I’ve lived in a big city for years now. Never seen anybody get mugged, or shot, or carjacked, despite doing activist work that often has me visiting poor minority neighborhoods.
The only time I ever really felt uneasy was when I had to walk alone at night through a neighborhood where all the businesses had bars on the windows. Worst thing that happened was a couple of people asking me for money, and they didn’t give me any shit when I said I didn’t carry cash.
But any time I visit the small town where I grew up there’s always someone or another acting like I came back from a fucking warzone lmao
The aspiring urbanists here have a hard time believing that some of us feel very agitated living in cities.
The issue is not that you don’t like city, but that you’ve done the conservative thing where you take something how it is currently and decide that that’s how it is for all time. “Surrounded by cars, smog and noise” this is not an essential characteristic of cities. No one here supports car-centric infrastructure, air pollution or noise pollution, and there are things that can be done to make cities nicer places to live.
The other issue is that your rhetoric plays into the conservative dichotomy of the cities as dirty and savage (and nonwhite) and the rural as bucholic, peaceful (and white). Which is not true at all. There is poverty, horrible poverty in rural areas, violence, and like most of the infrastructure is falling apart in most of the country. And good luck living in the country without a car, if you want to talk about car-centric infrastructure.
And third, this “cities suck I prefer the trees and nature” rhetoric always leads one place, and that’s to individualist, private landownership, the western ideal, where you’re given a little fiefdom to lord over as you try to separate yourself from your fellow man and live as a “rugged individual.” Even in rural areas, it would be better if people lived closer together and were more dependent upon one another-more sustainable, and better for societal cohesion.
So I’m not saying you hold these beliefs or anything, but just trying to give you a sense of why people react so strongly to them. You can have preferences, but this rhetoric historically (and still does) lend itself to extreme reaction. Rural areas are obviously important, but they need to be reimagined just as cities do.
It’s really just a personal preference. I don’t like living in crowded places. It’s not anti-social or misanthropic. I like other people. But I get agitated in crowded areas. It makes me unhappy to be constantly surrounded by people.
I don’t need a personal fief. I don’t care if I lived in a collectived area where I was close to my neighbors. That sounds fine. But it’s important to me that I have nature available to me. So if I could walk out of my collective into some trees I don’t own, that would be great. Public parks are okay, but they aren’t the same, and they’re always packed with people, too.
I’m sorry, but there’s no way to reimagine cities in a way that they won’t be crowded and noisy. People make a lot of noise just bustling about without cars. Some people like that feeling, and that’s cool. But I don’t.
I’m not trying to get you to admit living in cities is better than rural areas, if you don’t like cities that’s fine. I’m trying to make the point that your personal preference is linked to the politics of our time. So the original post is making fun of unfounded conservative fears of cities. But then the first commenter (which I realize is not you) comes in and says “oh but they have a point I hate cities too” and gets mad when people jump down his throat about it, even though many of his anti-city arguments parallel reactionary anti-city arguments (dirty, overpopulated, elitist, polluted in contrast with the pure trees and nature of the empty [another loaded characterization] salt of the earth rural areas). I’m not accusing you or him of having these beliefs, or calling your personal preferences “wrong” but trying to point out what many people hear when you say these things, and especially when you characterize your preferences in such a way and why people jumped down the original commenter’s throat.
Okay, thanks comrade.
I guess I should have been clearer and not attached my opinion to someone else’s. For the record, I agree with you that these places need to be reimagined.
This is the second time that I’ve had a similar conversation on Hexbear. From my perspective, I’m just saying I don’t enjoy cities, and I get a bunch of people telling me that, actually, I do like cities.
I understand why that’s happening now.
“Man I hate my farming job because of shitty pay and long hours.”
“Uh actually, the shitty pay and long hours is not an essential characteristic of farming so you’re being a conservative.”
The possibility of things getting better does not make living in the city now any more pleasant.
Your pro-city rhetoric plays into the neoliberal dichotomy of cities being civilized places and rural areas being filled with country bumpkins. I don’t think you’re a neoliberal though because I can understand how sharing one view doesn’t mean you believe the same thing.
No it doesn’t. It literally does not mean this in any meaningful way. I specifically prefer the rural areas because I have better access to local community and state parks. My love for nature is just about the most collective it can be. I can’t believe people on hexbear are unironically stating it is individualist and supportive of landownership to enjoy nature.
I have seen people on this site say similar things to your joke “actually you don’t hate your job” response above. Someone will complain about work and a response will be “actually work is necessary, you just hate capitalism” or something. Which similarly annoys me. Because that’s why I took issue with your response, not because you dared to dislike cities, but because the original post is complaining about unfounded conservative fears of cities, and you come in and go “oh actually they have a point” and go on about trees or something. The op was not talking about trees, and not even denigrating rural life. He was complaining about conservative reaction. It’s like the people who come in to a post complaining about work and go “uh actually you don’t hate work you hate capitalism.” Unnecessary and unhelpful.
But also, I do believe there’s a utopian tendency especially prevalent among baby leftists, in which socialism or communism or anarchism or whatever is equated with not having to work, ignoring the extremely difficult work necessary to get to communism, and then of course maintain it. I don’t consider this a hill to die on or even a real issue because it’s pretty well understood that when we’re complaining about our jobs we’re complaining about capitalism and the lack of worker protections under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and also when we complain about our jobs we’re reacting often to a direct threat on our lives - being overworked, dangerous working conditions, the lack of rights afforded us in the workplace. What is the larger point to your complaining about cities? What are you directly responding to when you complain about cities?
Air pollution? I agree that’s an issue, but to portray rural areas as somehow free from pollution shows a lack of understanding of many peoples’ experience of rural life. Unless, as I charge, you’re playing into the conservative ideal of rural life. I agree there can be an opposite reaction, in which rural people are portrayed as all uneducated hicks who can only survive through the goodwill of the civilized city folk, but frankly I don’t believe I’ve denigrated rural life at all in any of my comments. Everywhere I am stressing rural areas to be treated as real places that have their pluses but also are not immune to the issues reactionaries would have you believe are confined to cities. You however have denigrated city life as dirty, polluted and crowded, which shows that you have an experience of rural life that many are not afforded that you can act like these are not issues in the country.
Nor have I denigrated rural people except to take issue with the individualist mindset many who hate cities have (which is not even directed at rural people specifically), and I’m honestly not trying to accuse you of also having this mindset as I said to the other person, but trying to point out how this rhetoric can play into this mindset by portraying cities a certain way and rural life as a certain way when the reality is much more complicated, especially when your original comment was to respond to a post about conservative reaction that said nothing about rural life to say actually they have a point rural life is better.
Your analogy to farm wage-labour is silly. Yes, those those thoughts are actually wrong /in form/, and yes it is a characteristic of reactionaries to essentialize existing conditions. But the point is that you cannot stop there as that would conceal its contradictory elements, its laws of relation, and so on.
Yes the farm worker is suffering under low pay, and long hours, but what’s important isnt the just the truth of said claim, but the /history/ of its development. No, wage-labour is not natural–it had a historically specific development, so how did it come about and what are its contradictions, what is the specificity of farm work compared to other kinds of work, etc., Etc…
Without a dialectical, historical materialist approach we cannot understand the world scientifically, and thus all of our actions will be blind in a sense.
So given the discussions about cities and suburbs the question is /why/ are they like that–we all already know /what/ it is–so what is its concrete history that lead to its specific form today? With that know that valorizing a thing is not just valorizing its affect, but also its valorizing its history, and its function within the system as a whole. You may say that the comment you’ve made are simply about personal preference, but there is an (unconscious) probably) ideological component underlying them.