At midnight on New Year’s Eve this year, Thom Tillis, the speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives — and a man who is rumored to be eyeing a U.S. Senate seat — found himself standing in the middle of an outdoor stage in a gas station parking lot.
Tillis had decided to ring in the new year in a tiny North Carolina mountain town so far west it might as well be in Tennessee. At midnight Tillis lowered a suspended Plexiglass box as some 2,000 people looked on. Inside this Plexiglass box was a possum, which had been suspended thirty feet above the crowd for the past three hours.
I know what you’re thinking — this is everything that is wrong with rural North Carolina. Nothing but a bunch of uneducated hicks, impoverished people in an impoverished area with no aspirations beyond applying for a new hunting license. All in all, an embarrassment.
But you’re wrong. And what’s more, you’re missing the point. Actually the Possum Drop illustrates great positive truths about rural North Carolina.
Truth No. One: rural North Carolinians have remarkable self-awareness. Everyone gathered in Brasstown knew it was ridiculous; the absurdity of it all was what made it fun. No one in Brasstown that night thought what they were experiencing was high culture. They just have no interest in pretending to act like they’re something they’re not.
Truth No. Two: rural North Carolinians have remarkable ability. The Drop involved a full evening’s programmed entertainment, hosting a 2,000-person crowd in a town of 100, with a sophisticated sound system and multiple 10-foot viewing screens, all done by Brasstown residents. This is not for the faint of heart or the weak of mind. And if that’s not enough, they’re turning a tidy profit — just ask my friends who bought Possum Drop T-shirts.
Truth No. Three: rural North Carolinians are attracting political attention. Besides Republican Tillis, the Drop was sponsored by Democratic U.S. Congressman Heath Shuler, in a rare display of bipartisan accord. Keep an eye on the developing gubernatorial race – if the candidates are smart they’ll be looking rural. The challenge for rural areas, which is ongoing, is how to translate this attention into meaningful policy development.
Events like the Possum Drop don’t show how backward rural North Carolina is; rather, they show how little we understand it. But we have to understand what it means to be rural. If we don’t it’s easy to support the status quo and dismiss rural North Carolinians as people who can’t be helped.
Rural areas are different, not doomed. Their success can’t be measured in the same way as we measure success for a suburb of Raleigh or inner-city Greensboro.
