Rage Would Like a Word
As America goes mad, the temptation to turn on each other grows virtually irresistible. The loudest voices scream insults and indignities across widening divides, drawing us deeper into hostilities, fracturing our nation along a spider web of fault lines.
One of those fault lines is racial, several others are social, another is economic. One of the most pronounced and unstable is geographic, a modern-day equivalent of the Mason-Dixon line, except it doesn’t divide north and south. One side of the line is urban, the other side rural.
Not long ago, two urban authors—one an academic and former journalist, the other a media pundit—wrote a national bestseller about rural rage and the threat it poses to American democracy. The book bulges with telling facts and anecdotes but is just as full of galling stereotypes.
Rural is casually treated as a synonym for white even though a quarter of rural Americans are not white and nearly all rural population growth so far this decade is due to multiracial migration.
Small towns are characterized as places where piety and ignorance are spouses, the rural way of life passed off as taxidermied provincialism that clings to the old ways, nostalgic for the good old days. City life, by contrast, equates to modernity.
Having lived on both sides of this divide, I find the whole rural menace narrative laughably misguided and its popularity depressing. Neither rural nor urban communities are monolithic, both are more complicated than that. The devout and the secular can be found in both places, so can various forms of bigotry, so can tolerance. Both liberals and conservatives live in small towns as well as big cities, just in different proportions. Sentimentality for the past is not unique to either rural or urban communities, nor is innovation.
The vast majority of people living out in the country or in the suburbs or cities are not filled with rage. Some are, but that’s not so much a threat to democracy as it is a smoke signal of smoldering resentment over social and economic injustices that sorely need to be addressed.
As America goes mad, as the loudest voices scream bloody murder, a hundred or a thousand or a million softer quieter voices whisper to us, imploring us not to judge a gift by its wrapping. The urgency of this appeal prompted me to write my forthcoming novel, Miracles Along County Q. The story’s main character is Ray Glennon, known as Rage to the one nearest and dearest. Rage lives in a small town, an enchanting yet stifling place. The book being fiction, Rage’s character is a composite, based not on a single individual but several, better to reflect rural complexity.
Rage is a puzzle to solve, not a threat to fear. Rage is a voice that speaks of the unrecognized riches of those deemed lesser.