>The story is a commentary on how wonderful the people living in small towns are.
I don't think so, but I see how you got there.
I think it is a story about empathy for others in a crisis, and the author argues that this is universal in America--including New York, Chicago, Mobile, Detroit, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Seattle, Indianapolis, Honolulu, and Charlotte.
This was the sentence that convinced me it's talking about something being special about small towns: And the most unusual thing about all this is: None of this is unusual. At least not within the national tapestry that is The Great American Small Town.
The author blogs pretty much exclusively on the cultural tapestry of the South.
> and the author argues that this is universal in America-
I see a comment arguing that, but not by the author.
This is sort of a "stolen valor" situation, because Mendon MO is certainly not the South. One could make that argument for parts of Missouri, but this ain't the Ozarks. Mendon is on the same latitude as Dayton OH, so only JD Vance types would pretend to be confused about this.
Any state that was a slave state and member of the Confederacy is part of the South.
Missouri was never a member of the Confederacy. Slavery was in force before the Civil War, but do you really propose a rule that would also see Delaware considered part of the South? It's dumb to use state lines anyway. For example, Branson MO has a lot stronger claim to be part of the South than Sedalia MO, a town of which some people have actually ever heard, is 60 miles south of Mendon. Try visiting some of these places before pronouncing on them!
I'd be willing to admit Delaware on a technicality. To me "the South" doesn't refer to geography so much as the common referent of slavery in American culture. Maybe states like Deleware can be called "South adjacent."
The idea of defining the South in this way is appealing, not least because it will annoy people who like the "Sean of the South" website. If we do this, however, we won't be able to stop at Delaware. [0] Maybe thread parent could have said, "The author blogs pretty much exclusively on the cultural tapestry of USA", and I wouldn't have complained.
Communication is seldom improved by more vagueness, however. Sean Dietrich has apparently honed an oeuvre that makes a certain sort of American feel better about things, which is explicitly related to a particular understanding of the South. He doesn't hesitate to invoke Maine or Colorado or wherever while layering on more saccharine banalities, but his audience doesn't love precision the way HN does. (An example of the fuzziness of his POV: the fact that the train illustration depicts tall pine trees amid steep slopes rather than the gently rolling farmland with deciduous forest and scattered cedars around Mendon.) Presumably this benefits his project of assuring us that everything is just fine and we shouldn't think too hard about possible improvements. I oppose that project, so I think we should continue excluding him from various locales until he is completely fenced into a tiny Alabamian postage stamp. So, I don't agree that Mendon is more Southern than it is Midwestern or even what Colin Woodard would call "Midlands".
Missouri never joined it, but it was admitted to the Confederacy in 1861. It and Kentucky share this "admitted but never joined" status -- had the war gone the other way, the Missourian government-in-exile would have been legitimized (and in fact, the elected Governor of Missouri was pro-Confederate; the only reason there was a Union-sympathizing Governor was because a Union general chased all the rebels out of the capital).
"Missouri was never a member of the Confederacy" is a technicality rather than an honest assessment of sympathies and prevailing politics in the state.
I don't think so, but I see how you got there.
I think it is a story about empathy for others in a crisis, and the author argues that this is universal in America--including New York, Chicago, Mobile, Detroit, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Seattle, Indianapolis, Honolulu, and Charlotte.