Cities are islands of futurism, the countryside a sea of archaism
We all deserve better than to feel like foreigners in the midst of each other. Especially on the mental and emotional plane.
Economic inequality was not always a problem. After the Second World War, the strong and effective American government, with the people’s support due to their memories of the Great Depression, thought it was a no-brainer to create policies to all but eliminate economic want from their lives. And they did. As a result, we had the most prosperous middle-class in the history of the world until the 1970s when it began to unravel.
Wealth inequality has only become more severe since then, aided by technology. Today, the richest Americans tend to live in the top ten most populated metropolitan areas. While rural areas tend to be the poorest.
This is not meant to be an article about economics. I am more interested in discussing how our obscene level of wealth inequality has directly contributed to our political polarization.
This connection seems to be lost in the shuffle of the two issues. They both get plenty of airtime as separate unrelated issues, but no one seems able or desires to connect the dots that one has led to the other. Particularly on a geographic level.
As recently as the 1960s and 70s, cities and rural areas were much closer together in terms of wealth and culture. This reinforced a single ‘brand’ of American culture, whether you lived on Cape Cod, the Arizona desert, or the evergreen Pacific Northwest. It isn’t a coincidence that economic equality led to relative political tranquility with little to no polarization.
Now, these three hypothetical people would be so alien to each other, they may as well be foreigners speaking in tongues.
Why is this? As cities have consolidated a larger share of the American population vis-a-vis non-cities, they also pooled a larger portion of the people’s wealth in a small group of only about 10-15 tiny geographical islands.
Thus, cities have advanced in all measurable areas over the last fifty years, while rural areas are dying a slow death by losing their native-born people and their future wealth to the big cities.
This has created a vicious cycle of cities advancing exponentially - economically first, which leads to cultural advancements, and then political ideas that the stagnated rural areas find foreign.
During the same time, rural areas have stagnated on all fronts, exacerbating the cultural divide even more.
This is why city & suburb dwellers feel like foreigners in our own country when we leave our islands of civilization. And I’m sure rural residents feel a similar alienation when they have to visit a large city.
The political pendulum can always swing back, as life is nothing but a series of cycles. The problem I see is that a significant number of Americans don’t see this as an issue worth thinking about or realize it exists, although it is the root cause of almost of our current problems.
Also, we have immense enemies of the people in the form of our political parties and media that are more than eager to stoke these flames of hatred towards the others in our midst. The media, and now social media, are exponentially stronger and more effective at deluding the populace than compared to the 1980s and 1990s.
This is why the only real solution may be a total reboot of our economy and currency into something we can’t quite imagine yet. But this is exactly the kind of changes we can expect between now and 2044, due to Pluto’s transit of Aquarius.
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