Having grown up in a rural town and much later moving around cities, I’ve noticed the people who lean the most heavily into the rural identity are not rural people, but conservative suburbanites and exurbanites. I think it’s because while rural areas have their own historical identities and are secure in it, the exurbs and suburbs are in essence derivative of the white flight that occurred in the past 40 years.

What’s funny is they all despise the metro areas, but are universally ignorant to the fact they are part of them: they all benefit by the public and medical services, infrastructure and economic opportunity their metropolitan cores provide them through the tax base of the city. The people claiming they are living the honest simple life do so on the shoulders of city-dwellers, and can only claim that unreality because their peers are also suburban or urban dwellers and blind to the services urban living entitles them to. In reality you look at them and they are not financially insecure nor do they have any roots to where they live. They pretend to be rurals and think that by purchasing expensive camo wear and unmuddied lifted trucks, by wearing trucker hats and Timbs and listening to AM radio that they will become the people they look up to. But they are not rurals, they are urbanites pretending to be rural. Their lives and livelihoods are not tied to the place in which they live, it is just a playground in which their dollars go further and where they can pretend and separate themselves from reality. My general impression of them is they are just more consumers who waste money, that could be spent on family and community, on recreational vehicles, guns, real estate, and all manner of hedonism and egotism, while hiding behind a conceit of an “honest life”. There is something extremely antisocial and unreal that is festering on the fringes of cities across America. These are people who have already been filtered by a motivation to run away from others, and have selfishly and successfully used their influence to partition pieces of America away for themselves, at extreme detriment to the rest of us. The land of strip malls and highway interchanges was created to serve their needs at the expense of the majority who does not have the mobility to flee to the suburbs. Their hate, which once motivated them to move to the places they now live, is still unsatisfied, and returns to the urban cores to demonstrate their beliefs through violence against the vulnerable and other.