You have written a brilliant piece that EXACTLY reflects my upbringing in a lily-white town on the edge of a reservation. I, too, have been tainted and it has taken me the better part of my life to finally shake off the lies and embrace truth.
Yes, we had “Indian” kids at school, but we whites really didn’t understand the context of our environs. We looked down on them for living in tarpaper shacks. And I was raised a Catholic. Never got into the weeds about the history/circumstances that created this situation - we did not talk about those things.
I agree that elites in this country do not understand the crushing reality for so many that have lived the lie their entire lives. Fortunately, I was curious and learned where and when to ask the right questions - certainly not in the house I grew up in. Truth will set one free and it comes with a terrible cost in rural America.
“1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for thousands of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.” - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Seems to me the fundamental mistake in rural America is that their white skin and nominal Christianity puts them on the same ‘side’ as their Capitalist masters. It takes courage to realize you were wrong and to stand up to economic bullies. Can they find that courage?
Excellent piece. I recently read an article that represents exactly what the 'American Dream' represents. The author named it cruel optimism. In its distracting optimism is embedded the cruel fact that most people won't achieve it, what 'it' is.
I also recently read the afterword of the Three Body Problem in which the author Liu Cixin made a great point. He said (and I am paraphrasing), we are shackled to the time and place in which we grew up. No matter how far we travel from it, those shackles remain. I know after 70 years, some things just never go away.
I'm starting this note at subheading four, whilst the ideas are still swirling: there's a lot in here, and I'd first like to thank you. I see here an essay to the Self, to which I, as a subscriber am privileged to be granted insight. Thank you.
I grew up in Leeds and there weren't any blacks there, either. The blacks were in Bradford. After it got sandblasted, there was an old joke that a true Bradfordian is someone who could remember when the town hall was black and the population was ... Clever. I was at school in Bradford and back about five years ago, I got into a group of old schoolfriends on Facebook When I quit Facebook, we stayed in contact for a while - a short while - via a WhatsApp channel. These are men my age, within a year or two. I was frankly ... disappointed ... when the same kinds of jokes started to be exchanged, and far worse, on that channel. Like the town hall one. So, I quit the group.
Do you think that rural attitudes have to do with being rural, or do they have to do with who Walter Rhein is? Would Walter Rhein be someone else if he came from somewhere else? Would you be different if you were in a teenage gang in Gilbert AZ? Would you be as surprised at being prosecuted by the Vatican as I was to read that a property valuer in London was prosecuted by the Vatican? Is Christianity just for Sunday mornings, then? If it is, should we at least be grateful for that much?
Is a mob something we run towards? Or from?
I'll read on from subheading five now. Lots to think about. Not about rural folksy folk, but about you. And, by extension, about me. You don't think I'm reading this to read about other people, do you? We're far more interesting than they are.
I think I could have done without some of the absurd obstacles I've overcome. It would have been nice to have more encouragement along the way. Unfortunately, this is the fight of our time. Thanks for your thoughtful comment!
At the risk of seeming presumptuous, and with greatest respect, absurd obstacles are not in our path for nothing. Some say that conscription is valuable, because it builds character in a young man. But anything that befalls a young man as a young man will go to building his character. Youth is the time of character building.
The esoteric, by lacking substantive proof, is the easiest dismissed of all human attributes, so that whatever character is built by whatever experience in whomever can be ascribed to nascent qualities, innate characteristics or conditioned training, as one will. But, if I might, I believe that man's recognition of the distinction between that which is right and that which is wrong and his ability and will to act consequentially upon his own recognition of that distinction is sooner innate than learned. Not until it is tested can it be recognised, however.
I don't agree that this is depressing, Marco and Sabrina, but this is a topic that is hardly suited to a ping-pong of comment exchanges. If you care to sign up for my blog (which, like Walter's, is free of charge), you can find more detailed exploration of the topic of finding oneself and realising the vast irrelevance of much else in defining who and what you are.
