Awaken, and hear

I have not posted in awhile, but something has been getting under my skin. It does not have one trigger, but a thousand.
Namely: I grew up in a rural community in southern Illinois. There are many things I deplore about the community I grew up in, such as its politics. I have no desire to live there.

However.

I am not ashamed of my origins, and I feel, very firmly, that if you cross the line between disliking the beliefs/practices of rural people and disliking the people themselves, then this is bad.
I am not ashamed of my origins. My accent, like that of many where I grew up, has a flat twang and an occasional drift into a quasi-Southern drawl. I am not ashamed of this and make no effort to hide it.

My beliefs run something like this: if you want to mock the politics of rural America, fine. I'll help. If you want to bash the hidebound religiosity of rural America, that's great. Let me in on that. If you want to deplore the racism that runs deep in a lot of rural communities, I'll agree with you.

But.

If you tell "hick" jokes, I won't laugh, because I am one.
If you put on a fake drawl, I won't laugh, because that's how I learned to talk.

If you believe that the rural way of life is supremely messed up and that nothing good can come of such a way of life, then I really don't have anything to say to you. But then again, you wouldn't want to listen to me anyway, ignorant as I am.

Mock the aspects of rural life all you like. On many topics, I'll join in and help you mock away. However, don't cross the line. It is a way of living. It is highly problematic, but then so is urban and suburban life. If you think it is invalid, then you can't think much of people who come from it or those who live it.

Which means you can't think much of me and I'll take it as my right to avoid you.

I am very liberal. I usually vote as a Democrat in national elections, because I don't want to be part of tossing an election to a Republican by voting for a third-party candidate who hews more closely to what I actually believe. Now, I am not liberal in all things: this is where my status and identity as a scientist shows up. I am not a doctrinal leftist as a leftist quoi leftist, but a scientist, Quaker, and queer feminist whose politics flow from that. I could care less about the Democratic party as such, except when I hold specific members (or the leaders) in contempt for selling out. What I do care about are specific issues, such as equality regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender expression; science policy (such as federal funding issues, plus things like global warming, pollution prevention, and science education); and unwinding the pernicious influence of industry (especially defense and agro industries) in government.
Given the fact that I'm a lesbian and not terribly gender-conforming (I wear my hair long and like poofy skirts, but I don't wear makeup, high heels, or care much at all about what is fashionable), my interest in equality is largely motivated by self-interest. However, I must also admit that as a white person of middle-class upbringing and attitudes, I am very much the recipient of lots of privilege. Also, while I have some mental/psychological health issues, they're all invisible and don't dramatically make me the victim of bigotry. I am firmly committed to the viewpoint that I will never have true equality when people who don't have my advantages (race, appearance, invisible problems) are pushed down. This is why I am infuriated when gay rights organizations toss trans people under the bus, or when hate-crimes bills don't include trans protections.
Being someone who works in the biosciences, I care a great deal about science policy, as it is quite literally my lifeblood. Even more so: I work in a "controversial" area - I study human embryonic stem cells - so I am very much aware of how much my ability to do anything is highly dependent on the will of some policy person in Washington or Albany (as I'm in New York state). It infuriates me that my ability to do my job is decided by someone who doesn't know a lot about what it is I do. I believe, very firmly, that many of the social ills plaguing the country would be alleviated by a more firm focus on primary and high school education, making it easier for people to get a university education, and by an emphasis on science and math education. It wouldn't be an overnight transformation, of course, but it would go a long way, I think.

I grew up in the rural midwest, where pretty much everything is dominated by Agro (with a capital A), specifically ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) and Monsanto in this case. I grew up around factory farms, I know what they look like and how they smell. The swine flu thing does not surprise me - I've seen the conditions on the farm near where I grew up. The terrible conditions of the animals and the high potential for disease is not the only problem with factory farming, either - the agribusinesses are destroying small towns. Now, I'm not terribly a fan of small towns or their nosy intolerance of difference and uptight insularity, but at the same time, I recognize that it is a valid way of living that should not be insulted and attacked. Agribusiness, by buying up huge tracts of land, is displacing families that have lived and farmed the land for generations, dropping the bottom out of the local income tax rates, and basically being one of the primary causes of the big-boxitization and impoverishment of rural America. Amanda Marcotte has a rather excellent post on many of the causes of the swine flu outbreak over at her place, Pandagon, here. During the eighteen and a half years I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere, I saw the town I lived in slide into a sharp divide between rich and poor. The former was the normal doctor/lawyer mix, plus the farmers who were partners of ADM and/or Monsanto and thus now had money while the latter was largely consisting of the people who had sold their land to ADM or someone else and were now trying to live off of minimum wage at Wal-Mart (or by working land they had once owned). While that was happening to my hometown, nearby towns were essentially wiped out as people in them realized that there were no jobs, there weren't likely to be any jobs, and moved away. Some towns died, mine became a stratified place with people living on welfare and people with McMansions. This is happening all over the country, because of the desire of Big Agro to buy, consolidate, and work the shit out of the land for a few more pennies. Big Agro is not only killing the land through bad farming practices and producing antibiotic-resistant illnesses that are killing people, they're perpetrating human rights abuses in the treatment of many of their workers (many migrant, many undocumented immigrants, many poor people of color) and in the terrible beating they're meting out to rural America's way of life. It isn't pretty, and it pisses me off.