Outside The Box

Ask a happy person to tell you about the place where they live and chances are you’ll hear good things about that area. The way we feel directly affects, and for some people determines, how we perceive reality.

Most of us who live in our neck of the woods, even on our bad days, know that we are fortunate to be here, and that knowledge increases in direct proportion to how many other places we have lived or visited.

Nevertheless, we do live in interesting times, in a strange age of confusion in which the way many people perceive reality is affected as much or more by the virtual world as it is by direct experience.

It’s human nature to be vulnerable to stereotypes and prejudice of all kinds. Our brains are differencing engines with a limited capacity for compiling data on more than just a handful of individuals, and anyone outside that small group, or anyone we perceive as different than our group, is considered “the other.”

Our fears and prejudices were bad enough long before the age of information came along to leverage those shortcomings and facilitate even further divisions. For its effect on our national identity and civil society, “anti-social” media is perhaps a more accurate description for what we commonly refer to as “social.”

Long before “social” media and the ascendancy of virtual reality, our part of the world often got a bad rap. Even today, southern states are assumed to be homologous organs of a monolithic south, and now stereotypes about southerners, hillbillies and rednecks, encouraged by mainstream media, have merged with stereotypes about “red states” versus “blue states.”

Here at home, we always knew differently. Now we have the data to back us up.

The Atlantic magazine recently sponsored a study on partisan prejudice. The analytics firm, PredictWise conducted the study. Towns County, Georgia, ranks in the 13th percentile, which means that 87% of all US counties are more politically intolerant than we are.

In fact, all of North Georgia and most of the Southern Appalachians rank as being significantly more tolerant than the rest of the country. Fannin County is in the 9th percentile, Union County is in the 20th; Clay and Cherokee counties in North Carolina are in the 2nd percentile.

The most intolerant county in the nation? Suffolk County, Massachusetts, in the heart of the most “liberal” part of New England. No county in the state of Massachusetts ranked below the 85th percentile. None of Georgia’s hillbilly counties ranked higher than the 20th. The most politically tolerant city in America, according to the study, is Watertown, New York, which is in a county that voted for Donald Trump by a 20 point margin. I knew you’d be surprised.

The most intolerant demographic group? Older white educated urban dwellers who tend to associate much more with “their own kind.” Ironic, isn’t it? That some of the loudest voices calling for it have the least experience of diversity.

One thing is clear. Prejudice knows no geographical boundaries, and the same is true for tolerance. We are fortunate that tolerance has taken root in the place we call home. .

(To read more about the study, go to the Atlantic article here.)