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As a native of New York who lived twenty years in the mid-South, then found her way back to upstate New York (but still visits Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia annually), I can add a few here.The tipping culture. This is a custom that, I believe, originated in New York City, but has worked its way north as people move from upstate to downstate and vice versa. In Tennessee, if you call AAA to jump your car battery or replace a flat tire, you would never think to tip, as that's part of what you pay for AAA membership. In my part of the North, the first tI me I needed a jump, the guy hung around a minute looking expectant - I had no idea why, having last needed AAA service in Tennessee, and only afterward did it occur to me he was waiting for a tip. Often the responder will not quite put his hand out, but will quasi-acknowledge and quickly pocket the $2 or $3 or $5 you give him. I have also encountered hostility in a restaurant for not tipping the guy who handed me my takeout order.The pervasiveness of evangelical Christian culture, now extravagantly on display once you get some distance into Virginia, is much diluted or nonexistent in the North. Huge crosses are erected on church property or farmland in the mid-South, but the most you'll see in the North are steeples and spires of churches dating from 100 or 200 years ago. The North is, at least on the surface, far more diverse, with many more Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish institutions. The shooting in the Unitarian church in the Knoxville area a few years back would never happen in the north - at least, I hope never!Over the past 15 years or so, I have observed a huge, even militant shift to the political right in Tennessee and North Carolina. Democrats are not part of the mainstream unless you live in a progressive city like Asheville. Fox is the only accepted TV news channel. About eight years ago, I revisited the fitness center to which I used to belong in Kingsport, TN, where four TVs were set up for members using treadmills and bicycles. The employee who gave me a tour told me that members insisted online of these TVs set to Fox, threatening to cancel their membership if another news channel was displayed. In upstate New York, once you get out of the cities you'll find Fox News and many Trump supporters, but you can feel safe proclaiming any liberal or progressive opinions or tendencies.The North also has a more union-oriented workplace culture. Where I live, many people work in state government and, through the generous programs established for state workers, enjoy benefits that workers in the South might find astonishing. The preferred employer is the State of New York, and the warmest congratulations are given to those who “got in with the State” or even many local governments.

Here’s a unique answer to questions like this, and one that has nothing to do with partisan politics: it’s biology.To wit: humans have a number of heuristics hardwired into our brains. Heuristics are sort of like instincts. For example, we have one for face recognition, that leads to us seeing faces in unlikely things like three-prong electrical sockets (some contractors install three prong sockets upside down so as not to trigger this unsettling response in people).That’s a form of threat assessment. Noticing a face in the dark out of the corner of your eye could have meant the difference between life and death in our tribal ancestors—and we lived in small nomadic tribes for hundreds of thousands of years. Ditto our fear of snakes and spiders—both are often unobtrusive and sometimes deadly, so it makes sense for us to be especially wary of them. You don’t need a heuristic to be wary of an elephant.It’s nomadic tribal life that we’re evolved to deal with, for the most part. Civilization happened too recently, from an evolutionary standpoint, for it to affect the set of heuristics that help guide us.And as I’ve indicated, many of those heuristics deal with threats. The one involved with guns is what I’d call the Overal Threat Assessment heuristic. This is what kicks into overdrive in people with PTSD, where they’re hyperalert every waking second, as if they’re in a permanent battle zone.Heuristics like the OTA (my term for it) let us know how dangerous our environment is. You can’t be on full battle stations alert at all times, as the problems of people with PTSD demonstrate. You need to be able to relax when there are no threats around you.This is where our 2018 lives conflict with our 200,000BC brains: daily news shows and online publications and talk shows will, if we let them, feed us a near-constant diet of threats. The problems is that nearly all of those threats aren’t to us—they’re video clips and news reports of murders and disasters hundreds or thousands of miles from us. yet to our Overall Threat Assessment heuristics, which know nothing about Rush Limbaugh or CNN or Fox or even the nightly broadcast news shows.And because our OTA can’t tell the difference between threats it sees on TV and those you need with your own eyes right