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After a long year of torturing through the daily grind, it’s finally the holiday season! As joy and merriment begin in dining rooms and living rooms across the country, so does Netflix’s lucrative season of commercial holiday movies.
Despite the heavy investment in new movies that the company undertakes every year, their movie plots completely lack any originality. Each film depicts a beautiful girl, disillusioned with the monotonous noise of city life, who ventures into the snowy surroundings of a small town, where she rediscovers the true holiday spirit of sharing and caring and falls in love with a local boy. Aside from a few nagging confrontations over issues that could have easily been resolved with proper communication (but who among us wants to go down that treacherous path?), the two eventually reunite and live happily ever after!
While such films play on the hopelessly romantic inclinations of audience members (admittedly, I am one of them), they also embody America’s perennial fascination with small towns, demonstrating the prevailing national perception that such places are immune to the worldly problems that plague overcrowded metropolises. These beliefs stem from complementary beliefs that “only in a small community . . . can we really know what we are doing [because] only to a certain extent can we see human relationships in their fullness.” In cities, “meanings and connections multiply until we don’t see them at all. In the countryside or in the wilderness, we can feel that our actions take place outside the web of human meaning entirely.” Thus, the “ideal polis” becomes a small city, assuming “the primary mythical role . . . a game[ed] in our politics: the stage that is the right side.”
Our conception of small towns seeps through filters that penetrate idealism, signaling a place so untouched by external corruption that we always want to return.
But the real narrative of small towns is not so linear. While America’s coasts are speeding towards new milestones of economic progress, the small towns in the middle have been left behind. Our endless dependence on growth as a society has led us to overlook those for whom the same kind of growth is not possible—those whose lifestyles are so dependent on certain methods of economic production that adopting new ones is completely out of the question. As a result, small town America continues to struggle with critical social and infrastructure problems. Their desperate calls for intervention went unheeded, and their crippling frustration eventually culminated in the election of former President Donald Trump, who emerged as a sort of savior for the myriad issues plaguing these communities.
The average age in small-town America is 43, which has led to a decline in productivity, defined as the average output per worker. The population is shrinking, as small towns witness a mass exodus to the cities. Many of these residents are fleeing crime and widespread opioid abuse, once considered problems confined to urban areas. But the problems are not just that extreme. The more subtle consequences of crumbling infrastructure also cause significant havoc, and their consequences span a wide range of sub-sectors, chief among them public health. Small towns have obesity rates that are above the national average for all ages. The high incidence of health disparities is exacerbated by a lack of access to health facilities.
In addition, an over-reliance on cars for transportation precludes switching to clean renewable energy as a viable option, exacerbating the impact of these cities on the global climate change crisis. Increased demand for multi-family housing by those who cannot afford a traditional single-family home has been met with an oversupply of these same single-family homes.
Perhaps most urgently, economic growth is bypassing small towns. After the 2008 recession, “counties with fewer than 100,000 people lost 17,500 businesses. In contrast, “counties with more than a million residents added, in total, 99,000 firms.” That’s because national economic problems place unique pressures on small-town economies, which often rely entirely on one manufacturing industry. Small towns have become victims of an increasingly globalized economy. As corporations outsource production facilities overseas to seek cheaper labor, “there are fewer than 13 million manufacturing workers in the entire economy.”
Small towns are not the idyllic escape that popular holiday cinema makes them out to be. On the contrary, they are burdened with serious economic problems that will soon require an absolute inversion of the way of life of the inhabitants if the current course is not reversed.
However, if there’s one thing that small towns and their Hollywood recreaters get right, it’s capturing the essence of community that characterizes these towns. Social psychology research has repeatedly illustrated that smaller communities are kinder and more empathetic than their urban counterparts. Repeated studies have concluded that foreigners are much more likely to receive help in rural communities than in urban areas. Such findings can be attributed to the overabundance of stimulation in urban environments; perhaps, the relative quiet of rural areas allows residents to become more attuned to each other’s needs and cultivate a higher level of empathy.
Small towns deserve neither our absolute pity nor our overwhelming admiration. Their truth rests in the gray zone of black and white gradients into which we try to sort everything we come across. Instead, small towns are characterized by the same gray moral insecurity that characterizes every other region of this country, and by extension the rest of us.
Advikaa Anand is a freshman at Trinity. Her columns usually appear on alternate Thursdays.
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