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njlauren -> RE: All the colors of the rainbow - from White to White (7/13/2013 10:43:27 AM)
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The way I take it looking at the whole hard right movement isn't so much as it is racist, as it is feeling like 'their' time has passed. Look at the people running the show at the GOP, and what you see is primarily rural, white folks from down south and the midwest farm belt (and Texas, of course, which I won't insult by grouping it with anyone else:). It isn't that gun ownership, or same sex marriage, or fracking, aren't real issues, they are, but the underlying thing driving this is the feeling that they no longer count. Farm bills, for example, that provide all kinds of benefits to the agricultural states, have always been kind of slam dunks, even though it has been a really long time since the country could be called agricultural (agriculture accounts for 2.5% of employment and I think it is about 10% of our GDP). The GOP is attempting to ramrod a farm bill through and get it passed by the Senate that took out the food stamps provisions, and it is highly unlikely it will pass the Senate, in part because the rest of the country are saying why are we paying farmers not to farm? Why are we paying farmers subsidies when commodity prices are high? Why are we paying people who own farmland who don't even farm? It never was a struggle to get these through, now it is difficult (and in some ways, the farmers are getting back their own; many of them support the Tea Party idea of slashing government spending that subsidizes people, as they say, there is a poor sword that doesn't cut both ways).
You hear it in the rhetoric of the anti immigration people, how "they" are taking "our" America away, and it isn't just about immigration. These are people used to getting their own way; a number of years ago, Colorado passed laws, primarily because of the areas like this, banning any laws protecting gays with civil rights protections that the Supreme Court later threw out as being unconstitutional, since it singled out gays alone for not being allowed these protections. For many years, their attitudes towards gays were not that far off the mainstream, today they are in a diminishing minority. For many years, they could look around and see white representatives, white senators, white governors and until Obama, a white, male president, 98.5% protestant. They also realize that their attitude towards guns doesn't reflect the experiences of the overwhelming majority of people who live in city or suburban areas, and that they are losing the battle that allows gun ownership to be like buying a hammer and nails (a pretty good analogy by that poster). They also fear the loss of the money the government spends in rural areas, that has helped keep them going, whether it is farm price supports and subsidies, or money for other things like electric power generated at cost by federal dams or water projects and so forth.
It is also looking to the past, when even in rural areas people could generally find a decent job, which isn't true any more. Rural areas are dying, their young people leave to go to the more settled areas, and main street is dying. There is a really good article about Mitch McConnell in the NY Times, and it profiles a town that used to be a stronghold of his, Paducah, KY, that had as its largest employer a nuclear fuel plant, and McConnell was known for bringing home the bacon for other things as well.....the town was once a job center for the region, now it is in serious decline as many other small towns are.
The idea is if they secede, they can create a state that represents 'us', 'real americans' whatever you want to call it. Fundamentally, it is also the clash between a culture that is more and more diverse and has learned to value it, or at least tolerate it, and the part that fears change, fears anything but what they always believed was the truth. In reality, same sex marriage, for example, doesn't do anything to their marriages, yet to them it is an affront if the law allows someone to marry who they don't like (which is in effect saying I know what is true, what is real, and the law should reflect that).
Some issues like gun control and fracking are real; the rural areas see fracking as a way to revitalize their economy, as it has done in other areas, other people worry about the environmental concerns of fracking and are worried what it will do to the ecology and so forth, and I can understand both sides of that. With gun control, when guns are a part of your daily life, you may not understand why people want to regulate them, or if crazy enough, think you are going to 'fight the government', in part because they don't see the consequences of allowing guns to be sold easily, that some people in rural areas buy guns by the trunkload and sell them into the black market, and there is nothing to stop them from doing it, since the law presently has no consequences for doing so.
The idea of secession is also a national eye, too.If North Colorado became a state, it would add to the GOP count in the house, and more importantly, would give it 2 senators, adding to the GOP side of the house, which in turn could promise gravy coming from Washington with a strengthened GOP majority in the house and a weakened Dem majority in the Senate.
In many ways, too, it is nostalgia, that they can carve out their own chunk of 1950's America for themselves.
And of course, those seceding probably are not thinking of the consequences, what it would mean to have to pay for a lot more things that currently is a shared burden in the entire state, roads, schools, etc....or how the federal aid picture would shift were they to secede, or what the burden going down the road might be to pay for the fracking they want, the costs in pollution and such....a tiny state with 500,000 people or less is not going to get the same aid they do today as part of a more populous state, and they may find suddenly they are paying a lot more than they used to.
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