i used to be the douche with shitty politics in high school. they were all relatively disengaged and civility types. in defiance of the historical american trope, i grew up in a large urbanized metro “blue” area of a “blue” state and moved away to live/work in a series of smaller towns, mostly underserved regions, generally in starkly “red” areas of “red” states. and, much to others’ shock, my political development has gone in a completely different direction than that of my stayed-in-civilization high school cohort, who now find themselves in a battleground/contested area with suburban pockets of extreme reaction.

i don’t feel like my life’s arc has particularly been smart. my internalization of the information and ideas around me has been slow. all the pieces have been there for decades, but i was not putting them together mostly due to stubbornness and laziness. it all seems obvious to me how wrong i was back then and i am embarrassed at who i was.

i swear to god, every time i looked up somebody from high school back when i still had fb, they became massive chuds. they used to be chill and disengaged when i knew them, but somewhere along the way they plugged into the dumbest info streams and just plain gobbled it like hungry piglets. like just 70% “build the wall” type immigrant-hating chuds. and then like 25% anti-bernie, homeless fearing LIBS with the difference being weirdos who went off the rails, moved away, and vanished into the mists.

watching it has given me a lot of antipathy towards the passive assumption that in relation to rural life, urban life in america is an engine of tolerance or progressive politics. rather, that particular view is driven by the uncritical positionality of researchers and thinkpiece authors.