I am not Will Rogers

Will Rogers once said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Actually, he said it quite a bit. It was his slogan, much like Avis’s slogan is “We try harder.” I have great respect for Will Rogers. If you’ve never read any of the many newspaper columns he wrote, you need to do so. He ranks up there with Mark Twain for his humor and effective idiomatic use of the English language. Like Mark Twain, he was not a simple kid from the country, but rather a skilled, funny and insightful wordsmith who knew his audience.

He said some clever things like:

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few that learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

As loved and respected as Will Rogers was by the public, it is pure bullshit that he never met a man he didn’t like. I say that for two reasons. First, it is inevitable human nature to divide the world into likes and dislikes, good and bad. That’s the way the brain works. It has to categorize and stereotype in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the almost infinite variety of situations and sensory inputs a person encounters on a daily basis. The brain simply cannot process, analyze and make value judgments of that much information otherwise.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, there are enough jerks, buttheads and A-holes out there that it’s mathematically impossible to go through life without bumping into your fair share of them. I’ve never met anyone who likes jerks, buttheads and A-holes so I’d bet the farm that Will Rogers met a lot of people he didn’t like. He was smart enough to say otherwise to foster his image and further his career.

I don’t have that problem. I don’t have to worry about a career anymore, and I have no image to preserve. I have discovered that life gets a lot easier when you really don’t care what people think of you. So I don’t mind confessing that I’ve met plenty of people that I don’t like. I may even be proud of that fact.

Truth be told, I don’t think I can go through a day without not liking someone. I certainly cannot go through a half hour newscast without discovering there is another politician, commentator or celebrity that I don’t like. And every day the dislike list grows longer. By now it includes most of Congress, everyone who has hosted a show on MSNBC, most of the names on the Hollywood A list, virtually the entire state of California and everyone who works for the satellite internet service that provides such poor service to me. I’ve never really taken a tally, but I venture to say that I dislike more people than I like.

Which brings me to my topic and that is how nice and polite people are here in Fannin County and how hard it is to find people I really dislike. I’m not just saying that. It’s true. Virtually everyone I’ve met in the almost two years I’ve lived here has been nice, polite, welcoming and friendly. At first, it was disconcerting and a little overwhelming but now I’ve grown accustomed to it. I’ve even started trying to be nice myself. I make a point of smiling at least once a week. It’s a work in progress.

Since I am unable to accept anything on face value, I’ve spent considerable time trying to figure out why there are so many nice and likable people here and why it’s so hard to dislike them. I’ve concluded that it has a lot to do with the innate nature of rural areas and a small towns.

There are less than 25,000 people in Fannin County. As a consequence, you do not have the anonymity that you have in a more populous area, and there is a greater feeling of community. The circles are smaller. Everyone knows everyone else. Sometimes it feels like they are all related to each other. Instead of six degrees of separation there are probably only two or three. If there is any truth to the saying “what goes about comes about,” what goes about is more likely to come about a lot quicker here than in a highly populated area.

All of which means that people try to get along a little more here than in big cities and crowded suburbia. My analogy is this. If you’re on a big cruise ship you’re less likely to accommodate and accept the perceived flaws, foibles and weaknesses of others than you would be if you were together on a life raft with six other people.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I suspect that being nice, polite, welcoming and friendly are qualities that are common to most rural areas and small towns in this country. You always hear about people from big cities coming back from a visit to the Midwest and commenting that people there are so nice and friendly. By and large the Midwest is a place of small towns and rural communities. That may account for why they are perceived as being nice and friendly.

Regardless, if you are naturally abrasive, obnoxious and rude you should think twice about moving to a small town or a rural area. The odds are that you will not fit in.

By now you are probably wondering how I’ve made it through two years without being banned, shunned, tarred or feathered since I’m no Will Rogers. To tell the truth, that’s actually kind of a mystery to me. It either proves that people really are nice, polite and friendly around here or it demonstrates an amazing lack of perception. Either way, I’ll take it.