It has usually been the case that a culture is described to itself by those who live in metropolitan areas. The cities are the traditional loci of the, allegedly, most highly valued cultural activities and most histories of past cultures deal with the denizens of the urban spaces and the activities of those who live, work and, in many instances, are born into the most densely populated areas.
As we have come to live in the period of time that has produced the megalopolis, this paradigm is ever more the reality.
The unfortunate result of this is that a vast segment of the population is not represented in the expression of culture that spews out of our cities. The city mouse knows not of the country mouse and, all to often, could not care less.
The problem with this is that the urban and, increasingly, suburban expression of culture becomes self referent to the degree that it blindly excludes a large and vital sector of the culture that it pretends to explain.
Essentially, the city boys assign a null value to those who do not share their experience and consign those of us folks who do not share this confined version of reality - to the minor religion of Bubbaism.
This is a great tragedy for both parties.
In so far as America can be said to have a shared cultural experience, its historical antecedents are in the hardscrabble world of the rural and semi rural environs, rather than the allegedly more refined venues of the great cities or, more recently and, with more effective damage, the suburbs. To ignore this reality is to transgress reality itself.
Many of us who grew up in this country had fishing rods and guns as common household implements that shared the same level of familiarity and availability as shovels and corn brooms. In a very real sense, they were part of the furniture of our lives.
To state that many of us countrified folk hunt and fish is to state the obvious. To imply or infer that we must therefore be less intelligent or are more lacking in refinement than our metropolitan brethren is to misstate and misunderstand.
I would refer you back to Jefferson's ideal of the American. I would ask you to hearken to the message of Teddy Roosevelt and his appeal to "The Active Life".
Those who eschew hunting and fishing are not my enemy. Those who insist that their values are superior to and must supersede the values of those who do not share their view, to an exclusionary level, are everyone's enemy.
Regards, Tom Thomas J. Watson - Cabinetmaker Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania