If you were to solicit opinions on campus about the demographic factor that most divides us as a student body, you'd likely to get an motley assortment of answers—one's political persuasion, one's status as a Greek, one's financial wellbeing, and so forth. But having come from Kansas City, I'm sensitive to how narrowly-defined we come to be simply by virtue of our answer to a single binary question: are you from the Metro Area?
The tenor of the relationship between Kansas Citians and everyone else in the state is difficult to grasp and even more difficult to taxonomize. Perhaps it's best illustrated by comparison: it's less openly antagonistic than the cultural conflict between Americans and the French, but it lacks the novelty, exchange, and genuine curiosity that runs between Americans and the Japanese. It doesn't have any of the sinister and creepy undertones like the relationship between Americans and Russians, but is without the good-humored cheekiness of the relationship between Americans and Canadians. And although there's an explicit economic class component, there aren't any dark injustices lurking in the annals of history, so the struggle is not generally a personal one.
The truth is, for all the rhetoric about “small-town values,” and “big-town opportunities” (and all the other lazy and vague platitudes in between), people from inside the Metro Area just don't understand or care to understand the people outside of it—and vice versa—and other than the fact that “Johnson County” has been established as something of a slur, nobody has ever bothered to have a serious dialogue about it. The implied KC-centric dichotomy here is admittedly slightly false, but even that doesn't hurt my case: students from Wichita, Topeka, Salina, and possibly a few other places scattered around the state probably understand the nature of urban and suburban life, but they usually just ally themselves with the small-town folks, anyway. Students from the Metro Area stand alone.
This line drawn in the sand isn't exactly invisible, either; every freshman knows within two weeks of orientation which side of the tracks he or she lives on. Regional relations at K-State are a terrific mess, probably always have been, and although the disparity of wealth, education and opportunity between us does underlie some of the problems, I think the conflict is in essence a cultural one. I don't know whether the situation is getting better or whether it's even soluble at all, but I think it could be, if only some of my fellow suburbanites would take to heart the following:
Your obnoxious behavior has made us unpopular. Stop.
Righteously indignant rural folks certainly own some of the blame for perpetuating the conflict (every Kansas farmer feeds how many of us?), but the very fact that no explanation needs to be added to the above directive to make it coherent seems proof enough that we all know where the fault lies essentially. In a basic sense, the burden is on the city folk to understand that people who have until now lived their lives on farms and in small towns ultimately ask the same metaphysical and moral questions that we do (or at it's at least not necessarily the case that they don't), and that just like us, they're simply trying to make their way. I make this offering not to imply that I have any genuine understanding of “life in the country,” as it might be trademarked—I don't—but only to illustrate to my compatriots that there's a place under the sun for all of us, and if they figured this out, we would all be better off.
