California's Country Kids

Victor-Davis Hanson takes a California perspective about the experiential roots of the city kid/country kid divide over at City Journal.

I don't know that all of his examples are as diagnostic as he makes them out to be.

In the manner of ancient genres of the pastoral and georgic, the more urban culture grows, the more it romanticizes the rarely visited countryside. What is the attraction of reality TV, especially of the white, blue-collar people that appear in Deadliest Catch, Ice Truckers, Duck Dynasty, or Axe-Men, replete with rural accents, bib overalls, short tempers, propensities to swear and to fight, and lots of broken-down and often dangerous equipment? Are the good ratings based on urban viewers’ vicarious desire to experience hard nature? Or is the draw anthropological, as if the rural white American in Alaska or the Everglades is a rare species not fully understood but fascinating in his natural habitat? Or are these shows therapeutic and condescending reminders that city folks are clearly superior and still have their teeth, solve problems without screaming, watch their weight, and speak a recognizable, standard English? 

Urbanites now prefer natural granite counters to tile, wood floors to nylon carpets, and stainless-steel appliances to artificial white enamels. But these supposedly natural tastes don’t lead to a greater appreciation of the miner, the logger, or the fabricator—much less of the abstract idea that before there exists a polished floor or counter in the city, lots of messy operations are needed to force nature to give up its bounty. Like bored Hellenistic court poets who romanticized shepherds’ lives in never-visited Arcadia, Silicon Valley techies like to wear heavy-duty hiking boots and flannel and drive four-wheel-drive SUVs with mud tires. The cause of the delta smelt or the San Joaquin Valley salmon fills a spiritual need for the Sierra Club activist; the livelihood of the Hispanic grape pruner in Caruthers and the poor children of the field irrigator in Five Points do not. 

Add all this up, and these days rural man is more likely to be conservative and thus Republican, his urban counterpart liberal and logically Democratic. Freedom is the former’s creed; the equality and sameness of the co-op are the latter’s.

I would argue that  the infantilization of the American youth voter is a cultural moment that will pass, as the children of helicoptering late Boomer parents find themselves thrown upon their own resources.  Maybe they will demand that government pick-up the tab of their upkeep, but I think they will learn what it means to be independent.  If, for no other reason, the size of the budget is already too large to add their upkeep and remain solvent.

Still, the message to city kids is that this is how the divide is viewed from the rural perspective and the land outside the suburb is populated by your marginalized fellow citizens.  Those fellow citizens are worthy of your respect and their voice should be heard, not silenced.

We should learn from their experiences and not force their views to conform with our own.

Different views rooted in different experiences united by mutual respect and local governance.

City Kids, Country Kids, and the Wisconsin Wolf

It is a common city kid fantasy: that a problem can be solved by the passing of a law or the writing of a regulation.  Human problems can only be solved by changing human behavior.

In the end, people do what they think is right or, more cynically, "they do what is most convenient and then they repent."  Either way, laws only work when they operate with the consent of the governed.  There are plenty of laws in every nation which are ignored for this very reason.

If wolves are to find a permanent place in our wild areas it will come through a variety of regulations and laws which through a variety of sticks and carrots, convince the humans who must live beside the wolf to do so grudgingly if not happily.

• There are plenty of laws protecting African lions, but when the people who bear the cost of living next to lions do not share the benefit of having them around, lions are poisoned.
• Preserving the den sites of Illinois rattlesnakes, a necessary part of their preservation, looks very differently if you live nearby, have children, and want to feel safe allowing them to play in the yard.
• The allure of a resident wolf pack is experienced very differently by the downstate resident who travels north to hear them howl once every summer or two and the sportsmen who looses a dog, the livestockman who fears for his animals, or a father and son forced to fire off a warning shot when stalked. 

When it comes to wildlife policy and the health of our wild areas the urban/rural divide shows itself clearly.  It is the difference between those who want to project their vision of what rural areas ought to be onto people who have to live with the consequences.

When passing laws aimed at rural areas, city kids need to gain the consent of the governed.

Take for example a study recently published concerning the attitude of rural Wisconsinites to wolves, the Wisconsin DNR, and their state government.

Christine Browne-Nunez, a post-doctoral research associate working for the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the study, said that the focus groups revealed that the participants’ dislike for wolves is complex. Most of the participants were angry because of their perception that the state Department of Natural Resources failed to manage high wolf populations and the dangers they caused.Among the responses recorded by the study:

• A northeastern bear hunter: “They talk wolf policy and deer policy and everything and managing our predators up north here and they have all these meetings down in Madison where all these anti-hunters don’t know jack about what’s going on up here, and they’re controlling what happens up here. We know what’s going on because we live here, and yet they’re telling us down there what we have to do up here.”

• Another: “I’m going to tell you straight out, plain and simple, the DNR is not honest in what they say. They lie, they lie, they lie.”

Residents who share their world with wolves do not have so much a problem with the presence of wolves as they do with the perception that their ideas and concerns are not heard in state government.  They need to be given the power to live successfully with wolves and that power will only come when their concerns are heard and addressed.

