What Fear Looks Like

To hear commentators and pundits tell it, the red/blue split is rural/urban, less educated/more educated. I can’t understand for the life of me why being educated is viewed with such suspicion, as if going further in school is a bad thing, that such opportunity naturally leads to snobbery and elitism and people who, I guess, are taught to look down on those who are less educated. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump have college educations.

I don’t think it’s that at all, at least to the extent some apparently do. It is a perception, an assumption, though. Looking at the current election maps, the blue is often concentrated in urban areas, the red in rural areas. What I see when I look at this is not educated versus less educated. I see a difference in life experience and exposure to people who may think and look and sound and believe differently. I see, to some extent, a preferred isolation and provincialism in the red areas. And there is a mix of privilege and necessity in both urban and rural living.

The lowest common denominator, I believe, is not educated versus less educated. I see things more in terms of wanting some elbow room and a say in who your neighbors are, along with having the means to make that happen.

To some extent, red has a control issue, a freedom issue. And it exudes an intentional ignorance that looks an awful lot like racism, all under the guise of some sort of dystopian “love of country.”