In one of the most memorable bull sessions of my freshman year, the guy who lived across the hall said that he didn’t believe that he had ever known anyone who had died. I was flabbergasted. I absolutely could not believe that this could be possible. I protested. He said that he thought maybe one of his elementary school teachers was dead now, but he wasn’t sure.
I grew up in a small town. In a small town, you know not only your classmates, but your classmates’ parents and their grandparents and their uncles and their aunts. You know everybody who is a part of that community, the old as well as the young. I had known probably a hundred people who had died. I had known two people who had been murdered, and I had known at least 20 people who had been killed in car accidents—a result of the combination, I suppose, of random chance and the phenomenal motor vehicle death rates of the 1950s and early 1960s. I had had relatives who had died, grandparents and aunts and uncles, and those yet closer to me. I had known suicides and people who died in house fires. You grow up in a small town, you know—and actually know—maybe a thousand people. Some of them are old people, and they die; it’s a normal thing. Somebody in the community would die once every two weeks, and we would have a normal conversation around the supper table—should we go to the funeral, or do we not need to?
The guy across the hall, on the other hand, had grown up in the suburbs, surrounded by kids his own age. He "knew" hundreds of kids his own age, although of course he didn’t really know them. He "knew" the people in his neighborhood, but they were mostly people his parents’ age, and, in truth, he didn’t really know them, either—not in the way that you know people in a small town, where you see a person one week in the grocery store, and the next week at the post office, and the next week at a basketball game, and the next week at their work place, and the next week at a funeral, until after 18 years of this you have come to see the fabric of their lives, and to understand how it is woven into the community. His family (he being the guy across the hall). .. his family was small and did not live near to him, so he didn’t really know his cousins, if he had any.
Extreme, perhaps; I would assume that most of you who grew up in suburbs knew at least a few people who died during your youth, and I would assume that people who grow up in small towns today probably don’t go to regularly scheduled funerals, as we did in my youth. But it struck me then—and it strikes me now—how poorly his youth had prepared him for life.
Almost anyone who looked at his education and my education would conclude that his education was far better. He came to college better prepared than I did to do college-level work in math or science, better prepared to write papers that a col’ge perfesser would like. His parents had raised him in a safe and protected environment, with access to the best public schools in the state.
But at the same time, his education was missing something terribly important—perhaps more important than the edyakation itself. His education was great—but his childhood had not prepared him for Life. He had no view of the arc of a man’s life. He had no sense of what it meant to be older, and thus no real understanding of what it meant to be young. He only knew people who were very much like him, and thus lacked real insight into himself, even the limited insight you might have when you are 18. In terms of being prepared to fight through hard times, being ready to face challenges that were off the grid, being ready to cope with loss and thus understanding the urgency of time. . .my education was far better than his.
But this essay is not about small towns and education; it is about small towns and tolerance. City people tend to see themselves as being tolerant and accepting, and tend to assume that small-town people are less tolerant and less accepting of others who are different. In certain ways this is true. Small town people will cling to old ideas and old beliefs, including prejudices and presumptions that they would be better off without.
But in other ways, small town people are much more open and accepting than city folk, simply because it is a community. It has borders, in a sense, and you have to deal with everybody within the borders whether you like them or not. In most cases you learn to like them; you learn to see the good in them.
It has to do with what I talked about yesterday, about selectivity in mating. A small town person moves to a city, at first he/she tries by instinct or long habit to be open and accepting of everyone in the city. This is exhausting, unrewarding, and makes you vulnerable. You begin to close down a little, to start looking for people like yourself. After you’ve been there a year, you have a circle of people you associate with, normally young people somewhat like yourself. You start to filter out those people who don’t meet your criteria—people of the wrong age, people whose background is not like yours, people whose interests are not like yours, people who do not know the slang that you use, people who do not know how to dress the way you are supposed to dress. You avoid people whose manners are not the right manners. After you’ve been in the city for twenty or thirty years—assuming that you are a successful person—you have a tight circle of friends, people your age, people who work in your field or related fields, people who have similar interests and life experiences, and you don’t realize that the circle has closed.
In a small town, the same social events are attended by the lawyers and the bus drivers, by the grocery store clerks and by the mayor and the minister and the real estate agent. In a small town, the rich kids and the poor kids deal with one another every day, and very often they get to like one another, and not infrequently they marry one another and bond into a family. In a small town, you have social events which are attended by 18-year-olds and 70-year-olds. In a small town the same social events are attended by the liberals and the conservatives, by the gays and the conservative Christians. The same social events are attended by people who have very high standards of personal hygiene, and by people who haven’t taken a bath in a week. A city person tends to look at it like "this is a horrible party." These people are in no way cool, or hip, or sophisticated, or whatever it is he would like them to be.
The city person moving to a small town tends to look, by instinct or long habit, for people who are like himself. He tends not to find them—certainly not the people who are as much like himself as he would find in a city. He tends, by long habit, to pay no attention to people who are not of his age group, not of his background, not of his income status, and not of his interests. He feels excluded from the life of the small town—not because he is excluded or has been excluded, but because he has excluded himself by the selectivity—the intolerance—of his vision.
My brother was a rather cranky, distant person, not easy to get to know and not too easy to like. When he was in high school, he somehow developed a close friendship with an old man who lived across town who was notoriously grouchy, a quiet, somber man with whom I had never exchanged so much as a greeting; I forget his name now. He would go over to this old man’s house a couple of nights a week and watch television. None of us knew how these two became friends; I guess they liked the same TV shows. We could easily see what they had in common, but how they stumbled into a friendship—since neither of them was at all friendly by nature—was always a mystery. I suppose that happens in cities, as well, that old men and young occasionally become friends.
The social amalgam of a small town does tend to enforce conformity at the edges, and thus does create a certain kind of intolerance. When you have 18-year-olds and 70-year-olds at the same social event, nobody is smoking pot. When you have extremely conservative people and extremely liberal people in the same room, gathered to have fun, people keep their political opinions to themselves.
In my family I have both conservative Christians and gay people, and it is not uncommon to have them both at the same picnic. I have had representatives from both sides in my house at the same time, and many times. The Christians do judge the gays, and the gays do judge the Christians, but it is my observation, for what it is worth, that the gays are much more harshly judgmental of the Christians than the Christians are of the gays.
In the same way that an urban school touches all of the registered elements of a good education, but sometimes leaves out fundamental life lessons, small town people tend to be intolerant in some theoretical, paint-by-numbers way, but very tolerant in practice. Small town people will accept you if you don’t dress right, if you don’t talk right, if you have eccentric habits or oddball hobbies, or even if your personal habits are not what they perhaps should be. You can still fit in, in a small town, even if you have your ways. In a city, not so much; in a city you are much more likely to be judged and rejected, told in subtle ways that you do not measure up.