Having acquired a Rural Racist Grampa-in-Law by marriage, I’d like to encourage y’all to try to dig a little deeper with this than just sneering mockery. If you have values you cherish, and which represent the consensus in your community, and you see the handful of loved ones your family sends to higher education come back rejecting those values, your first thought is NOT going to be “Well, some stranger must have proven our values invalid,” it’s going to be, “People I don’t know or understand are opposed to my values and corrupting my kids.” The prevailing liberal idea that “All educated people know and agree on better, smarted things than uneducated people do, so if your beliefs clash with our institution’s dogma, they must be wrong” is just as myopic and irrational.
Contempt is not persuasive, and it will heal none of what this nation needs to heal. If you’re not even trying to empathize with or understand rural Americans, you’re not part of any solution - you’re just embodying and reinforcing their stereotype of high-falutin’, snobbish, overeducated liberals.
