Pointing out that there’s a great divide between rural and urban areas is no great revelatory reveal. This is something that’s probably existed since the beginning of civilization. City folks look down upon country folks; country folks don’t trust city folks.
In terms of democracy, I’ve been clear before that I’m not a fan, especially on an all-encompassing scale within a country of 300+ million people. There’s no reason a congresswoman from New York City should be dictating public policy for folks in rural Indiana.
And as it turns out, it’s this mass democracy that allows the urban areas to control — or at least attempt to — the rural areas: they’ve got the numbers, as well as the greater desire to attain and wield power over others.
When talking about decentralization or secession, people’s minds immediately go to a state seceding from the union, understandably so. But there are other forms — such as dividing democracy into rural versus urban areas: large city democracy and rural county democracy, so to speak.
This isn’t necessarily me coming around to a pro-democracy sentiment, but rather mere thinking aloud. I also don’t have a specific cutoff number for when a town becomes large enough to be considered a large city, but perhaps a start would be to count how many pink haired people are in said town — the larger the quantity, the more likely city democracy applies.
Of course it’s not perfect, nothing is. In fact, what I’m envisioning is not much different than a general election electoral map — only we would be formalizing the power of each color in those regions. The areas enacting large city democracy would remain blue, and the ones with rural county democracy would remain red. The only difference: the small blue areas wouldn’t have the control over the large red ones that they do now.
To cap off this form of soft secession with an aesthetic feel, think of the amount of times the legislatures in their given areas would meet. Every week, perhaps everyday or even hour in the cities. Maybe once or twice a year in the rural counties. Now think of where you’d like to move.