in front of you, your OTA tends to call Battle Stations even if you live in a city, as I do for example, where there’s about one murder every three years or so.Moreover, there are special interests that profit from ginning up people’s anxieties. Gun makers don’t sell many guns to relaxed, happy people (gun sales dropped quite a bit when the Trumpublicans took over the national government, I hear, since the possibility of any gun regulation vanished, leaving the gun makers unable to scare folks into the gun stores by telling them that them evil Dem-o-crats gonna go grab their guns so they better stock up right now). Gun makers sells the most guns to the most scared.So the NRA ruthlessly propagandizes its own membership with scary violent stories from all over the place. Home invasions are a biggie. Even though I know a lot of people, and not one has ever had a home invasion happen to them or to anyone they’ve ever known. The only exception I can think of myself is a friend who emigrated here from South Africa, which has a crime rate ten times ours, and my friend knows someone in South Africa who had a home invation robbery.That’s it. From 8,000 miles away.My experience is just anecdotal, but it’s also not unusual, even for city dwellers like me.Also, fear tends to give us tunnel vision, thinking about certain dangers while ignoring others (like others that weren’t highlighted on the news shows we watch/listen to/read.In this case, having a gun in the home is itself dangerous. You’re far more likely to die from a gunshot if there’s a gun in your home than if there isn’t. There are plenty of deaths from accidental discharge of firearms (I include kids finding guns and playing with them in this category). And having a gun handy facilitates suicide in a dark, drunken moment when not having such an easy solution available might lead to having a cooler (if hungover) head in the morning.To my knowledge only one person of my broad acquaintance has a gun in their home, and they’ve never needed to use it.Our tribal brains evolved under vastly more dangerous conditions than most Americans live in. If you deal drugs, you probably need a gun for self protection. Though as I recall studies of defensive use of firearms has mostly comprised using a gun to intimidate others, which a bully would see as “defensive” but no one else would.This is not an argument against owning guns, or for owning guns. I’d probably own a gun if I lived where grizzly bears roamed, for example. Here, though, I’m just trying to show how our biology leads us to misinterpret the modern media-saturated environment as being vastly more dangerous than it is, and to preparing us to live under more dangerous conditions than most of us live in.

How about this let’s throw CNN and Fox out of the equation. Let’s look at alternative news providers and there’s literally hundreds of them available these days. You can do a 30 second search online and you’re gonna find out That main stream media has been feeding you a Heap of horse dung. The mostly peaceful protesters begin and ended their peaceful protesting after the first day. And violence intimidation and dishonesty has reign supreme since then. There are major metropolitan areas that have been besieged by violent insurrectionists for Months now. And the elected officials of those cities and states have not only turned a blind eye to it but have furthered the dishonest narrative That This is a organic and peaceful movement. Don’t take my word for it do you own research. Go to the website of antifa and BLM read their mission statements go to their forms see what the leadership of membership discuss, use their own words to make your decision. There’s Apple video evidence showing violence occurring in these cities every single night. Local businesses being burned to the ground citizens terrorized beaten and even murdered, look up the story of David Dorn or Cannon Hinnant. Chances are you haven’t heard either one of those names in main stream media. well except for one outlet but we’re not discussing them right now. The more you dig the more you learn that this is not a simple citizen protest there’s something larger going on something that is diametrically opposed to what you and I know of is the American way of life. It’s highly organized it’s well-funded and one political party has been using it to further their ambitions to fundamentally change this nation into something that no Free people could accept. i’m not even sure that that political party fully understands what they’ve unleashed or the fact that they have no control over the direction that it’s taking.but you’re a free citizen do you have the time lock down is certainly guaranteed that so do some digging, put in some effort and do your due diligence as a citizen of this nation. Then decide for yourself what’s really occurring, And whether or not you can be bothered to stand up against it. For freedom isn’t about rights, trivial wants and desires. it’s the decision to willing burden yourself with responsibilities that are required to maintain that freedom. And most Americans have forgotten or we never taught that