Posted on 06/16/2018 11:46:50 PM PDT by Hojczyk
On a blustery afternoon in April, I filed into a van along with 10 students from Harvard. We had just spent the last two days in Chicopee, Mass., where we had chatted with the police chief and his force, the mayor and his staff, small-business owners, waitresses and firemen about their struggles living in small-town America.
The undergrads were buzzing with their impressions. Chicopee is about 90 miles west of their prestigious university in Cambridge, but when it comes to shared experience, it might as well have been 1,000 light years away.
As they settled in, I looked at them.
“So,” I said, “who do you think most of the people you just got to know voted for president?”
None of the students had an answer. It hadn’t come up in their conversations and they didn’t know I had privately asked each person who they’d voted for.
So, I let a minute pass and told them.
“Nearly every one of them voted for Trump.”
My students looked stunned, at first. But then a recognition crossed their faces.
We were only a few days into a new course I had developed with Harvard’s Institute of Politics, called the Main Street Project, where students are immersed in small-town America. Even though these kids had almost all been raised in the United States, our journey sometimes felt like an anthropology course, as though they were seeing the rest of the country for the first time. And this was their opening lesson.
I have been a national political journalist for nearly 15 years. Whenever and wherever I travel in this country, I abide by a few simple rules: No planes, no interstates and no hotels.
And definitely no chain restaurants.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Salena Zito is not a 'perfesser' she is an honest writer. She used to write for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review {when it was the Greensburg Tribune Review} and at one time it was a very conservative paper.
It is now 10-12 pages of garbage {they still have George Will on the editorial pages as a conservative}.
Thanks for posting.
I know b&bs. Generally run by gay transplants to the area, who burst in the door of the dining room at 8am carrying a loaded bk’fast plate calling “Fruit coming!”
I don’t think you meet people in either motels or b&bs.
She has a new book out which was reviewed in The New York Times. They killed it but I may pick it up.
As a female traveler I am off the road by 6 pm and won’t stay in a hotel with a door to the outside. Only rooms with doors to inside halls.
The idea of Chicopee Mass being the heartland of anything is hilarious.
Good to iconic restaurants in three east coast States is not “the heartland.” They need to go spend time in small farming communities at hole in the wall restaurants and bars.
So, I suppose sleeping in your truck camper in the Walmart parking lot is out of the question?
I won’t even stay at a Hampton Inn.
At a minimum I stay at Courtyard, in a larger city a Westin, Hyatt or Renaissance. All depends which property I can swing the best discount in.
Well, I think I might spring for a couple more dollars to let my wife stay.
You sayin’ you don’t like staying at the Motel 6 where everything is glued or nailed down?
He's still a ways from the “heartland”.
78 and do the same. If you can fly first class and don’t, be sure your kids will when you’re gone.
Excellent very short summary of the intellectual class. Your concluding comment on understanding the inevitability of bloody revolutions is also noteworthy.
“I would fail the course before I stayed in a motel 6. “
Don’t shine a black light in one.
The second problem is that these people are over represented in our government, including the Supreme Court.
Anyone else wondering how socio-economically diverse Harvard’s student body is? And that young people can have these kinds of sterotypes in the information age just astounds me.
“Let me tell you - it’s getting tough out on the road. My standards for a place to sleep have gone way up, and for good reason.”
We stayed at a mom and pop motel in Kansas once that still had the stench of a death in the room.
Nothing but the best for you! Can't go slumming with us poor...
Studying Politics at Harvard? That’s the definition of Narcissism. America would be better off with more aircraft mechanics.
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