Charles, I trust you accommodated for the rich rural libs in their chalets, ranches, and summer homes who also don't want diseased Seattleites invading their paradise.

"In a sense, this is their revenge. Many here vote red but depend on blue tourism to put food on their tables and a roof over their heads. Their fuck-you to city slickers, however, is complicated by the fact many who support Trump want to open the economy. Nothing but nonsense can come of out of the rural predicament."

Um, BULLSHIT. PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO GET SICK. THAT'S IT.

I live in a rural coastal town that kicked tourists out and has asked them to stay out until this situation is under control. Why? Because there are 25 hospital beds here. TOTAL.

Each year nearly one million people come here as tourists or part-time residents. If 20,000 people get sick here, where the fuck are they going to go?

The entire COUNTY only has 50 hospital beds.

More people have died from COVID-19 in the United States than live in this county.

Where I live will be decimated by the shut-down. Even during regular times there is difficulty keeping places open because employment is seasonal with no benefits and there is literally no (as in ZERO) affordable housing here For the working people who keep the tourism businesses running.

This is lose-lose situation. There is no revenge. There is no fuck you to city slickers. There is only a vulnerable population in a location where there are no resources to handle a COVID-19 outbreak of any kind.

@3 + @4 = irony

Another nonsense article from Charles Mudede. Most rural people are welcoming and kind. Salt of the Earth. Just like most City people

Can we all agree that the density movement in Seattle is dead? Who wants to live in a tenement and listen to your fat neighbor coughing all night when you can have a home and a garden to enjoy during pandemics?

@9 Well not to you, of course. Only wack-jobs like putrid festering GermanSausage.

@10 Correct.

@9 I hear the West Side of Chicago is lovely in the summertime when the sun is out and gunfire in bloom.

"You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons."

I'm with Xina on this.
My impression in talking with relatives in truly remote WA St isn't any sense of xenophobia.
It is simply everyday folks just like us who are trying to navigate this changed world in an ethical, responsible manner and be good citizens and stay healthy.
Of course there are always going to be whack-a-doodle outliers- just take a look at Slog comment section.

Dear lord, why did you keep this stupid little man on staff?

"Their fuck-you to city slickers, however, is complicated by the fact many who support Trump want to open the economy."

They don't want to "open the economy" so much as put other people at risk so they can be served as they feel is their right. I didn't see any signs arguing for the right to wait tables but a lot of them were asserting their right to a haircut or massage.

Wow, Charles really bought the click bait news story. Finding one or two nutcases anywhere does not define an entire population. Not much different that racial or other stereotypes, except for the Seattle Freeze, that one is real. :)

If the rural folk want the city folk to stay away that's fine but they'll have to abide by their own rules and not come to the cities or their hospitals if they do get sick.

The author’s world view seems to be shaped by popular media. This vapid piece begs the question, what sociological insights can be distilled from Love Island?

“ Finding one or two nutcases anywhere does not define an entire population”

What if they’re white though?

I just spent a week over at our place by Grand Coulee. No one was freaked out. No one showed up with pitchforks and torches. Some people wore masks, some people didn't. The Safeway was limiting the number of people in the store at one time, and the hospital isn't allowing visitors, but that was about it.

Of course, I think a lot of people who live there are snowbirds.

@9- you're an asshole, that's why that are not kind and welcoming. I'm sure the attitude towards you is not limited to rural folk.

@27 - You're perceptive. Most of our comments here tell more about ourselves than those we attempt to denigrate. @9 "denigrate" means "put down".

Asking people to "stay home" is good policy when it comes from Olympia but a fuck you coming from rural counties?

Also, while the protesters were a bunch of jackasses, there is a point to be made about opening up some rural counties. Pacific county has had zero cases, that curve can't get any flatter. It also has a much less resilient economy than the urban counties and poverty kills after all and in the long run will probably kill far more residents of Pacific county than coronavirus will.

I and almost everyone I know are more than happy to oblige not going to their county (I've lived in Seattle for 30 years and have never been to Pacific county). If they could stay there and not travel here--- and hold off on any trips to Olympia to protest on the steps of the capitol without taking proper social distancing precautions--- that would be good too.

It's interesting to see Charles defending the wealthy (2nd home owners) against the poor (rural residents). Not very Marxist to not see the class component here. I guess only poor urban people count?

@1 - The rural areas are also trying to keep the "rich libs" from getting to their summer houses, on which they pay taxes that prop up the rural economy. I get that people don't want to get sick and am not totally unsympathetic to the rural areas. However, this is just another example of the fiction that rural areas are somehow independent of the cities, when in fact they are heavily subsidized by urban areas.

@3 - the rural areas' "fuck you" to the cities is ongoing. They demand services like everyone else does. They want schools, roads, etc. But every time the urban areas, who are paying the vast majority of the bills, try to raise enough money to meet needs, the rurals vote it down.

Their goddamned $30 car tabs tantrum is going to make it impossible to actually pay for the roads that they want to drive on. Red parts of Washington make it impossible to enact a reasonable progressive income tax (which most of them would never pay anyway). To top it off, they elect jackasses like Trump who destroy any efforts to actually solve any of our national problems.

I say enough. Your demands for low taxes have consequences. How about from now on, if your county voted against a particular tax, then none of the money can be spent there?

Don't want to pay what it actually costs to maintain the roads so you can use them? Fine. Fix your own goddamned potholes. from now on. You didn't need that new highway anyway.

