Scaring Ourselves to Death

In the 70s, my first job out of electronic tech school was servicing mobile and stationary electronic scales.  While I was still in school, I’d started working as a very low skill welder for an ag equipment manufacturer in Dodge City, Kansas.  I was so low skilled that an old friend, who was a real welder, had to show me every step I’d need to perform to pass the job application.  After I got the job, he’d stop by my work station and setup my welder for each task I’d have in front of me for the day.  After a few weeks of cobbling welds on to equipment and grinding them down to almost look acceptable, I graduated to installing the components of the electronic scales to the company’s equipment as it was added to customers’ trucks.  After only a couple of months of that job, and the training and experience I was receiving at the local community college, I started troubleshooting new installations, since the two suppliers of the electronic scales that company used were marginally reliable.  Before I finished my first semester in the electronics program, I was doing almost all of the troubleshooting and repair work, while the two “old guys” who had been holding down the workbenches in the office watched and complained.  I had gone from barely-more-than-useless to indispensable and began to do field service along with bench repairs.  When Ms. Day discovered she was pregnant, I could no longer afford to work part time and accepted a job doing the same kind of work with a competitor in west Texas.  After less than 3 years in Texas, I took another position managing a similar department in central Nebraska.

From the beginning of field work in western Kansas until I left that industry and moved to California, I spent a lot of hours and miles driving through the practically empty Midwestern desert at all hours of the day and night.  You don’t get a real feel for how isolated the people who live in those areas are until you are on one of the many remote US, state, or county highways on the western end of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and the Dakotas in the middle of the night.  
 Back in the 70s, I used to try to imagine what it was like living in one of those isolated homes watching television shows depicting life as it rarely was in urban America.  “Kojak,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” “Baretta,” “The Rookies,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “S.W.A.T,” “N.Y.P.D,” and the endless stream of overly dramatic crime shows featuring white cops battling the invading hordes of brown people.  Obviously, those cities were overflowing with all kinds of terrifying stuff: drugs, murder, rapists in every dark alley, loud noises, bright lights, rock and roll music.  It clearly terrified the folks who would elect Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and finally Trump.  I’m not much of a conspiracy fan and I don’t believe the people who have profited the most from this distortion and polarization are smart enough to plan much of anything.  Whether they planned it or it was all just a happy accident, the outcome is the same: half of the country is scared to death of the other half. 

I’ve lived in some cities—Dallas, Omaha, Los Angeles, Denver, and Minneapolis—and while all of those places were certainly noisy, they weren’t particularly scary.  Statistically, at least two of the small towns I’ve lived in (including the one I’m living in now) have higher crime rates and the assault and murder rates are equal if not higher, too.  When I first moved to Red Wing, I was listening to a couple of geezers babble about how dangerous Minneapolis was, while I was waiting for someone to write up my invoice.  “I wouldn’t go into downtown Minneapolis if you paid me.  It’s like a riot’s going on every day down there,” one of the geezers confidently claimed.

I couldn’t resist and I put in my two cents, ”Actually, Red Wing is more dangerous than Minneapolis.  I’ve lived here less than a year and there have been two murders and, if you watch the Sherriff’s report, the county has almost twice the property crimes per 100,000 residents as the Cities.” 

They looked at me like I was a little green man from space and one of the geezers replied, “Der aren’t 100,000 people in this county.”  And they went back to their conversation as if they’d corrected a small child. 

That is still one of my favorite rural Minnesota stories and I tell it often.  Statistically, the most dangerous places in the United States are rural red areas, mostly in the southeast, but rural areas practically everywhere in the country are a good distance from “safe” and free of violence and property crime. 

I’ve been surprised, in every rural place we’ve lived, at the people who are so afraid of “the big city” in their area that they have never experienced any part of those cities, unless they were brought there by ambulance.  When we lived in a small town in eastern Nebraska, we invited some twenty-something friends to ride with us to Lincoln, about 70 miles away, to see a concert.  On the way, they admitted they’d never been to either Lincoln or Omaha and they were more than a little worried about their safety.  In 1980, Lincoln’s population was about 200,000 and Omaha’s was about 500,000, considerably less than a “big city,” in either case.  Later, we learned that lots of their friends had never been to Lincoln, either, and wanted to hear all about their “adventure” in the city. 

At the other end of that spectrum are the people who live in those cities and rarely think twice about being in a “dangerous” place.  Doing stupid stuff, like wandering through dark alleys with money dangling from your pockets, will get the expected result in most cities (large or small).  Exercising reasonable caution and being aware mitigates that risk considerably.  The thing rural people are most afraid of, in my opinion, is the competition.  Discovering that being the smartest, fastest, tallest, strongest kid in small town America means that you are almost average in the city is a big come-down.  Villages across the country are full of pissed-off people who went to the city to find their fortune, discovered that they are unable to compete in the real world, and went back “home” with their tails between their legs to spend the rest of their lives jealous and bitter.  That is probably the real story of where the American Dream vanished.  The smartest, best and brightest humans are smarter and better than any other time in human history, but the rest of us appear to be getting dumber, slower, weaker and more gullible and dependent.  The 2016 and 2024 U.S. elections were a showdown between the two extremes and, for the moment, the worst of us “won,” but it will probably be a disappointing victory for all of us.