For urbanites moving to small towns

[next_migration]

Finally, I hope you’ll forgive me for some remarks on Right Attitude in your new home, especially if that home is a small conservative town and you are a Blue urbanite. For some this will be very obvious and you may think I’m being condescending, but please believe me that some other people need advice. Lifelong city residents can be just as parochial as rural villagers in their own way. Everyone they know is from the city; they have never met a farmer. (Many urban children actually do not know where tomatoes or potatoes come from.) Better-educated urbanites often have friends and colleagues who are ethnically diverse, but all similarly well-educated; they may never socialize with anyone who isn’t, or have more than a brief conversation with them at the checkout counter or the tire shop. How can they know what behavior is appropriate in a small blue-collar town? Just like a rube going to the big city and unwittingly shaming himself by bristling or sneering at its diversity, city folk in small towns can look like arrogant fools without realizing it. If you get that reputation in your first months, it could take many years to shake it. At worst, if the rural vs. urban cold war turns hot, that could put you in real danger.

 

Adopt small-town manners the instant you get there. Residents of nicer small towns tend to be, or at least act, friendlier and less rushed. They say good morning when they pass people on the sidewalk or join a line at the post office, even if they don’t know each other, or wave when they drive by a neighbor walking his dog. They drive slowly on narrow residential streets because they know children will often be riding bikes in them or playing nearby. They may tap the car horn to say hello to someone (this drives me nuts), but will be slow to lean on it to punish the driver ahead of them who doesn’t move fast enough when the town’s stoplight turns green. They are also less likely to go screeching through that light after it’s turned red, partly because the local cops will write tickets for that. If you display the rushy-rushy big city attitude, impatient and avoiding unnecessary speech or eye contact with strangers, you will get a reputation as an unfriendly jerk.

A minor cultural point: Unless you’re arriving to take a professional job, wear practical clothing if you can. Avoid a style that’s too fancy or overtly countercultural, avant-garde, or “liberal.” Don’t wear T-shirts advertising liberal causes. Observe how residents dress; imitating how they dress for winter will be particularly important to your happiness in the locality. When you need to buy clothing, shop locally as much as possible. That will both build your social connections and help you to dress for the weather. For women, if fancy makeup, short skirts, and spike heels are your current style and you see that women in your new home don’t share it, you had better cut back or you’ll look snooty and high-maintenance at best. Contrarily, if local styles favor makeup and fancy hairdos, some women (like me) may reasonably refuse to conform; the jobs you’ll be shut out of probably aren’t worth having anyway.

I noted before that if you move from a small town to a big city, thanks to urban snobbery, you don’t have to explain yourself. If you move in the other direction, especially dramatically (which is seldom advisable), people will wonder why you’re there. They may think that their home is better, but they don’t expect you to think so. They’ve seen too many TV shows that make it clear what too many urban coastal residents think of Flyover. Have an explanation ready that relies on positive things about the locale. For example, “I want to raise my kids where they can play outdoors and people are friendly.” Not “I wanted to get away from the coming wildfires,” which suggests that you’re just using their town as a convenient host for your personal semi-rural doomstead. At the moment, “I didn’t want to be forced to get a COVID booster every six months for the rest of my life just to work” would be a satisfactory explanation in many places; this may not be an issue forever, though. If you grew up in one state but are currently living in another, you may be strategic about which one you emphasize (try to feature your connection to the more conservative state, or whichever one isn’t California).

Small-town residents have more conservative understanding of social and political issues than most people in coastal big cities. Culture changes more slowly in small towns, so even kindly, politically moderate people cannot be expected to have adopted the most recent “correct” language and behavioral fashions on urban college campuses. Your expectations should be adjusted accordingly. For example, working-class ruralites do not tell everyone they meet what their pronouns are, and many won’t be persuaded to refer to you as “they,” certainly not as “xe” or “ey.” If you go around telling people that you’re “demisexual nonbinary,” most won’t know what it means and will scoff when you explain (even if they actually have the relevant characteristics in common with you!). I don’t mean that you should be willing to accept bigotry, of course, but if you’re a member of an invisible minority of any kind, consider whether you insist on being “out of the closet” with people whom you don’t know well, and if so, don’t move to a place where you suspect that it would make you a pariah. (In the event of a fascist coup in 2024, many invisible minorities would be well advised to keep their heads down unless and until the Union breaks up or they can get out of it.) Also, do not introduce yourself by telling everyone where you went to college, implying that this is a very important fact about you (and, therefore, that lack of a degree is an important fact about them).

In some small towns, a modest number of residents who are non-white, or known to be gay, for example, may be tolerated and even accepted as long as they are not suspected of being Democrats. If you’re going to be a Blue Tribe member in a mostly Red community, don’t go around announcing it, including by means such as arriving in a car coated with liberal bumper stickers. This just invites people who have never met you to start hating you. Let them get to know you as a person before they know you as a political animal.