Don't want to fund your schools? OK, but realize you're screwing your own kids. Don't want to let the high-earning urban areas tax themselves (far more than they would tax you) to provide state services? Works for me. But no more state $$ for you.

The infection rate in rural areas is actually higher than in urban areas on a per capita basis.

Don't be distracted by shiny numbers like the fact that Comrade Trump has killed MORE people than died during the entire Vietnam War (on the US side), or that there's a lot more people going to die in the South that may or may not be recorded as COVID deaths.

Empty land doesn't catch COVID. People do.

I live in Seattle now but used to live in rural eastern Washington. There is little infrastructure available in those communities for a pandemic. When wealthy Canadians tried to shelter on a native communities land, the tribe sent them away for precisely that lack. Sorry, but shelter in place means shelter in place. Not driving over the mountain pass to bring added risk to a community without adequate health services. And, by the way, those farms feed a lot of hungry people here. The price of cheap food is low pay for farm workers and food processors.

I think it's fine that rural communities want people to stay out. It's actually good and means they are paying attention to the right people instead of to President "Maybe we can inject disinfectant".

All that doesn't make them friendly to outsiders, or good people, or less reliant on the people and politics they tend to actively, as a group, spit on every chance they get. It certainly doesn't mean they won't turn around and walk away from a good policy of isolation and social distancing just in time to be overrun. And while we can't blame the people in Washington state for Trump, we can blame some of them for state senators who shamelessly lobby for fossil fuel interests, throw fits against even the most basic progressive taxes or policies and cheer on rollbacks on environmental protections.

I think Mudede is a bit off base in the direction of his attack, but I don't think we can dismiss the conflict between urban and rural municipalities and by extension the residents of each. Nor should we think that, just because a "stay out" order is probably good policy, that it doesn't also come from a place of xenophobia and underlying hatred for urbanites.

I don't understand why these inflammatory articles are written. Its pretty obvious a rural town would have limited beds and resources and would be very concerned with protecting that. This is true in any place/state. Flexing political strife and gaslighting is just as bad as fox news.

@33 That is not what the article was talking about and the claim made in the article is wholly false. The ONLY reason rural areas are asking people to stay away is there is no capacity to care for the sick - many rural counties have no hospital or medial facility at all. Urban areas do.

That's not how this country works, though, is it?

And it's not just rural areas that refuse to generate revenue required. Look at Seattle, a big city that refuses to collect the tax revenue required to keep itself functional. Seattle is constantly in crisis mode. Then WA state takes $197 million more from the federal government than it gives, all while insisting on having no income tax and refusing to tax corporations that make billions in profit in their state.

Cuomo recently said it best - NYS paid the federal government $116 BILLION more in revenue than they took (since 2015), while Kentucky has taken $168 BILLION more than it's given the federal government in revenue (while Kentucky's population is 1/5 of the state of NYS). And NYS is HUGE, with more rural areas than urban.

All Kentucky has to do is give back the money they took that they never generated and fend for themselves. And every single red state can do the same. I mean I love it when they vilify California when California has a negative rate of return (meaning they give BILLIONS more to the government than they ever see, BILLIONS, they have a negative rate of return).

Mitch McConnell's making big noise about letting states go bankrupt. I say Kentucky first, motherfucker. None of this is how the United States works (except when the GOP is in charge). Blue states funded financial relief after Hurricane Katrina, funding that GOP refused to give up after Hurricane Sandy to NY and NJ. And under Trump Puerto Rico was left to rot and die (literally) and no one, not one person in the federal government did anything to stop him from doing that to fellow Americans. All of the conservatives who vote red and hate everyone who doesn't live in the backwoods like they do should be forced to see what their lives would be like without all of that money poured into their pockets from the very people they despise.

You seem to be directing your comment directly at me, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and read it as the universal "you." If not, well there's this:

I don't live where I live by choice and I don't vote the way you are accusing me of voting. I lived most of my life in urban areas (including NYC where I paid not only federal and state but also city taxes). I believe in taxation and I believe areas that refuse to generate tax revenue should not be allowed to take the revenue of areas that do to support themselves. And yet I believe in the country as a whole and the ideology that we should take care of everyone in the country who needs help. So how to fix that? Make every state have the same taxation system? That would be a start.

All that being said the tiny town I live in, while voting mostly red, is one of the few counties in Oregon that goes blue each election. Here's the map of the 2016 election: https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/oregon/

That's not how this country works, though, is it? >>> Meant for between the last 2 paragraphs.

@3 xina: I feel for you and everyone in your community and county, along with everyone else whose local revenue relies so heavily on tourism. I grew up five miles outside a small town funded by seasonal dollars, too.
I now live in a much larger community some 25 miles north of where I grew up, but am just stunned by the emptiness in my former hometown. The streets are deserted. Few businesses are open. A festival that for the last 36 years has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors annually down there isn't happening this year. Few jobs pay anything close to a sustainable wage.
Yep--I'm in total agreement, xina. If Moscow Mooch McDumbbell wants states to go bankrupt, let it be Kentucky first. How that shitwipe has served six senatorial terms (SIX !!!!!) is glaring proof that his constituents have no clue how to vote wisely.

"Nothing says I need to get laid like a man insulting another man's writing in the middle of a world health crisis."
LOLWUT

That you, Charles?