wildyams

I was talking about this the other day as the election results rolled in, but I saw it again on BoingBoing, and wanted to mention again how this country is clearly divided into people who live in big cities and people who live in sparsely populated areas:

Look at this map from USA Today that shows nationwide how people voted county by county, and go to this link (which has a larger picture of the map) and check out the total square miles of the counties that Bush won vs. what Kerry won, and then check out the populations of the counties that voted for each guy, because there is a pretty stiking difference. I calculated it out, and the average number of people per square mile in the counties that voted for Bush is 46 (for someone like me who lives in LA which probably has thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people per square mile, that should be particularly telling). The average number of people per square mile in the counties that voted for Kerry is 140. That means that people who voted for Kerry are on average living in areas that are three times as populated as the people voting for Bush.

My co-worker Amy and myself had an interesting discussion about this yesterday, in which she suggested that maybe people like us who live in more densely populated areas do not have the same "morals" as those who want to outlaw gay marriage and abortion and things of that nature because we are more exposed to different ways of life and different kinds of people and are more accepting and tolerant of other peoples' views. People who live in areas of the country that don't have many people living around them probably only get their opinions about people who are different than them based on what they see on TV or read about in the newspapers or based on what someone told them, and not because they actually have ever had anything to do with them. They probably have no idea what people of different races or creeds or sexual orientations or religions are like, because they never come into contact with them. This is why for those of us who do interact with diversity and know that people with different backgrounds and beliefs are still just ordinary people like everyone else, we get so frustrated by the way that these small-town people develop these opinions and intolerances for people who are different than themselves; because we know for them it's not really based on experience, but rather just rumors and heresay. In other words, maybe these outdated, back-asswards modes of thinking are allowed to propogate in sparsely populated areas because these people aren't forced to see the truth about things because they're so far removed from the reality of the things they're voting on.