I just read Notes from the Urban/Rural Divide: Pardon Me, Your Contempt is Showing by meloukhia.

I was raised in San Jose, California, so it might seem odd that this post hit home for me. But it does.

I grew up hearing from other people that the region of California my father is from wasn’t actually part of California. Because California is only the Bay Area and the Los Angeles area, apparently. The school actually called my parents once to express concern when I repeated to the whole class everything my dad had told me about how to kill chickens for food. (I was also the only kid who had chickens.) My dad is from a farm in the central valley, where his relatives originally came from Oklahoma and Arkansas. People from there were immediately hated even by the existing local residents of California. While prejudice towards “Okies” and “Arkies” in specific had waned where I lived, prejudice towards the general idea was definitely everywhere. People mocked the accents and speech patterns I heard from my relatives on both sides of the family, as another way of saying stupid without actually saying it. It’s still painful to think of how I tried to eliminate the traces of those speech patterns that showed up in my own speech (and sometimes even tried to “correct” my parents, which feels even worse), because I was so mortified by things like that. I actually had teachers tell me it “sounded uneducated” as well. It only got worse when I went to a school that was mostly for rich kids, because then it was both class and urban/rural stuff to contend with. (Because you can be raised in the city and yet still be influenced by the rural-based culture of your family. Which has always made me feel a weird sort of in-between status, regardless of whether I was living somewhere urban or rural at the time.)

Both my parents lived in rural areas or small towns growing up. They live in a rural area now, in the real north of California, not the Bay Area that everyone calls Northern California as if the state stops anywhere near that far south. (People have actually asked me why they’d want to live in the mountains “cut off from everything”.) I live in the largest city in Vermont (one of the most rural states in the country), which was still called a “small town” by CNN. (I’d actually be living in a rural area if I didn’t need the frequent medical care.) And meloukhia is right that rural Vermont was one of the areas most devastated by the hurricane, even declared a disaster area. Entire towns have been underwater. Even in Burlington, which got off light, everyone knows people from the more rural areas who lost a house or a workplace or a town. The idea that the hurricane didn’t really do much damage is… I was going to say ludicrous, but more like grossly offensive.

There’s a naked, ugly, almost angry contempt people in urban areas reserve for rural communities, and it’s a twisted, unpleasant thing. In the wake of the hurricane, some ‘progressives’ suddenly claimed to care about rural issues, taking care to excoriate each other for belittling Irene while there was serious damage in Vermont, but almost immediately afterwards, they returned to their ways, again ignoring rural areas and rural issues in favour of topics they found more interesting. They totally ignored the impact of the earthquake on rural communities, even though that information was made readily available; instead, both Andrea and I got hate mail for the piece that ran here.

I live at a strange straddle of the urban/rural divide, something I’ve discussed before. Most people who read me casually or only see a few pieces of mine assume I am a resident of the Bay Area, since they see I’m from Northern California and the Bay Area is the only thing there, right? So people feel very comfortable letting their contempt fly around me, assuming that I am one of them and will join them. And when I point out that no, their assumptions are actually wrong and I am living in a rural area, there’s not even a hint of embarrassment, just a little ‘well of course you’re different.’

I’m very glad that ou wrote that. Because it says things that have existed in my head since forever but haven’t been possible to say.

Letter to Occupy Together Movement by Harsha Walia

It describes some things I’ve been uneasy about with the #occupy movement, and some I hadn’t thought of, but it’s well thought out and fundamentally about the necessity of involving the perspectives of everyone in the “99%”. (Including the people whose land is already being occupied without acknowledgement from most of the people involved. I don’t see how people can ignore what my inner senses always perceive as this murky ooze of genocide and slavery that practically permeates the American landscape to the point it seems impossible to not notice it. But people do.)

While I don’t know when I’ll have the brain to put it together, my friend (the one who wrote the post about this movement that I linked to before) has requested that I make a video dealing with concerns we have about making sure that disabled people are likewise fundamentally respected by people who probably haven’t thought of it before (and probably don’t respect us now as full human beings). I’ve got ideas on what to put in it, and my friend has helped, but it’s really hard to make a video when you’ve got this little energy. Fortunately she suspects this will be around for long enough that I’ll have plenty of time to put it together. (And who knows, sometimes I say something like that and put everything together in a frenzy of energy one day and collapse for a week or two after. That’s what life with fluctuating skills and energy levels is like, you never know the exact moment when everything will come together right in order to get something done.)

