I really sympathize with this, honestly. At a certain point, as I'm working really hard to debug a segmentation fault late at night, and then catching the subw

I really sympathize with this, honestly. At a certain point, as I'm working really hard to debug a segmentation fault late at night, and then catching the subway early in the morning, the idea of having to sympathize with a bunch of welfare-receiving meth addicts* who keep voting themselves into oblivion really strains my patience. But think of it this way: forget about "rural vs urban", and think of it as a problem with education levels. Rural areas tend to be, on average, much less educated and far more religious. Lack of education has a corrosive effect on democracy, because it garbles the decision making process of entire voting blocs. So why should Blue State people take the initiative to care? Precisely because we are the more educated (on average) and the more cosmopolitan. When engaging with any population that is sufficiently less educated and more provincial, a more educated person is very likely to become frustrated with all the self-destructive behavior observed. Think of a first-world humanitarian organization trying to build schools or hospitals in an impoverished third world country. They may encounter all kinds of resistance based around irrational fears, superstitions, shamanism, and other self-destructive world views. It's really the same thing that happens when Obama tries to make healthcare more widely affordable and available, only to run up against widespread resistance based around conspiracy theories, tribalism and close-mindedness. (It also doesn't help that some of the highly educated people in power regularly exploit the fears of the lesser educated for their own political gains.) But if you think about the situation as a problem of education, rather than "urban vs. rural", it becomes easier to avoid losing your sympathy when you encounter this sort of self-destructive behavior among the less-educated. * it's a joke, relax.