Art Thompson: I’ve responded to marie myung-ok lee on a different article where she objects to the “bless your heart” phrase. However, I want to comment here as well.

Can you accept that perhaps your experience of people rarely traveling outside the local area and rarely reading items with which they disagree isn’t a whole lot different than somebody from Manhattan rarely spending much time in New Jersey? When I lived in New York City I was one of the few people I knew who owned a car, and even though I could drive wherever and whenever I felt like driving, I didn’t leave the city very often.

Now as for reading material — I grant that I don’t have a lot of neighbors in my county in the rural Missouri Ozarks who read The New York Times regularly, as I do. But I know more than a few in my county who are Medium readers, and if we’re going to criticize FOX News, let’s not forget that Rupert Murdoch is from Australia, and his TV and cable network is based in New York City, and for a lot of FOX viewers, it gives them a window into a part of America and into parts of the world they might never visit.

Most of us live in bubbles of our own making. It may be an urban bubble, or a social bubble, or a work bubble, or a university bubble, or it may be a bubble of friends from the school we all attended together who get together at the MFA feed store to chat about a business which just happens to involve big animals that cost a lot of money and require a lot of hard work.

Is chatting about cows while sipping coffee at the MFA a whole lot different than stockbrokers chatting about their work while sipping coffee at Starbucks?

If a New Yorker isn’t interested in the far-flung rural parts of “flyover land,” the New Yorker doesn’t get called provincial or stupid. Some New Yorkers aren’t even interested in New Jersey. Why should a person living in rural America be blamed for not being interested in places where he doesn’t live and doesn’t want to live?

Personally I’m glad I spent some time living in New York City. It’s not a place I’d want to live the rest of my life, but that’s largely because I’m a conservative and don’t share the same interests or values as a lot of people in NYC. However, it was interesting for me to see a world very different from the one where I grew up in Michigan.

When I moved to the rural South, it was MUCH more different for me than moving to New York City. There were many more differences I had to get used to. Having an interracial marriage (my wife is Korean) raised serious concerns for both of us about living in rural America, particularly twenty years ago, but we were pleased to find that almost nobody minded our marriage in any of the rural towns in any of the four different states where we’ve lived.

There would have been problems in rural America if we weren’t conservative, but me being a Northerner and my wife being Korean simply wasn’t an issue. It may have taken time for people to get to know us, but once they did, things went fine, apart from a occasional jokes about being “yankee carpetbaggers.” By the time people actually said that to my face, most of them had long ago decided I was okay despite my “funny accent,” and it was a joke, not an attack. Yes, there are always a few jerks and idiots, but I’ve had more problems in Korea with my interracial marriage than anywhere in rural America, and big cities aren’t exactly free of bigots, either.

Give people time to get to know you. Take time yourself to get to know other people. Learn what people like and what they don’t like. Be open-minded about differences that really don’t make a difference. Be patient when someone says something you don’t like, and give them the benefit of the doubt about what they intended to say. Very often what appears at first to be a problem turns out to be based on a misunderstanding.

Is that really so hard?