Politics is a game of strategy, whose machinations can secure gain or loss, but in which winning is frequently subjected to aleatory matters outside the player's control. However, finding yourself is not a game of strategy. The question relies on the subject's answering honestly to themselves: which of the two is the more important to them - the world out there, or the world in here?
Think of how those obstacles give you a perspective that you now use to help other people prevent or overcome the same obstacles. Do you know how much I appreciate a writer from a rural town who is an independent thinker?
The urban, rural divergence is real but there is convergence in the upper ranks of the power elite as it relates to the powerless. This is clearly evident in foreign policy where billions are diverted away from tax payers to arms merchants and foreign criminal regimes.
"If one man is duped into doing the labor of two, then one man doesn’t have to endure the hardship of work. But why stop there? Why not divert the profits from ten people, or a hundred, or all people?"
"The pitiful self-delusion of stoicism."
-Walter Rein.
Beautifully said, patiently explained,
Your sentiments here resound so loudly:
"I watch the news and I see ill-conceived, self-righteous, and arrogant methods deployed to placate rural conservatives. There’s nothing more irritating than watching some pampered jerk who has had every advantage in life go on television and lecture me about what we have to do in order to “reach” those that oppose creating a society based on inclusivity, equality, diversity, and progress. "
-Walter Rein
I am not scared to walk among those protestors I could even have been one of them if my circumstances had been different,
"...I remain grateful for their occasional acts of kindness. Despite all that we disagreed on, I could sometimes make them laugh."
-Walter Rein
Beautifully said, It has encouraged me to write a similar piece, but as I am sure you can attest the phrasing and construction is important, so that others especially non-Canadians can understand the author's intention. You have broached a taboo topic, and done it justice.
I grew up in a similar small conservative town. Girls and women are at great risk in these communities. Even now at 63 yo people from home send me death threats because of my religious and political beliefs, mostly surrounding social justice issues. Reading your posts feels validating. No one believes when I discuss the current dangers of sundown towns. Even if the physical signs are gone the physical, mental, and spiritual scars shape the utter control over who lives there.
Walter, thanks for saying what I had expected to learn from JDVs hillbilly book 📚, which at the time I thought was terribly insightful, and now resent the irreplaceable hours of my life I spent reading it. Ugh. 😕
Oh, I was completely taken in, saw him on Fareed's show, etc. He seemed the guy to answer the question of why Drumpf appealed so much to the low wealth rural white people, when he obviously didn't care about them, and wasn't going to do anything to help them. We should have remembered what LBJ said about how if you tell the worst white man that he is better than the best black man, you can pick his pockets easily. That, and your present essay, would have made everything clear.
I am a high school theater teacher in the same high school I graduated from in 2006. My graduating class had 36 people. My mom’s graduating class (same high school) in 1977 had 32 students. My daughter’s elementary class will around 37 students by the time they reach their senior year at the very same small town, middle of nowhere, high school. I was raised in rural Utah by generations of rural Utahns, and still managed to develop the critical thinking skills. The first time my mom told me I had to stay skinny or my husband would leave me, I was able to process the message she was sending, recognize it didn’t actually apply to my situation because I was 9 years old, and as she revisited this same conversation over and over, I figured out that this was never a conversation she with me. She was telling herself this message where I could hear it for the same reason large cats bring live animals to their cubs to practice hunting techniques even though the cubs can’t actually kill and eat the poor prey animal their mom caught. Did my mom give me an eating disorder? Yes. She was trying to teach me to hunt gerbils in a habitat where gerbils weren’t able to survive anymore. She did her best to teach me what she knew from her experiences. Unfortunately, my generation had to learn how to hunt honey badgers to survive. It sounds like your rural ecosystem also had some keystone species upheavals… and that sucks. But guess what… living in an urban setting doesn’t prevent lie dispersal. Not all conservative ideas are still based in the dark ages, but not all progressive ideas are conceived with enough universal understanding to actually promote progression, or they make a positive change for an area or a small group of people but damage a larger population because the driving force behind the movement wanted universal application or enforcement without universal understanding.
Don’t write stuff that would alienate my rural American drama students from their families and neighbors.
