This is actually a great analysis of Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movies, and why their plots frequently center on 30-something year old women who abandon their successful big city lives to move back to their home towns and marry the handsome “boy next door.” It seems to be a very popular fantasy among the network’s primary audience, conservative women aged 50+ (70% of the channel’s viewers.)
My family has a cabin. We’ve literally built it all by hand except for the cement foundation. It’s legit, signed off as meets code and everything. I brought a pride flag up knowing it might ruffle my grandparents feathers but I planned to talk to them respectfully. Before my grandparents ever saw it, my parents and uncle sat me down and said “we’re not going to allow that” and even going as far as saying “if you leave the flag here, we’re going to destroy it.” I didn’t fight them. I left. And despite my blood, sweat, and tears going into that cabin, I’m never going back.
I told them it wasn’t as simple as a difference of opinion, it was a difference in morality. They agreed.
I like the “tolerance is a social contract” approach to a tolerant society. My wife and I are thinking of growing our family. We both don’t want to subject a future child of ours to my family’s beliefs so we’re effectively estranged and I think my parents are slowly finding out we mean business and it’s not just “their kid throwing a fit.” Call me snowflake all you want, my child won’t hear it.
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One observation I read is that were going to rapidly reach a point in this country word tens of millions of elderly people have kids and grandkids who won’t speak to them. There’s going to be an epidemic of estranged family is over this and it’s going to be a rather defining cultural phenomenal of our time. Large parts of an entire generation are clinging to backwards views even at the cost of destroying their own family’s
A lot of this is by design, I know how bringing up Hillary Clinton closes minds to what she says but she had a fantastic point in this article that the Right are trying to destroy our families just like they’re successfully destroying our sense of community by fostering distrust and hate for one another, the next step is with the families. So why are they doing this? Because angry isolated individuals are easier to control and manipulate.
Also this plays into how Right wing lawmakers are trying to make it easier to exert control over women and children, because the close minded right wingers don’t see wives and children as people, they see them as property, resources, and objects of sexual desire.
This is an amazing article, thank you for sharing. As someone who fled red-state rural America for blue-state urban living I can’t put it better than this article. Everything was like reading from my own history.
I went to college to become more skilled in the labor force. I realized quickly that would give me the ability to move anywhere in the country and get a job.
The most welcoming place I’ve lived is my very blue state urban city. People here don’t care who I am, what I’m into (as long as it doesn’t hurt other people), what religion I am, or what my profession is. It’s by far a lot nicer than “nice” rural small towns
Hallmark and MAGA exploit the void inside of them
What I think needs to start happening is for groups of people to come together and build intentional communities in and around college towns and small and mid-sized cities in blue States. There’s not enough housing to how is these people in the traditional big cities in the States but if a bunch of people were to all move to the same place we can make new big cities complete with all the amenities and culture one expects and places like Southern Illinois and Eastern Washington and Oregon
This is basically gentrification, but politicized (I don’t mean that in a bad way). Follow the Target, Home Depot, and Starbucks store openings, and you’ll see where your vision is already happening. Or closings for where they tried and it didn’t work out. I mean crime, yea, crime. They close for crime.
I’m not really too concerned about gentrification tbh since we’re past the point where anything’s affordable. I could see the argument when previously cheap neighborhoods were getting made too expensive for the residents to live there, but now you can’t find a house in fucking compton, CA of all places for under $500,000 that doesn’t have illegal wiring or mold problems, and rural areas and small towns aren’t much better either post-covid. we just gotta build and keep it out of the market
Citations needed did an amazing analysis of the Hallmark Christmas phenomenon that touches on this and a lot of other stuff
And a follow-up here about the anti-labor tropes of Hallmark movies
