I moved to Fort Worth a long time ago for work, we had a 1 year old. I didn't really like the idea of him going to school with kids... lets say, of the "Texas mentality", but was really just using the job as a stepping stone to get out of my home state and hoped to be in CA before he'd reach school age.
The first week there we met a family that had also just moved from a northern state and ended up hanging out with them all summer. The kids were super nice, they played with our 1 year old, who had no one else to play with, being new to the area, for hours on end without any fighting whatsoever. Their son, maybe 7, had long red hair "like Shawn White" who he idolized. A few months later, school started. The first week the family showed up at the pool in our complex and he had cut his hair short. We mentioned it and he ran off, clearly holding back tears. His mom said he doesn't want to talk about it, the kids at school had bullied him so bad he wanted to get it cut.
Never made it to CA but left TX to go back home within just a few months. That story wasn't the only reason but there are plenty of others that made it clear to us TX wasn't a good place to raise a kid.
I can empathize. As an early teen, my family moved from a major US city to the rural midwest which is filled with "blue collar born and bred Americans." I was immediately bombarded with a strict Christian and puritan-like culture in high school. I grew up in a Catholic household but I had never experienced the intensity of a group of kids following their parents upbringing to a tee. They hated anyone who had longer hair and didn't play football and didn't go to church on Sunday. It may sound like a caricature but I immediately asked my parents to change schools. It never happened. I experienced a tough four years of high school because I liked alternative music and dance music like techno. I never made long lasting friendships during that era. Over 20 years later and I can't shake the uneasy feeling that seemingly well-intentioned people seek to eradicate uniqueness in humanity. I've been to plenty of those homes with parents who would greet me with polite words, but I could sense the dichotomy of distaste and good Christianity sensibility.
I never considered myself politically active during that era. I chalked it up to the country mindset. But, since then I've witnessed the rise of their hatred powered by the systems many of us built – social networks and similar technologies. I don't believe either of the two major political parties represent my ideologies and ethics. Instead, I find them both to be trapped in a game of showmanship while wrestling for control of a great nation. Seemingly non-1% citizens loose rights, freedoms, and opportunities to grow as persons. The majority of my high school peers never left their birth town and simply perpetuated the farce taught them in early in youth. The farce being that they own something of America to greater degree than anyone else and that their government owes them everything, but they want to exist without regulation or taxation...and any non-white non-christian non-rural humans. I still can't wrap my head around their logic and I spent a lot of time experiencing a similar existence.
Back to the topic of Texas life. I believe that people born in rural communities like I experienced, would have different belief systems had they been raised in more open and mentally adventurous environments. In other words, their culture is not genetic instead it is more like a meme. Why risk putting our nation's future in stifling cultural states?
As a side note, I witnessed many of my peers turn to drugs like meth and fake cannabis like Spice by the end of high school. Maybe that is the American and I did it wrong.
> Over 20 years later and I can't shake the uneasy feeling that seemingly well-intentioned people seek to eradicate uniqueness in humanity.
It's because there's a self-perpetuating safety in it. This is one of the functions of religion: it benefits its in-group by giving them rules about the "right" way to behave, and those rules coincidentally favor conservative behaviors that have the side effect of stamping out individuality and making everything more "the same." And the self-perpetuating part is that groups of people engaging in more conservative, safer behavior thrive (at the expense of individualism). It's compounded by the fact that there's a moral judgment attached to your behaviors, which means it behooves people to be outwardly conforming in order to signal their inclusion in the morally superior group. Long hair on a boy? Well that sure is different, and as everyone knows, different is bad.
"Culture clash" is "I think that thing you believe is silly". People looking to force their views on others by law (or other violent means) vs people not wanting to have other's views forced on them by law is fascism vs freedom.
The first week there we met a family that had also just moved from a northern state and ended up hanging out with them all summer. The kids were super nice, they played with our 1 year old, who had no one else to play with, being new to the area, for hours on end without any fighting whatsoever. Their son, maybe 7, had long red hair "like Shawn White" who he idolized. A few months later, school started. The first week the family showed up at the pool in our complex and he had cut his hair short. We mentioned it and he ran off, clearly holding back tears. His mom said he doesn't want to talk about it, the kids at school had bullied him so bad he wanted to get it cut.
Never made it to CA but left TX to go back home within just a few months. That story wasn't the only reason but there are plenty of others that made it clear to us TX wasn't a good place to raise a kid.