Exactly. People can’t be told what to think or how they think…. They should be inspired? told? encouraged? to actually think (or in this case.. write). I am going to coach speech and debate this next year. I really want to be able to influence these kids in a positive way to improve their lives and our community. When I read your bio and some of your stuff, I thought you would be a good source of information to consider when thinking about my situation.
Thank you for this Walter! I feel every single word of this so acutely. I was also raised by rural conservative assholes and it has created a web of bullshit around my entire life that I'm still working to untangle and probably will be for the rest of my existence. Only recently did I have a major epiphany about my upbringing. You see, I've known how screwed up they are for a long time, but I had internalized their opinions of me (weak literal, drama queen, exaggerator) and I recently realized that I've been letting that hold me back when I shouldn't even be giving their opinions any credence at all. And you are so correct. There are parts of who I am that are directly adjacent to the ignorant upbringing I experienced that still haunt my life today. Not to mention that the stoicism you talk about has been used to completely shut down my very real and very valid emotional responses my entire life. It's tough when you realize how fucked up of a situation you grew up in but you still have some affection for at least some of the people who are responsible for it. The struggle is real.
You have written a brilliant piece that EXACTLY reflects my upbringing in a lily-white town on the edge of a reservation. I, too, have been tainted and it has taken me the better part of my life to finally shake off the lies and embrace truth.
Yes, we had “Indian” kids at school, but we whites really didn’t understand the context of our environs. We looked down on them for living in tarpaper shacks. And I was raised a Catholic. Never got into the weeds about the history/circumstances that created this situation - we did not talk about those things.
I agree that elites in this country do not understand the crushing reality for so many that have lived the lie their entire lives. Fortunately, I was curious and learned where and when to ask the right questions - certainly not in the house I grew up in. Truth will set one free and it comes with a terrible cost in rural America.
Thank you for this!
Thank you Peter!
“1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for thousands of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.” - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stem rose
Everybody knows - Leonard Cohen & Sharon Robinson
Seems to me the fundamental mistake in rural America is that their white skin and nominal Christianity puts them on the same ‘side’ as their Capitalist masters. It takes courage to realize you were wrong and to stand up to economic bullies. Can they find that courage?
I doubt it. Thanks for the comment!
Sad, but true. They are weak people desperate to signal the strength they don’t have. I fear the violence they are capable of unleashing.
Absolutely.
Excellent piece. I recently read an article that represents exactly what the 'American Dream' represents. The author named it cruel optimism. In its distracting optimism is embedded the cruel fact that most people won't achieve it, what 'it' is.
I also recently read the afterword of the Three Body Problem in which the author Liu Cixin made a great point. He said (and I am paraphrasing), we are shackled to the time and place in which we grew up. No matter how far we travel from it, those shackles remain. I know after 70 years, some things just never go away.
Anyway, well done and what you say is important.
I hadn't heard it described that way, but that's a very good way of putting it.
Very true. We all harbor situations from the past...good and bad...Hopefully we are able to balance it out to live in relative peace
Dear Walter
I'm starting this note at subheading four, whilst the ideas are still swirling: there's a lot in here, and I'd first like to thank you. I see here an essay to the Self, to which I, as a subscriber am privileged to be granted insight. Thank you.
I grew up in Leeds and there weren't any blacks there, either. The blacks were in Bradford. After it got sandblasted, there was an old joke that a true Bradfordian is someone who could remember when the town hall was black and the population was ... Clever. I was at school in Bradford and back about five years ago, I got into a group of old schoolfriends on Facebook When I quit Facebook, we stayed in contact for a while - a short while - via a WhatsApp channel. These are men my age, within a year or two. I was frankly ... disappointed ... when the same kinds of jokes started to be exchanged, and far worse, on that channel. Like the town hall one. So, I quit the group.
Do you think that rural attitudes have to do with being rural, or do they have to do with who Walter Rhein is? Would Walter Rhein be someone else if he came from somewhere else? Would you be different if you were in a teenage gang in Gilbert AZ? Would you be as surprised at being prosecuted by the Vatican as I was to read that a property valuer in London was prosecuted by the Vatican? Is Christianity just for Sunday mornings, then? If it is, should we at least be grateful for that much?
