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“What Makes You Think You’re Better Than Anyone Else?”

May 16, 2017 By Aaron M. Renn

princess wedding dresses

Downtown Covington, Indiana. Photo Credit: ubackdrop, CC BY-NC 2.0

Some experiences of life are so universally known that they’ve become cliches. Yet when they happen to us we still can’t avoid thinking of them as something remarkable, about which we must tell others as if we’ve made some new discovery about the human condition.

For example, “you can never go home again.” Conservative writer Rod Dreher surely knew this to be true, but he didn’t let it stop him from trying anyway. After leaving rural Louisiana for a writing career in DC and New York, he returned home after being moved by the community that surrounded his sister Ruthie when she died of cancer.

It did not go well.

A recent New Yorker profile of Dreher says:

Over dinner—Dreher, who was observing Lent, confined himself to oysters and crab cakes—I learned what happened when he moved back to St. Francisville. “The thing that I dreamed of and hoped for didn’t work out,” he said. “They just wouldn’t accept me—not my sister’s kids, and not my dad and mom. They just could not accept that I was so different from them. I worshipped my dad—he was the strongest and wisest man I knew—but he was a country man, a Southern country man, and I just wasn’t. All that mattered was that I wasn’t like them. It just broke me.” He fell into a depression and was diagnosed with chronic mono, then went into therapy and read Dante. When Dreher speaks, his emotions flow across his face with complete transparency, changing phrase by phrase. (His glasses, I realized, provide him with some emotional privacy.) As he told his story, he looked freshly wounded, as if it had all happened that morning.

Dreher is the classic misfit dreaming of greater things who leaves and ultimately finds them – but in the process discovers that he’s lost something important he can never regain. And that the things he achieved after leaving did not fully resolve the sense of disconnectness he’d felt growing up.

On the opposite site of the political spectrum, Millennial writer Caity Cronkhite wrote a lengthy polemic two years ago inveighing against the suppression of her educational ambitions that she’d been forced to fight through while growing up in the small Indiana town of Covington:

I returned to Covington Middle School that fall with a pit in my stomach. No one talked about AP classes anymore, because no one in my hometown knew what AP classes were. No one discussed their plans for college, because most of my friends’ parents had never earned any kind of degree past their high school diploma. No one encouraged me to take harder classes or do extra homework that would challenge me, because my teachers didn’t have time or resources to devote to a student who needed extra help. My teachers told me to stop raising my hand in class, because I was an annoyance to them and a distraction to the other students. No one wanted to hear what I had to say anymore.

…

My dad and I chattered over our dinner for several minutes before I noticed that my mother had said nothing. Her eyes were cast down as she pushed a pile of mashed potatoes around her plate, sitting in stony silence. I fell silent.

“You’re not going,” she said simply.

I didn’t understand, not right away. I looked at her, perplexed. “What do you mean?” I finally asked. I looked over at my dad, his mouth agape, staring across the table at my furious mother.

Her voice rose to a fever pitch. “You’re not going! No other kid does this—goes off and leaves when everyone else goes to a normal school and does normal things. It’s only you! You’re the only one who does this. You’ve only thought of yourself and you are not going.” Her face was red, and her tone was murderous. “You. Are. Not. Going.”

Cronkhite eventually made it to Carnegie Mellon, and now lives in San Francisco. Her childhood experiences clearly left a bitter taste in her mouth. These are only two examples, but there are a large number of people with a high degree of alienation from the place they grew up. Luckily for me I never experienced any of this, but I know people who did.  These are particularly good stories to use as examples because they are already published in depth, Cronkhite’s the first person.

The easiest and most natural thing to do when reading stories like these is to critique the people telling them. Usually those who air these types of stories have their own quirks, as most of us do. But there’s no need to do that here, because you can read them for yourselves and draw your own conclusions. I’m more interested in what this pattern tells us about these smaller working class communities.

There’s been a lot written about the plight of working class towns, and how that fueled the rise of Trump. Many of their complaints about economic malaise, and how public policy has been explicitly set to benefit the already successful are true. But that doesn’t mean that these communities themselves don’t need to change. If they want things to be different, then they have to be part of the solution too.

I wrote last week about how pragmatism had helped undermine the Rust Belt and hosted a podcast with Dwight Gibson to explore the matter further.

Today I want to isolate one attitude that seems to underlie many of the experiences of people like Dreher and Cronkhite. It’s something that Cronkhite heard over and over: “What makes you think you’re better than anyone else?”

These small towns have a high degree of social order and social solidarity. Because they are small, the institutions that exist by and large are shared by the whole community. Almost everyone goes to the same school (save perhaps some in religious schools), shops in the same stores, attends the same festivals, etc.

Membership in the community thus becomes defined in terms of memberships in these institutions, rituals, and shared patterns of life. To opt for a different choice is seen as a rejection of the community, and also as a statement that a person thinks he’s better than the rest of the people in the community.

In short, these communities have a limited sense of multiple life tracks, diversity of social networks, etc. In bigger communities, one assumes there are overlapping communities, institutions, etc. and that the community as a whole is really a network of these formed by the overlaps. That’s much less the case in a small town or rural area.

I interviewed someone who was involved in attempting to start a charter school in a small town. There are some legitimate challenges with rural charter schools, but the key rationale of the broad based opposition they faced was that by seeking to start a charter school, they were perceived as declaring themselves better than the rest of the community. This was true even though most folks knew at some level the local public school was terrible and ill equipped to deal with any students outside the norm, like Cronkhite or Dreher.

