Comments - White Rural Rage Is Here
It doesn’t feel like you did. For example, your section on the pickup. Basically, you appear to think of it as a fashion statement or signaling display.
I live in rural Virginia. Nearly all of my neighbors have pickups. Why? Two major reasons, both practical. First, someone, usually meaning the homeowner, has to haul the household trash to the transfer station for the dump. That’s a dirty, often smelly mess that you don’t want in an enclosed car.
Second, many people out here have animals and/or large family vegetable gardens, or trades jobs that involve hauling equipment and tools. That means you’re hauling manure, hay, straw, bags of feed, topsoil, and plants. Or generators, drills, power saws, etc. And while you may not haul your horse often, it’s a whole lot safer to have the option to pull a horse trailer than to have a sick horse colicking and no way to get to the emergency vet.
It’s also a lot cleaner to haul dirty power tools in a pickup than a SUV. Most rural people don’t ever need to haul a full sized sheet of plywood, but most of my neighbors take their trash to the transfer station every week. So having a pickup is almost essential, but a particular length of truck bed is not.
It’s a lot more of a simple practical choice than you appear to believe. And yes, if you are getting a pickup, nowadays people are more likely to choose one that can double as a family vehicle with a second row of seats and some creature comforts.
That’s just one example, but to me it suggests a tendency towards preconceptions rather than trying to understand the daily realities of living outside of the city.
I also think you greatly underestimate the impact of the widespread loss of rural manufacturing in the past fifty years, and the resultant impact on rural demographics, but that’s another discussion.
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