Is a mob something we run towards? Or from?
I'll read on from subheading five now. Lots to think about. Not about rural folksy folk, but about you. And, by extension, about me. You don't think I'm reading this to read about other people, do you? We're far more interesting than they are.
I think I could have done without some of the absurd obstacles I've overcome. It would have been nice to have more encouragement along the way. Unfortunately, this is the fight of our time. Thanks for your thoughtful comment!
At the risk of seeming presumptuous, and with greatest respect, absurd obstacles are not in our path for nothing. Some say that conscription is valuable, because it builds character in a young man. But anything that befalls a young man as a young man will go to building his character. Youth is the time of character building.
The esoteric, by lacking substantive proof, is the easiest dismissed of all human attributes, so that whatever character is built by whatever experience in whomever can be ascribed to nascent qualities, innate characteristics or conditioned training, as one will. But, if I might, I believe that man's recognition of the distinction between that which is right and that which is wrong and his ability and will to act consequentially upon his own recognition of that distinction is sooner innate than learned. Not until it is tested can it be recognised, however.
That's true, but I think there are some challenges that inflict too much pain for whatever lesson is learned.
This is as profoundly depressing as it is insightful. MAG vs MAGA- even if the G stands for 'Good'
I don't agree that this is depressing, Marco and Sabrina, but this is a topic that is hardly suited to a ping-pong of comment exchanges. If you care to sign up for my blog (which, like Walter's, is free of charge), you can find more detailed exploration of the topic of finding oneself and realising the vast irrelevance of much else in defining who and what you are.
Politics is a game of strategy, whose machinations can secure gain or loss, but in which winning is frequently subjected to aleatory matters outside the player's control. However, finding yourself is not a game of strategy. The question relies on the subject's answering honestly to themselves: which of the two is the more important to them - the world out there, or the world in here?
Try this for starters: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/on-power.
Think of how those obstacles give you a perspective that you now use to help other people prevent or overcome the same obstacles. Do you know how much I appreciate a writer from a rural town who is an independent thinker?
Here’s to curious children! They contribute as opposed to complaining. Thank you, Walter!
and I think they're the last line of defense against fascism.
The urban, rural divergence is real but there is convergence in the upper ranks of the power elite as it relates to the powerless. This is clearly evident in foreign policy where billions are diverted away from tax payers to arms merchants and foreign criminal regimes.
That's true. That's why i say both parties are conservative.
I apologize. I missed that! Great article, btw.😊
That's a general belief of mine though I can't remember if I stated it in this article
"If one man is duped into doing the labor of two, then one man doesn’t have to endure the hardship of work. But why stop there? Why not divert the profits from ten people, or a hundred, or all people?"
"The pitiful self-delusion of stoicism."
-Walter Rein.
Beautifully said, patiently explained,
Your sentiments here resound so loudly:
"I watch the news and I see ill-conceived, self-righteous, and arrogant methods deployed to placate rural conservatives. There’s nothing more irritating than watching some pampered jerk who has had every advantage in life go on television and lecture me about what we have to do in order to “reach” those that oppose creating a society based on inclusivity, equality, diversity, and progress. "
-Walter Rein
I am not scared to walk among those protestors I could even have been one of them if my circumstances had been different,
"...I remain grateful for their occasional acts of kindness. Despite all that we disagreed on, I could sometimes make them laugh."
-Walter Rein
Beautifully said, It has encouraged me to write a similar piece, but as I am sure you can attest the phrasing and construction is important, so that others especially non-Canadians can understand the author's intention. You have broached a taboo topic, and done it justice.
Outstanding, great share.
Thank you!
Wow. I was incredibly moved as I read this article. Thank you.
Thank you!
Walter, congratulations. You've written the fundamental fact and truth of Amerikkka and it's white supremacist crutch.
Well done. Bravo.
Yes, the ONLY way forward is to face this truth. To drown in it. But, it won't kill them, only their old sense of self.
