because it wants to be that way. The South is the way it is not because it was left behind, but because it wants to be the way it was and no better. It sees itself in those days as the best it was and it wants to remain that way. Speaking with people, the median American and listening to the radio show “Shit Town” made me realize this. Traveling in the south and rural America, you realize just how isolationist it is. It is a country of people who came here to get away from civilization, to get away from government, to get away from progress and to be left alone. It was a country of hermits in the time of Native America and it is a country of hermits today. America is as it always was, a place where people want to know just enough to survive and no more. To know more is to confuse and to take the eye off the ball: which is themselves and their own business.
This is why speaking to people about the benefit of a country, benefit of society, benefit of progress is pointless because that is not their value, that is not their goal or mission. They don’t need black, latino or asians. They don’t need science. They don’t need the government or the law. What they want is to be able to be as they want to be, a wild, lawless rural, mountain folk. Living off the land and having to do with other humans as little as possible.
Our cities now have majority of people, but they are still a minority of space occupied and given how our electoral system is made, will for a long time be at the mercy of the rural vote, just as it was in 1776.
Little change will happen, in a positive direction except for a few short bursts here and there. I am afraid that what the mad clockmaker John B McLemore said is right, with the current trend we will be descending into dark age, a belief that all laws and science is evil, that progress is evil and our society will collapse where might makes right and the strongest survive.
not-rushin 