There are worse tweets in that thread. The generous interpretation of the responses here is that the folks never opened the article and assumed that I was somehow positing some superiority of small towns over big cities. That’s probably mostly true, but it’s also a bit too charitable. There’s increasingly a desire on social media to turn every single story into a politicized culture war. So, if I write here’s what life was like for a different part of America, if it’s the wrong part of America — if it resembles that dreaded “diner in Middle America” that so many commentators spent 2016 through 2020 mocking — it earns the reaction: Those people are no better than us!

No one said they were.

So, is this something Twitter causes, because it makes it so easy to infer someone is making a point that you dislike? Or do we all just hate each other, and Twitter allows us to say it out loud?