On the face of it, “Try That In A Small Town” is a pretty typical Jason Aldean song championing small-town values of sober order, the willingness to disobey tyrannical laws passed by unresponsible leftist authorities, and a willingness to help out their own who are less fortunate. The song has a bit of a sour mood towards the mostly white antifa looters and anarchists that appear in footage and the song has a clear aim at the appeal of patriotic small-town and small-city red America audiences. None of this is anything particularly inflammatory or remarkable in nature. To be sure, big-city leftist audiences may not find the song’s message to be very welcome, but it’s not exaggerated in the slightest. This author can personally attest to having seen signs that threatened Portland looters who sought to take advantage of evacuations due to a wildfire a couple of years ago in the areas in and around the small town of Molalla to have been threatened with summary death by the firearms of the well-armed local population, and there is no reason to suspect that these were idle threats. Nor is Aldean’s message an idle threat, it is a warning that ought to be taken seriously.

As might be expected in our hyperpartisan contemporary world, the song has become part of a firestorm of controversy. While nothing in the song nor in the music video (which I have seen) has a racial view in mind, the dimwitted bulbs of the left have raised the tired and cliched hue and cry that the song itself has a racist message because there was once a lynching 100 years ago in the small town where the music video was themed. This is obviously not something that Jason Aldean would have known, nor is it relevant to the message of the song that small-town America is not going to tolerate the anarchical violence and looting that continues to rage across the large cities of blue America and that flares up even more intensely whenever something goes on to offend the extremely touchy brownshirts of America’s contemporary left. In truth, the song is a fierce but entirely reasonable presentation of the strong-willed nature of small-town America not to be dragged into the sort of wasteful destruction of property and collapse of authority that is tolerated in places like Portland and Seattle’s CHOP/CHAZ. One does not necessarily have to like the song or its message, but the song is straightforward and honest in its presentation, and reminds me of earlier songs like Hardy and Lainy Wilson’s “Wait In The Truck” and even earlier songs like Montgomery Gentry’s “You Do Your Thing,” which present a muscular and violent willingness on the part of small-town Americans to enforce a sort of rough justice on those people who violate social codes.

I do not speak as someone who necessarily has found small-town life to be all that enjoyable in my own personal life. For the first fourteen years of my life, I resided in small town communities in rural Western Pennsylvania and then rural Central Florida, and in both places I was painfully out of place with my neighbors. Despite having family ties to both areas–they were where my father’s and mother’s family lived, respectively–I did not have an easy time fitting in or belonging in small town America, nor do I even know to this day whether both areas ever or to this day would consider me among their own that they would defend or take care of. Nor have I always found it enjoyable to visit and spend time in small town Oregon apart from the personal friends I have there. Molalla was not a particular welcoming town to me when I visited it some ten years ago for my job in seeking to optimize UPS routes, and I have no trouble believing that it would be an extremely unwelcome place for any leftist anarchists who desired to stir up trouble. But neither have I found the supposedly tolerant cities of Los Angeles or Portland to be particularly welcoming places, not least because while I happen to be an obvious intellectual wherever I go, I am also pretty obviously a deeply conservative person by temperament, and leftist big cities are remarkably hostile and needlessly cruel to people from small towns who do not engage in struggle sessions or express a visceral hostility to small town life and small town values. My own complicated feelings of ambivalence are certainly not outright hostility.

As is often the case, small-town values and ways are particularly attractive if you happen to be someone on the inside. The knowledge that one’s neighbors will look out for you and help you out in difficult times, and that you would do the same for them, is appealing if one happens to be someone who is looking out for others and who others are looking out for. Where there is mutual concern and assistance, belonging to a tight-knit community is deeply appealing. If outsiders are not especially welcome in such places, so long as those outsiders do not bring obvious demonstration of their desire to negatively impact the local population or to flout or disregard its ways are, there is no danger of any sort of open hostility, much less violence. Such people have enough nuance and an indirect enough approach to make it clear when they wish to leave out the unwelcome mat without having to be crude about it.

At least in past times–if not so much right now–there were appealing aspects of big city life for those who wished to live anonymously without the prying eyes of nosy and inquisitive neighbors and relatives, although at present big cities look to be falling apart due to homelessness and political instability even as small town America is being gutted by a lack of economic opportunity. Both our cities and small towns are suffering, and rather than seeking in common to resolve the common problems of political corruption and a lack of economic growth that might make life easier wherever one happens to be, the valid concerns of small town Americans towards big city political turmoil are viewed as illegitimate or mere racism and are disregarded. This is deeply to be regretted and lamented, not least when we should encourage and listen to those voices that come from outside of our own echo chambers so that we might better understand and be able to deal with the world around us.