Small-Town Values?

Recently, political campaigners have been extolling the virtues of small town America. I grew up in rural America; I've lived in small-town America. And take it from one with wide experience, small-town America has no corner on virtue. Needing emotional support, one of my daughter's friends e-mailed my daughter last week. This friend of my daughter's lives in small-town Texas, the small town where we lived before moving to the big city four states to the east. She constantly feels as if her values are under attack.

My daughter's friend attends a Presbyterian church, is the daughter of a church youth leader, and has been very active in youth work camps. She is appalled by the narrow-mindedness of her classmates; the presidential campaign seems to be exacerbating some of these attitudes. One day in a history class, several students were loudly discussing the election. "Hey," said one guy, "someone ought to organize big chicken fries during voting hours so black people won't come out and vote." Everyone laughed.

Another day, several teenagers piled into a car to drive to a local restaurant for lunch. My daughter's friend was part of the group. As everyone piled in, some sitting in other kids' laps, the driver of the car exclaimed: "Hey, if we were Mexicans, we would feel right at home crowded up like this!"

My daughter's friend hates the racial attitudes these statements illustrate, and she feels lonely because she sees around her a majority of people who own those racial attitudes. And while racism is not confined to small towns, it often is found in such places where minorities are few and thus unknown and misunderstood--or hated because their difference threatens the dominant culture, admits change to that culture.

When my daughter attended the same school as her friend in Texas, she would often come home upset with something that a teacher had said in class. Her English teacher, for instance, openly proselytized far-right conservative views. Once she spent most of class time criticizing the "evil liberal media" and praising the Bush administration. She told her students that Democrats were "all right" if they weren't liberal. She lashed out at gays and gay marriage, called Cindy Sheehan "crazy," and by implication suggested to her students that anyone who criticized the government--particularly the Bush administration--was either crazy or unpatriotic.

My daughter looked around the classroom and saw that all of the class was either agreeing with the teacher or pretending to agree. No one felt free to offer another view.

We should be careful about extolling the virtues of small-town values. Just what are those values? Are we using coded language for "white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant"? Or are we extolling values of community, of people caring for people even when they differ politically, racially, religiously, ethnically? Are we extolling the values of hard work, of recompense for that work? The values of community support?

In his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, Barack Obama extolled those latter values:

For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief — I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper — that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

That's the America I believe in. It's the America my daughter and her friend want to believe in. It is NOT small-town America. It's any-town America where people continue to believe in real freedom.