Different Than My Small-Town Values

by: Mike Lux

Thu Sep 04, 2008 at 13:38

I was born and raised in Nebraska, and my wife grew up on a farm her brother and father still live on. It's four miles away from Westboro, MO, a town whose population has sunk below 200 many years ago. Before being pulled to the Washington, D.C. area because of my work a few years back, my wife and I had never lived in a town over the size of 200,000, and we're still most at home when hanging out with the family and friends back home at small-town cafes and restaurants that were favorite haunts as we were growing up. My brother is a Methodist minister serving a church in Lincoln now, but I miss the days when we could drive out to visit him in churches in places like Mullen, North Platte and Broken Bow, Nebraska.

I go through all this biographical background as a way of getting to this point: while I appreciated Sarah Palin's tribute to small-town values at one point in her speech, the values she exhibited in the rest of the speech were not the ones I recognized from the small towns I know. Her sarcasm, even downright nastiness at times, is not representative of the people I grew up with and still love.

More in the extended entry.