But basically… most people (and therefore most people involved in this movement) fundamentally don’t grasp that disabled people are people. They’ll deny it, and they may believe they think we’re people, but their actions treat us differently than their words do. Even people who are against capitalist greed in theory, have usually not worked out that part of capitalism is valuing people differently based on the kind and amount of work they do, and the creation of a system that figures that if it can’t manage to exploit disabled people then we’re basically trash. And they generally also haven’t thought through the terror of becoming disabled (especially but not limited to cognitive disability) that drives them to the ultimate danger for us — that they’d want to die if they were like us, and therefore we are better off dead. And those two distortions of reality (because reality is that we are valuable because we exist, end of story, there can be no “buts” added to that) combine to horrific effect to both devastate and outright kill disabled people.

But the video I’m trying to make, while it will obviously go into those subjects in enough depth to get the idea definitely across, is fundamentally about the value of all people (and specifically the value of disabled people because we are people). Because without understanding that, this movement will end up reproducing all the screwed-up dynamics that already result in the oppression of disabled people as well as many other sorts of oppressed people. So it’s really, really important that while we support this movement, we also make our voices heard as firmly as possible to get things across so that it is reflecting values that will substantially change things for people already currently oppressed in ways a little more complicated than most people think of when they think of this movement. I absolutely support the general idea of the movement (because if someone doesn’t do something to stop the people with power, there will be destruction much worse than if they don’t do something, even if the something ends up being destructive to people like me in many ways), but I also know that without disabled people’s voices getting heard the outcomes could still be quite bad for us even if their goals are totally met otherwise, and I want to do everything I can to make sure things don’t happen that way.

(And if anyone’s going to get on my case about making a video while I’m supposed to be resting — I’ll try really hard to be careful. I have much more energy than I did when I first mentioned needing to rest, although it’s still a pretty fragile level of energy that can go away fast if I’m not careful. Today I had a doctor’s appointment so I’m really wiped out and can’t even think of making a video without brain-pain, especially given that right now all words I read are affecting me like Words That Bite My Brain, and the words I write are coming out much more scrambled than usual so then I have to read them over and over, biting my brain as they go, until I am fairly sure I didn’t get them in the wrong order. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve read through this and found words like “by” and “from” and “with” and “about” and so forth mixed around, so if I haven’t caught them all, that’s why.)

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m referring to an earlier post called Story, Story, Story, WHAP!. I’m not suggesting that the title of the post become a long-standing name for the phenomenon.)

So for me at the moment it’s any of the many different ways of saying:

“I have this [insert relative here], sort of. But we only visit her [insert ridiculously small amount of time], because she’s got [insert diagnosis here] and she naturally [without us even questioning whether this is okay or necessary] lives in [insert type of institution here].” Bonus points if they don’t treat her even remotely like a part of the family except when they want to make the character in question look sympathetic or like they have a “tragic past”. Extra bonus points if the person has never even met or made the smallest of token efforts to meet their relative but still want to angst about this person’s existence on the planet as far as I can tell. (While never, not even once, thinking of how their relative herself might feel, about any of that, because we don’t have feelings or reactions to not being treated remotely like part of our families.)

I’m not talking about instances where the person is institutionalized for reasons beyond the character’s control, the character has tried to do something about it, and is actively prevented from seeing them for more reasons beyond their control. Like in Lest We Forget (a sort of documentary-on-CD put together by the brother of one of the former inmates of an institution being covered by the documentary), the only times the guy annoyed me more than slightly were for… other things.

It’s more when it’s “This person is barely a part of the family and that’s because that’s how these things work, period, end of story, and this is only ever brought up to manipulate the audience, and the injustice of the situation is never questioned whatsoever.” Or when it becomes all about that one person’s suffering with no comprehension at all that whatever they’re suffering, it’s nothing even close to what their disabled family member is suffering by being in that situation. Or other things along those lines.

That’s not the only thing that pisses me off on sight, but it’s the one that I’ve run into more than once recently, so it’s what I remember right now.

What sort of things (please read the original post so you know what I mean) affect any of you this way? I’ll probably throw more in, in comments, as I remember or run into them.

Edit to add: I’m less concerned with what specific books/movies/etc. people have seen these in, and more interested in what they’re actually doing that provokes this reaction. Although of course people can reply however they want, I just thought there might be some misunderstanding.