Quote: (12-10-2018 10:02 AM)Jetset Wrote:
Quote: (12-08-2018 12:45 PM)Montrose Wrote:
The crowd were ´white trash’ from rural Picardy, Normandy and Artois, with a strong country accent, rather genial and cheerful.
This is not a deep insight, but one of the things that struck me when I visited France - and I realize that the people I met were subject to selection bias - was that rural people were pretty upbeat and alert.
I would go so far as to call them "bouncy". It's not easy to find communities of rural Americans, at least in the northeast and midwest, who can be described this way.
It's easy to roll your eyes when someone who drifts through most of their life like a dead-eyed zombie complains about the government and makes a bunch of empty promises about what they're going to do about it. They've never done anything about anything and they won't do anything about it now. It's less easy to dismiss people who are, if not sophisticated enough to fully understand what they're getting into, broadly functional, curious, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed enough to figure it out as they go.
You speak the truth about the northeast US. In New Hampshire, we live in a bubble. Or, at least we have for a long time. I'm not even quite sure why, but I suspect it's because it's such a rural state - it hasn't been a major target for large corporate interests. But the state has gone purple recently, largely because all the wealthy people that vacation here also vote here, but also the shifting demographics of Salem and Nashua, I suspect.
Side note, you should see some of these fucking houses. They're not just big, they're big and on the sides of mountains (Triple H has a fucking house up here,
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh).
We have a couple of real estate developer brothers who have been sponsoring the resettlement of "new Americans" for the last dozen years. Seems remarkably transparent to me. Things are shifting, slowly, but noticeably. Our political representation in Washington is entirely blue and female, for instance.
But generally speaking, there's a political hush over the landscape. I've seen people on the side of the road with signs, usually for a candidate, occasionally for a cause, and there are plenty of political campaign bills in yards and such (I saw a work truck covered in Trump signs a few weeks ago in downtown; I also see a ton of "stand with planned parenthood" signs), but I never see any marches, or protests, or anything like that. There was ONE incident, the only one like it I've ever seen in 5 years living here, and that was a bunch of high school students and adults holding an anti-gun rally on the state house lawn. Gun Owners of NH and a couple of other groups showed up with their own signs to counter protest. The troopers and local cops were there in some pretty impressive numbers keeping an eye on things. And then it just sort of dissipated.
I don't know what we are. There are definitely plenty of savvy blue collar guys in the state. But I can't say if there's any fervor behind it.