I grew up in a similar small conservative town. Girls and women are at great risk in these communities. Even now at 63 yo people from home send me death threats because of my religious and political beliefs, mostly surrounding social justice issues. Reading your posts feels validating. No one believes when I discuss the current dangers of sundown towns. Even if the physical signs are gone the physical, mental, and spiritual scars shape the utter control over who lives there.
Walter, thanks for saying what I had expected to learn from JDVs hillbilly book 📚, which at the time I thought was terribly insightful, and now resent the irreplaceable hours of my life I spent reading it. Ugh. 😕
It's looking more and more like that's a book that should have never gotten a big contract.
Oh, I was completely taken in, saw him on Fareed's show, etc. He seemed the guy to answer the question of why Drumpf appealed so much to the low wealth rural white people, when he obviously didn't care about them, and wasn't going to do anything to help them. We should have remembered what LBJ said about how if you tell the worst white man that he is better than the best black man, you can pick his pockets easily. That, and your present essay, would have made everything clear.
Yes, it's a question that doesn't get enough attention but Vance didn't know the answer. Sigh... thanks for the comment!
I am a high school theater teacher in the same high school I graduated from in 2006. My graduating class had 36 people. My mom’s graduating class (same high school) in 1977 had 32 students. My daughter’s elementary class will around 37 students by the time they reach their senior year at the very same small town, middle of nowhere, high school. I was raised in rural Utah by generations of rural Utahns, and still managed to develop the critical thinking skills. The first time my mom told me I had to stay skinny or my husband would leave me, I was able to process the message she was sending, recognize it didn’t actually apply to my situation because I was 9 years old, and as she revisited this same conversation over and over, I figured out that this was never a conversation she with me. She was telling herself this message where I could hear it for the same reason large cats bring live animals to their cubs to practice hunting techniques even though the cubs can’t actually kill and eat the poor prey animal their mom caught. Did my mom give me an eating disorder? Yes. She was trying to teach me to hunt gerbils in a habitat where gerbils weren’t able to survive anymore. She did her best to teach me what she knew from her experiences. Unfortunately, my generation had to learn how to hunt honey badgers to survive. It sounds like your rural ecosystem also had some keystone species upheavals… and that sucks. But guess what… living in an urban setting doesn’t prevent lie dispersal. Not all conservative ideas are still based in the dark ages, but not all progressive ideas are conceived with enough universal understanding to actually promote progression, or they make a positive change for an area or a small group of people but damage a larger population because the driving force behind the movement wanted universal application or enforcement without universal understanding.
Don’t write stuff that would alienate my rural American drama students from their families and neighbors.
Don't tell me what to write. I don't belong to you.
Exactly. People can’t be told what to think or how they think…. They should be inspired? told? encouraged? to actually think (or in this case.. write). I am going to coach speech and debate this next year. I really want to be able to influence these kids in a positive way to improve their lives and our community. When I read your bio and some of your stuff, I thought you would be a good source of information to consider when thinking about my situation.
Thank you for this Walter! I feel every single word of this so acutely. I was also raised by rural conservative assholes and it has created a web of bullshit around my entire life that I'm still working to untangle and probably will be for the rest of my existence. Only recently did I have a major epiphany about my upbringing. You see, I've known how screwed up they are for a long time, but I had internalized their opinions of me (weak literal, drama queen, exaggerator) and I recently realized that I've been letting that hold me back when I shouldn't even be giving their opinions any credence at all. And you are so correct. There are parts of who I am that are directly adjacent to the ignorant upbringing I experienced that still haunt my life today. Not to mention that the stoicism you talk about has been used to completely shut down my very real and very valid emotional responses my entire life. It's tough when you realize how fucked up of a situation you grew up in but you still have some affection for at least some of the people who are responsible for it. The struggle is real.
You're right. Even recognizing it's a problem, it's difficult to overcome. Thanks for the kind and thoughtful comment!
Dammit. I wish I'd written this. Brilliant and trenchant. Well done.
That's a very nice compliment, thank you!