Even just pursuing higher education can put you into the same category in some cases. That’s one reason there’s so much skepticism about college in these places. (And some parents also surely fear, and rightly so, that college means their kids will move away and rarely be seen again).

These towns need to find a way to move beyond that. Because people want different things out of life.  They also have different skills, aptitudes, personalities, etc.  So they need to be able to respond to those in building their life without being seen as a Judas.  A one size fits all model is just not going to work in the modern economy.

This has consequences because especially the people who go to college and leave are the ones who can be sources of intellectual capital, leadership talent, even future investments back into their hometown. They can also help connect and orient that community to the broader world, even if they don’t move back. There has to be something of value in Covington having a person from there who is now based in San Francisco. Unfortunately, given how things went down, they aren’t likely to be able to take advantage of it.

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Comments

  1. bettybarcode says

    May 16, 2017 at 6:51 pm

    It’s clear to me that Dreher and Cronkhite are seen by their families as class traitors. Not all that different from the heir to a fortune getting booted out of the family for marrying a cocktail waitress.

    • Chris Barnett says

      May 17, 2017 at 7:41 am

      Yet this doesn’t seem to happen in some families. My mother was the 5th generation of a farm family. She (and all but one of her siblings) went to a K-12 village school with maybe 125 students then moved pretty far away for college or work.

      But their dad and grandfather had been off the farm in their early adult years; their grandfather had a doctoral degree, their father was well-read, and their mother had grown up in a big city.

      So I think that some knowledge of other places and the sense of possibility is what’s important. No one in my family ever acted like anyone younger was a traitor for moving on in life, perhaps because they all knew that the different “out there” was ok.

      And then the flip side of what you describe is “yew ain’t from around here”: active or passive hostility toward outsiders and/or different ideas coming into the community. Having attended 8 schools in five cities growing up, and ultimately coming back to Indiana from the east coast to work in manufacturing supply chain management, this aspect I know well.

  2. Robert Cook says

    May 17, 2017 at 5:05 pm

    I read this am I’m thinking of Munising, Mich., in the Upper Peninsula, population 2,000, where I was born and would have grown up had I not been given up for adoption. I’ve since reunited with my birth mother and now bring my family up every year (my adoptive family had UP roots as well, so I’m fond of the area). It might be interesting for you to look into a Munising native named Tom Dolaskie IV, who left to make money in luxury hospitality IT, and has since come back and been a driving force in the town, still operating his company (technically based elsewhere) but buying up and redeveloping a once-sleepy town that is quickly becoming a tourist mecca, thanks to its location next to the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, and Dolaskie’s own aggressiveness in marketing it through his company ROAM, which leads “silent sports” excursions, operates a small hotel and high-end restaurant, even runs an auto repair shop, and is buying up an old department store building to turn it into a brewpub and condos/apartments for his wealthy “silent sports” customers to use. He’s even paid to buy an old Superfund site to turn it into a parking garage, which the town needs for the summer. Because he’s a native, nobody seems to give him any trouble, but his family wasn’t necessarily the cream of the town’s crop — that’s two other families with deep roots in banking/law, and in lodging/restaurants. Dolaskie doesn’t seem to be tapping into bringing the dwindling number of locals into his high-tech businesses, but is doing so for his auto and lodging businesses. He’s definitely tapped into what is really the only growing economy in town (the other big industries are a paper mill, a veneer company that does the floors for the NCAA Final Four, and a prison). I wouldn’t say he’s moved the town’s mindset — there still seems to be a little tension toward people who grew up and got out, and a lot of resentment of tourists — but I haven’t heard of too many people who went back to their small town and made it work like Dolaskie has.

  3. T Michael Lutas says

    May 21, 2017 at 2:03 am

    It’s as plain as the nose on my face the one thing that needs to change in these towns, a collective commitment to, together, look for “plan B”. That means trying to turn their hobbies and spare talents into something that brings in some cash and seeing how far they can take it. For nine out of ten of them, it’s going to be beer money every once in awhile. That tenth guy will make enough to turn it into a full time job, and if you bring together ten of those “one in ten” people, one of them will be hiring on a regular basis, diversifying the local economy. Occasionally, there will be a unicorn born of this, just like anywhere else.

    The proportions are likely off, but not by so much as to invalidate the strategy.

    Approaching things in this way, doesn’t require destroying social solidarity. Everybody puts their noggins to the idea of figuring out a plan B and turning their one industry (or in the rust belt, perhaps zero industry) town into a place that has a number of small and mid sized employers diversified across multiple industries making the area resistant to economic downturns and an attractive place to move to and build up.

  4. HelsinkiBudapest says

    May 28, 2017 at 3:00 pm

    The problem with these small towns is their identity is so tied to the collective, breaking with that sacred element is tantamount to willingly exiling oneself from the Garden of Eden. I lived as a foreigner in four small towns growing up, and though in three of them I was more guest than stranger, the fourth left such a vile taste in my mouth I would have to remove myself from the situation if I ever had the misfortune to meet anyone from there. I always referred to it as “the place where all the Nazis who couldn’t make it to Brazil
    ended up,” as it was in Germany. On the surface I was integrated into the community, spoke the language, even the local dialect. Reality was a different issue.

    Posts and articles in this vein are extremely important to foster understanding on both sides. Generally speaking, I have nothing against small towns, these communities just don’t work for me. Yet, I’m still fascinated by them.

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About Aaron M. Renn


 
Aaron M. Renn is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an opinion-leading urban analyst, writer, and speaker on a mission to help America’s cities thrive and find sustainable success in the 21st century. (Photo Credit: Daniel Axler)
 
Email: aaron@aaronrenn.com
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