The urban environment tends to remove people from nature & the reality of the earth. Everything they see is some man made construct. Even parks are manicured caricatures of nature, sanitized for human convenience. But it is a high tech bubble, devoid of any real connection with the earth & human needs. Food is neatly wrapped in shrink wrap. Many urban dwellers have never seen a cow or chicken slaughtered for food, & live disconnected from our carnivorous, violent nature. Bambi is their role model of wildlife, with kumbaya singing lions, tigers, & bears (oh, my!). Most urban dwellers live completely disconnected from traditional human survival, going back thousands of years. They do not have to fight enemies, grow or hunt their own food, build their own house, or do anything for their basic needs. Life is a job, which SEEMS to be provided by some mysterious powers or divine, governmental ability. This job provides money, with which they buy the easy essentials for living.. food, shelter, water.. but those are incidental.. the real purpose of the job is to provide extra money to party, play, or distract us from reality. Dream worlds are built, through television, video games, computer obsession, & other high tech distractions. Even nature getaways are viewed as man made theme parks.. they still have the urban crowds, & masses of humanity. Then there is the propaganda. We voluntarily submit ourselves to endless streams of propaganda about humanity. Movies, music, noise, & hysteria are flooding our senses constantly.. no one stops to think, or listen to any 'still, small voice' within. People seem to be terrified of their own thoughts, preferring well orchestrated, officially cleansed & approved thoughts to fill our brains with. Hollywood types & reality stars feed the delusion that stupid people are entitled to huge compensation, just because they exist. There is total disconnect between working & creating something useful for society to earn the means to feed, house, clothe, & buy luxuries from the fruits of our labors. This urban dependency mindset, which you see in europe even in the 19th centuries, is rampant in us urban areas, & is spreading to small towns & remote areas across the country. The result of urbanization is that people begin to hate each other (should be 'more'.. we already hate each other!). We are sick of crowds, & the mass of humanity. Crowded urbanites see the govt as the solution to manage the masses. That is the appeal of statism to urbanites, imo. Rural people tend to be more in touch with nature & the realities of life, & see more personal responsibility in daily living. They rely less on 'big brother' to take care of them, or to manage those around them. Yet, like moths to a flame, we humans seem drawn to the cities. The conveniences & the comforting masses seem to distract us from the realities of earth, where we actually live. When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe. ~Thomas Jefferson To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. ~Mahatma Gandhi
I often muse in similar ways, and at my own perception of rural life. When I was a kid, I knew people who lived far from cities, and was among them at different times. Even at that though, we relied heavily on machines. My best friend in high school lived on a gold mine. Being his friend meant joining in on some of the work that was constantly going on. We had to haul water from the aqueduct, gather and cut firewood, work on all of the machines and keep everything else running. Modern rural life is like that. Not what it was when there were not so many machines. Still, people who have to do and make for themselves are much more in tune with the world and how it works.
I have lived in cities for at least half my life. I now live in a rural area which is very different except, we also have satellite TV and ISPs. Everyone is well aware of world events, politics, etc. The atmosphere is clear and clean, there are sparkling streams, creeks etc. Neighbors know each other but usually keep to their own business unless someone needs help. The hardest thing to accept (for me) was all the cars in the local grocery, post office, retail strip parked and the owners leaving their keys in the ignition. Sometimes, on hot summer days, you can find a car running with the AC on while they were picking up their mail. The difference is stark.
Town drunks and village idiots are what the collective produces. It takes a parent to raise a child. Oh, and city is also in citibank, a known evil in humanity..
