It's a Team's Life Small Town Attitude

[chillout]

Over Thanksgiving we made the choice to dead head to Bob's mom and stepdads and ended up staying a little longer due to ice. This gave us extra time to visit with friends and family.

When I was seventeen I moved to the small town of Elkhart, from Arizona. I was from what I thought was a small town, Sierra Vista but it was not small compared to Elkhart. If you look on a map you will see that Elkhart is in the southwest corner of Kansas and there are not any cities of size nearby. A little about Morton County; County is 730 square miles, three incorporated cities, county seat is Elkhart with a population of a little over 2100. The closest city with a population of over 20,000 is Liberal, KS and is located 65 miles away on highways. The closest interstate was 144 miles away in the city of Amarillo, TX.

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[ATeam]

In trucking, one of the things that transformed the trucker-helping-trucker attitude into something less brotherly today is technology; specifically the smart phone. Truckers do not stop to help truckers like before because there is no need. A trucker in distress can call for help more easily now.

Now days, if there is a serious injury in a small town, a helicopter ambulance will fly in and people will wait for that help before jumping in to transport the victim themselves. Where such services are available, people rely on them. Where they are not available, people rise to provide the support.

It's not that the people in small towns and big cities are different. The same person will act one way in one setting and differently in another setting. It's the availability of technology and services that make the difference.

Even with things like the crime rate, if you take a city's crime rate and compare it to a small town, the small town will likely be lower. But if you add in enough small towns to compare an equal number of people, you may well find that the crime rate is not all that different. To be fair, such a comparison must adjust for poverty as well. If you compare an equal number of small-town poor people with the same number of big-city poor people, the crime rate will not be so different.

People like to wax romantic about small town values, but a factual look at what is really going on evaporates that myth. TeamCaffee herself makes that very point by describing how her relationship with her neighbors and community changed when her circumstances changed. This is the same woman with the same heart in both settings but the behavior is different because the circumstances changed.