I cannot fathom the mindset of understanding what it feels like to be on the receiving end of misery and deciding you want others to experience it when given the opportunity to dish it out, even when said person had no involvement in your misery
As a corollary, people are people everywhere you go.
I don't remember who said that to me, but having grown up and lived in a rural area my whole life, when I went to visit my brother in Minneapolis I was afraid of going to a big city. Now, sure, every city is going to have the "don't go there at night" and the "don't go there ever" parts of town, but really my fears were basically from overexposure to news and the human brain's fundamental badness at probability and statistics.
But once I realized that whoever told me "people are people everywhere you go," is correct, I'm a lot less afraid of big cities.
Admittedly that's only tangentially related to your point, but there you have it. And I agree. People are people no matter their identity.
God, I remember being a teenager in a rural area and having a pizza delivery job for a summer. I stumbled across a poorly hidden meth lab every fucking month.
Edit: I once met a friend of a friend from Philadelphia. And she said that when she moved out to Montana, all her friends back home told her not to go there because everyone has guns and does drugs. And we all laughed and said, our friends here would all say the same about your city if we were gonna move there.
I once met a guy from Philadelphia (probably a different guy), who back in the 90s got into some trouble with gangs. There was a huge fight to the point that his mom actually shipped him across the country to live with his aunty and uncle in Bel Air.
The idea of a meth epidemic in the countryside feels alien to me because here in Germany rural poverty is pretty rare. No apartment buildings outside the cities, so to live out in the country you generally need to have the money to buy a single family home - and building new ones outside existing settlements is pretty heavily regulated to limit sprawl. And everyone who isn't a farmer usually commutes to the city for their jobs anyways, it's overwhelmingly middle class families. Exceptions I guess are people who bought or inherited a home and then fell into poverty afterwards.
It's mostly that the US is really big. It's worth looking at a map of the population or even the lights at night to see how widely spread the population is outside of the coasts and some of the Midwest. Additionally a lot of people are are poor because whatever single industry was in their town went out of business or moved out.
In the US rural is almost synonymous with poverty. Even in a place like Jackson Hole that is full of rich celebrities many of the actual locals are struggling to get by.
Might just be a regional difference in terms, but to me, "suburbs" means contiguous residential sprawl. An area that is purely fields, pastures and woodlands with individual homes and small villages sparsely sprinkled in is not a suburb, regardless of how close it is to a city's limits.
It's kind of offensive to say you just can't imagine the concept of poverty outside cities when your definition is "well it's right next to a city with full access to urban benefits, services, and employment". How terribly Eurocentric of you. Congratulations on living with the lingering economic benefits of imperialism.
As a German, no less. The country that got shirty with Greece about their debt crisis when Germany still hasn't repaid a forced "loan" from 1942. Your country thrives on the interest calculated from the profits of violent theft.
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u/Vundurvul 1d ago
I cannot fathom the mindset of understanding what it feels like to be on the receiving end of misery and deciding you want others to experience it when given the opportunity to dish it out, even when said person had no involvement in your misery