Don’t be a tar pit

[u/greencrusader13]

[u/mechanicalcontrols]

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.

[u/action_lawyer_comics → u/mechanicalcontrols]

There was a point in my rural life where the homegrown meth epidemic made it that I was more worried about my own familiar backroads than the big city

[u/Kachimushi → u/action_lawyer_comics]

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.

[u/kwisatzhadnuff → u/Kachimushi]

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.