In recent years, I have been on a journey to disentangle myself from the nostalgia associated with having grown up in a small town. Because nostalgia, by its very nature, commits the sin of omission. It rarely tells the whole truth, only the parts that make us feel good. When it does try to include everything, it minimizes the details that make the story look bad.

My guides on this journey have been musicians such as Jason Isbell and Brian Douglas Phillips, whose song Looking Back warns against nostalgia with biblical urgency.

The prophets shouting truth along the pathway have been people of color, the poor, the religious and sexual minorities who grew up in the same place as I did. These sages tell different stories about how good life in a small town can be.

I’ve been thinking about this recently with the Social Upheaval Du Jour, the pulling of Jason Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town video from CMT airplay. For details and commentary on this, you can scan Twitter/Threads during this small time window between Trump indictments.

I have been mindful of a couple of things during this brouhaha. The first is how many in the conservative movement appropriate ideas such as “small towns” and “the simple life” to advance their brands. But many of the loudest mouthpieces for this sense of nostalgia have never truly experienced what they are preaching.

Jason Aldean lives in Nashville (population 692,000) and grew up in Macon (population 150,000).

Kid Rock grew up in a house I would have considered a mansion when I was a child.

More MAGA-World residents live in the suburbs and drive $60k+ pickup trucks than those who live in Luckenbach.

Over half of the January 6th rioters were business owners, white-collar CEOs, doctors, lawyers, or architects.

The reality that Jason Aldean represents “Small Town America” is a testament to how successful the rich and the powerful have taken on an identity that is not their own.

But the other sadly comical (or comically sad) thing about the song “Try That in a Small Town” is that small towns in our country are HAVENS of violence and criminality. In the days before the Aldean saga began, I saw friends from back home share stories on social media about a high-speed chase involving police and car theft.

My 84-year-old uncle (a former marine, farmer, and factory worker who would challenge Aldean to a fight over his politics) is frequently the target of theft, scams, and being taken advantage of in our hometown.

Do we even need to talk about the drug epidemic in small towns?

The more sinister truth behind all this, one that renders the Aldean song even more ludicrous, is that small-town law enforcement OFTEN turn a blind eye to certain crimes, and are often complicit in others. Have you ever seen Dukes of Hazzard?

None of this is to say that small towns aren’t generally more conservative than larger cities. That is a reality I will not deny. And although the number of violent crimes may be more in cities, that is a matter of scale, not values.

Divesting myself of small-town nostalgia hasn’t made me love Chandler and Brownsboro any less. It has actually increased my affection for those communities that helped raise me. I now love those places not because of their “past glories” but because they are where I learned to love God and value people. They are where I was introduced to a Jesus who preached against the retributive violence that Jason Aldean preaches. But the blinders have been removed, and I can now see that those values weren’t exclusive to my small town, but just happened to be where I first experienced them.

I was in a small town when I first read the words from T.S. Eliot that “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” I am in a city as I am remembering them now. The nostalgia of small-town AND big-city life hinders the end of our exploring, so let’s try putting it to rest.