I am angry because my people, the whites, have been oppressed for too long!

Soft-headed demagogues like Sarah Palin try to draw a divide between American small towns and urban centers during election season, but similar problems plague both segments of our society: education, drugs, poverty, health care, etc. I came across The Rural Brain Drain, a smart article by married sociologists Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas in a September Chronicle Review that articulately addresses how both the city mouse and the country mouse often end up in the same trap.–though, yes, the problems are more dire in small towns. They also offer some common-sense solutions. An excerpt:

“The Harvard University sociologist William Julius Wilson famously describes how deindustrialization, joblessness, middle-class flight, depopulation, and global market shifts gave rise to the urban hyper-ghettos of the 1970s, and the same forces are now afflicting the nation’s countryside. The differences are just in the details. In urban centers, young men with NBA jerseys sling dime bags from vacant buildings, while in small towns, drug dealers wearing Nascar T-shirts, living in trailer parks, sell and use meth. Young girls in the countryside who become mothers before finishing high school share stories of lost adolescence and despair that differ little from the ones their urban sisters might tell.”

Read the full article.