You will hear people express opinions that you disagree with, or find prejudiced, or know to be false. Do not be hasty to jump in and tell them the truth as you see it. As the saying goes, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. At least at first, school yourself to behave as a person who “doesn’t like to talk about politics or religion,” who is happy to be quiet, make noncommittal noises, and listen. If you’re asked your opinion, be brief and tactful. This is an extended information-gathering exercise. You will be learning what attitudes, beliefs, and topics of conversation are locally acceptable. Sometimes you learn that a person can hold an ignorant or outright delusional opinion, yet still be, in the context of day-to-day living, kind, well-meaning, and decent. Sometimes you learn that a certain person is a malevolent bigot or militia nut; you then know to politely stay as far away from him as possible.

A corollary is that, while you should seek every opportunity to be active in your new community, you should avoid getting involved in contentious political issues, such as by vocal participation in city council or school board meetings or publicly taking sides in local elections, in your first years of residence. If most locals agree with your view, your voice won’t be needed. If they don’t, they’ll see you as a carpetbagger trying to impose the preferences of people in the big city that you moved there to get away from.

Not all small-town people are holy-rollers by any means, even in the South, but few are open, much less angry, atheists. Expressing dislike of the dominant local religion will make you unpopular. Do not suggest to locals that they’re raising their kids wrong, especially if their kids seem less likely to grow up popping psych drugs than big-city kids. Unless the local school is doing something truly atrocious, be very slow to complain; if there is a real problem, longtime residents should be leading the complaints. (You should have checked in advance to see that they’re not teaching creationism, if you weren’t willing to fill in Bio 101 at home.) If you’re a finicky eater, the food at local restaurants may not please you; avoid it if you really can’t learn to like it, but don’t grouse about it. Be patient if traffic on local routes is slowed by farm equipment during planting or harvest seasons. As a general rule, avoid telling people how much better anything was done back home, or they will ask why you don’t go back there.

Gun ownership, hunting, and fishing are common in small towns across the country and can contribute to people’s livelihoods and recreation. If you’re a vocal PETA member or anti-gun zealot, stick to city life—or you could take seriously the dictum that your opponents are not evil in their own eyes, and spend some time learning to see the world from their point of view. As I’ve hinted before in suggesting that liberal youths ought not to avoid military service, adopting some of that culture yourself, i.e., getting a gun and spending some time at the local shooting range learning to use it, might have long-term benefits. It might convince local right-wingers that you’re one of the good people. Or it might just make them think it would be easier to leave you in peace when the rule of law breaks down.

Cops and politicians have a lot of power in small towns—not that they don’t have power in big cities, of course, but it can be more personal in small towns, because they can know or recognize more people as individuals and have the leisure time to make specific people’s lives easy or difficult. (Some towns’ governments and police forces are grotesquely corrupt; I have not knowingly recommended such places, but if you are researching potential destinations, take warnings of that nature seriously.) It’s always wise to be friendly, patient, and respectful when you encounter local authorities; someday you’ll need a permit or something, and they can choose to smooth your path or to throw up roadblocks. Until you know the lay of the land, obey all traffic laws and local ordinances religiously; don’t even jaywalk. If you get stopped by a cop anyway, even if you know it’s a pretext, I advise you to act friendly, patient, and respectful, answer his questions, and pretend to believe he’s just doing his job. This is a tough ask for people like me who are inclined by temperament to assert our legal rights while we still have any left. However, if you act docile and try to get on his good side, he won’t decide to harass you for the rest of your life. It’s worth tugging your forelock once or twice to avoid that.

If you have school-age children, try to school them in the above behaviors, but don’t teach them to fear the “other” faction. You certainly want to raise your children to share your basic values (e.g., that all people deserve rights and respect) and not to be afraid to assert those values in their own words. However, it might be better not to teach political slogans, which would be seen as markers of family factional affiliation, to children too young to have learned the value of discretion. Values are essential; tribe is not. Older children, who can understand and participate in politics, may deal with classmates who aggressively promote the dominant faction at school. These youths should be mature enough to consider questions such as: when is silence complicity, and when is it just a reasonable choice not to bang your head against a brick wall? They should know not to discuss your beliefs and actions with others, but don’t try to control their decisions about whether, when, and how to express their own beliefs or identities.

In conservative communities, many people follow the leaders of their faction in denying the reality of climate change. Someone who has seen enough damage from climate change that they felt forced to migrate may find this frustrating, but there is no profit in arguing with climate deniers; it only places you into their “enemy” category. However, if you happen to be middle-class, do remember that if they have a gas-guzzling pickup and a double-wide, and you have an air-conditioned house full of electronic gizmos and fly somewhere every year or two, your actual carbon footprint might be much larger than theirs. Instead of commenting on the climate costs of other people’s consumption, just work to reduce your own and let people see that you are happy with a modest lifestyle.

That seems like a good place to end this little advice book. Wherever we are, wherever we choose to live or move or stay, most of our families at some future point will be living what most Americans now think of as a very modest lifestyle, out of necessity. Even if the impending collapse of our political system could be reversed, some combination of a resource crisis and a pollution crisis would still compel us all to tighten our belts. Your goal for the coming decades should not be to gain or keep a middle-class-or-better lifestyle; it should be to try to ensure that you and your family will have your basic needs met in the long term. For millions of Americans, the best way to do that will be to move, sooner rather than later, to a community that is better placed than their current home to survive the coming economic and environmental crises, and to become a known and useful part of that community. Good luck to you in that endeavor.