There’s a great cultural divide between rural and urban citizens in the United States today, and it’s not a new thing.
My friend and colleague Brandon Morse, on Wednesday morning, gave us a great analysis of Jason Aldean’s recent release, Try That In A Small Town. So far, and to his credit, Jason Aldean has vigorously defended his work, and that’s good; the first rule of dealing with the Left is this: Never apologize. As Brandon points out, Mr. Aldean is part of a trend.
Americans have proven more and more than they’ve had it with the radical left’s attempts at taking down the good guys and have gone out and shown support to those who have stood against the radical left. They did it for Chick-fil-A, Goya Foods, Hogwarts Legacy, and more recently Sound of Freedom, going gangbusters in theaters in its third week.
RedState’s own Bob Hoge also examined the Aldean phenomenon, and stated an opinion that I share wholeheartedly:
These days, the Left considers virtually everything they don’t like to be racist or related to White Supremacy. In my view, this rocking song is pointing out that the lawlessness happening in our big cities is simply unacceptable and un-American, and owning a firearm is a Second Amendment right. And guess what, folks—he’s allowed to like small-town living; it isn’t a crime.
Both Brandon and Bob make excellent points. The Left is largely failing at canceling anyone with a viewpoint to the right of Leon Trotsky, and that’s because most of us on the Right, be we conservative, libertarian, or somewhere in between, are proud of our lifestyles and have little time or tolerance for the rioting, looting and general disintegration of some of our inner cities, That’s exacerbating the rural/urban divide.
It’s important, though, to take a good hard look at the trends behind this growing divide, of which Jason Aldean’s effort is a symptom – a symptom, as Bob Hoge points out, of the growing frustration of many folks from small towns, rural communities, and outlying areas from Florida to our own Alaska, from California to the Carolinas.
The sources of this divide are largely cultural, and spring from the major cities. A great portion of this trouble has derived from a combination of things: The failure of the education system to teach people how (not what) to think, or indeed, even how to spell or do basic math. There is also, in many of our big cities, a toxic, malignant thug culture that has captured too many young people, and an increasing tendency to disregard the established political process in favor of riots and looting.
One could argue that the rule of law is collapsing now, not in small towns and rural areas, but in American cities, some of which were formerly some of the greatest cities in the world but are now quagmires of crime and corruption. It’s not just the collapse of the rule of law; it is also the corruption of the rule of law by those ostensibly charged with maintaining it. Antifa and BLM rioters receive wrist-slaps, while California prepares to let judges base sentencing on racial considerations like “reparation,” while the Federal government comes down with full force on rural residents for improving the land they own. The very principle of equal treatment under the law is dead.
And at least some of the urban Left is putting forth the idea of trying to start some trouble in small towns and rural areas.
They literally want you dead pic.twitter.com/7MVvlqFNMT
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 25, 2022
That won’t work out the way this person thinks it will. I could cite my own Susitna Valley community, for example; sure, there are no cops close by, and yes, our firemen are volunteers. But everyone in our rural Alaska community is armed. Nobody much is worried, of course, about home invasions, or Antifa, or BLM protestors; we’re more alert to the possibility of a black bear making a foraging run in our freezer. Why we have guns doesn’t matter. We have guns, and we know how to use them. Small-town and rural communities always have. Not all that long ago, small-town folks had their own ways of dealing with criminals, and those ways were decidedly effective. It would be better, of course, not to have to go back to those methods; but rural and small-town folks are capable of it, and that’s a big part of what Jason Aldean is cautioning the Left against.
The United States is a nation built on a set of ideas: That all men are created equal, and that all should be treated equally under the law. We haven’t always been perfect at any of these things. After all, we are also a nation made up of imperfect people, and despite the predictions of various utopians, a perfect society is only possible with perfect people. By and large, small-town and rural folks still hold to those ideas. Plenty of people in the major cities hold to them as well; but squeaky wheels get greased, and right now, the Left and their activist allies are squeaking a lot.
The rest of us are getting tired of listening to them. Now it seems like we’re seeing more push-back. The failure of woke Disney movies and the runaway success of projects like Sound of Freedom are encouraging. That’s a good thing; nobody wants us to wander down the other, possible path.
Which brings us back to Jason Aldean. To Jason Aldean, I will just say this: Hell, yeah. Never apologize.
In a final note, I’ll add that Jason Aldean was prefaced in his rural/urban comparison, by none other than the great Hank Williams Jr., with his 1982 song, “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Old Bocephus saw this coming over 40 years ago, and he told us about it in a song that has become an elegy of the rural and small-town cohorts.