Building RC in Small Towns and Rural Areas
I am the Area Reference Person for a “progressive” college town in central New York State (USA). I live in a small town about ten miles from the college town. The region as a whole is conservative politically. I have neighbors, coworkers, and extended family who support conservative ideas and policies.
Sixteen years ago, when I saw the electoral map appear, it became obvious that politically we had a deeply divided, segregated country—the coasts and large cities versus the rest of the United States—and it looked like we were headed for a big problem! I thought we needed to get good at building strong RC in the non-urban parts of the United States, and I became the Information Coordinator for Builders of Rural/Small-Town RC.
The work has been slow for many reasons—some my own limitations but also because of the surrounding conditions. For one thing, it is much harder to build strong RC where there is not already a concentration of RC “resource.”
RURAL AND SMALL-TOWN OPPRESSION
In general, RCers have not understood rural and small-town oppression and how it impacts our RC work. For example, racism confuses people into believing that rural areas and smaller towns are “all white.”
The oppression of small towns and rural areas is an outgrowth of capitalism. It overlaps with classism, but it is not exactly the same.
Small towns and rural areas have been systematically decimated. A century ago, industrial capitalism needed its workers concentrated in large urban areas. Many things were done to convince people that their lives would be better in urban areas, to make it their “best” or only option. The people remaining had to watch as their beloved communities emptied out or became places for “resource extraction” or vacations for wealthy urbanites.
The distresses imposed by the decimation sit on top of earlier continuing devastations—the attempted genocide of Native peoples and the stealing of their lands, the enslavement of African peoples, industrial/global classism, the loss of place experienced by European and other immigrants to the United States, and so on.
People growing up in large urban areas carry distress recordings that tell them that large urban areas are “more significant,” are “where important things happen,” are “less confused or manipulated,” or are more deserving of attention and resource. A hierarchy has been imposed on our minds in which urban areas are the most significant. We act this out against each other as well as against the rest of the world.
MOVING FORWARD
We need to share RC ideas and tools more openly. We also need to build RC Communities that include people who don’t already agree with all aspects of RC.
Many Communities outside the large urban areas are in liberal college towns. Those of us who live there already have—or could easily have—relationships with people who view things differently from us. But we have more discharging to do about this.
Those of us in small communities need to keep working on a feeling of insignificance and seeing ourselves as significant leaders beyond our small communities.
Here are some questions for allies:
- What do you see (or not see) in the more rural areas around you?
- How is rural oppression acted out in the RC Communities?
- What relationships do you have or want to build with rural and small-town people?
- How do we better back [support] and follow Co-Counselors who were raised rural or in small towns (especially those raised poor or working class)? What led some of them or their families to “leave home”?
- What do you need to discharge to see the intelligence, potential, perspective, leadership, and strength of those who live outside large urban areas?
- What do you think about the non-urban areas of the United States? What do you know about them or the people who live there?
- How are you impacted by distress recordings that say non-urban areas are less important, more distressed or confused, places simply for vacations, “fly-over country,” or filled with “people you need to help”?
- How might you support those who are building RC in non-urban areas? How could you be our allies as we try to reach for those around us?
I am so glad we are having this conversation!
Groton, New York, USA, mjh17@cornell.edu
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for USA political issues
(Present Time 202, January 2021)