There is the experience that hearings held in Madison, are mostly attended by activists who live in Madison.

Even in the internet age it is hard enough to figure out when a hearing is going to be held but even if you do know when and where a hearing is to be held, you still need to be able to take time off of work to drive down, find parking, and participate in the hearing.
A coyote eats a cat and city kids act like it is the end of the world, but that does not keep them from thinking that they are expert enough to prescribe how northern citizens should live with wolves.  
Twenty-one hunting dogs have been confirmed as killed by Wisconsin wolves so far this year.  In that set of circumstances, people who hunt with hounds have been treated as stakeholders and are compensated for their loss.  While the program is controversial, it is responsible for much of the success we've seen with wolf re-introduction into Wisconsin.

Within my personal circle, I know people who hunt the northwoods with dogs and when they see a wolf they pray for its death.  I do not know anyone who is actually going out to do them harm.  Their hate of the wolf is a result of their love for their dogs.  The knowledge of generous compensation will be forthcoming if they do loose a hound to wolf predation, however, keeps them in the fold. When we had a season, it gave northwoods hunters an outlet for that animosity.

Wolves were hunted to the edge of extinction for a reason, we must eliminate, or at least mitigate, that reason if we would have them return to those places where wild and domestic exist side by side.

Over a couple of springs a resident pack raised litters a few miles away from my house.  That resident pack disappeared.  Maybe it moved.  Probably someone made use of the three S's: shoot, shovel, shut up.  The closer wolf packs expand into more densely populated wooded areas, the more effort will be necessary to win the cooperation of citizens who live in the area.It means winning people over.  It means listening to and accounting for their concerns.  It requires education but an education that exists in the form of two-way communication.  City kids need to be educated about rural realities.  City kids need to account for rather than discount the rural experience.  Country kids need to educated about how to avoid wolf conflicts.  We're going to need to make compromises about where wolves will and will not be tolerated.

Some people live or travel up north to be amongst the wild.  Lots of people moved to West Wisconsin to be a dairyman, hunt whitetail, or to have the benefits living near the Twin Cities without urban or suburban problems.  They're going to need to be convinced to share their space with wolves.  If they can't be convinced, then there will not be wolves in the area, no matter how many laws are passed in Madison.

Mutual respect is the root of the commonwealth.

You Can Always tell a City Kid,

The conservation movement has been so successful that city kids are no starting to experience problems that rural problems are starting to creep into the city.

In September, two dogs were killed by coyotes in western Wauwatosa. The first dog was killed by a coyote during the early morning hours while the dog and its owner were jogging. The dog had just been taken off its leash, according to police. The second attack also occurred in the morning, after a woman let her dog out of the house. There have been other suspected attacks.

Old Story, Still Relevant

Rest assured, there is going to be a meeting.  I suspect joggers will be told that not to let their dogs off lead in the woods and everyone will be told that coyotes eat dogs.  Welcome to earth: third rock from the sun.

As a rural kid whose lived with city kids much of his life, the rural/urban divide has been a chronic cultural hassle.

Homo Sapiens are great at discounting what we do not understand.  Rural kids can not escape some knowledge of the culture of the city.  City kids write our television programming, our movies, and most of our teachers and other leaders spent at least four years in a city.  Even when it is misunderstood, misapplied, and misconstrued, we have some knowledge of the urban experience.  We can't escape it.

The city kids understanding of the rural kid culture comes from shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and  our political concerns are usually understood through the lens of Daily Show Snark.  While the rural kid has some basis to understand the city kid point of view, even when we don't agree with it, the city kid lacks the resources to think rural kid concerns as anything short of irrational.

You can always tell a city kid, but you can't tell him much.

We're treated as foreigners and subjects to be approached with xenophobia rather than as fellow citizens in a heterogeneous culture.  Our President will say we're nothing but Bible and gun clingers.  We're objects of ridicule and if you live or work in the city you quickly learn to conform, shut up, or at the very least pick your battles.

As the story above suggests, however, rural kids have an important voice that should be heard.  We've been dealing with coyotes killing our dogs since the beginning.  We understand why Africans need to be given a reason to preserve the lion population.  In the Anthropocene hunting is an important part of conservation.

If we are to find a way forward together, if we are to overcome political deadlock, if we are to find effective solutions to real problems that account for regional differences in subjective culture as well as objective circumstances, then the abuse of the rural voice must stop.  City kids need to put at least as much effort in understanding and accommodating the country kid as they do the Islamic kid, the Latina kid, the homosexual kid.

That means you don't get everything you want.  Welcome to life in a republic.  Welcome to life in a diverse nation.  Homo Sapiens are by nature tribal.  I refuse to pretend any different.  The Anthropocene began, however, when tribes bound themselves together into nations.  A nation, however, we make account for a diversity of tribes to receive just treatment either by forcing subjugation to the most powerful of the tribes or inclusion.

The answer to "convert or die" is come sit among us as equals.  Right now the city kid's position is closer to "convert or die."  Welcome to the Anthropocene.