I hesitate to respond to you again because I think you've dug your heels in here on finding the joke troublesome, but: You DO realize that it's not at the expe

I hesitate to respond to you again because I think you've dug your heels in here on finding the joke troublesome, but: You DO realize that it's not at the expense of MERELY staying in a small, provincial, homogeneous place, right? It's ALSO continuing to embrace the blinkered worldview that growing up in such a place engenders. You need both for the joke to land. You're reacting here as thought it's JUST about moving away (or not). It isn't. I know educated, open-minded people who stayed in my hometown who have grown personally and intellectually and morally since youth. They stayed there for a handful of reasons, and some of them are as you state: an inability or unwillingness to be more than an hour from family, for example. But I know of far more people who have not advanced in any meaningful way since they were 18 or 20. They often find the VERY IDEA of a world beyond the hometown to be fishy and untrustworthy. They are, uniformly, uncritical consumers of Fox News. They are the ones posting racist memes about, say, the Obamas, or proudly touting their COVID vax refusenik status. This is who the joke is about.