Many people just want a normal life around family and friends and what they're familiar with. Having family around in particular is especially important when you have children or when your parents are approaching their end of life. Children get sick and having a relative around to help watch them is essential.
Many don't optimize their life their lives around "better opportunities" and "diverse cities". It sounds like you do, and good for you.
I hesitate to respond to you again because I think you've dug your heels in here on finding the joke troublesome, but:
You DO realize that it's not at the expense of MERELY staying in a small, provincial, homogeneous place, right? It's ALSO continuing to embrace the blinkered worldview that growing up in such a place engenders. You need both for the joke to land.
You're reacting here as thought it's JUST about moving away (or not). It isn't.
I know educated, open-minded people who stayed in my hometown who have grown personally and intellectually and morally since youth. They stayed there for a handful of reasons, and some of them are as you state: an inability or unwillingness to be more than an hour from family, for example.
But I know of far more people who have not advanced in any meaningful way since they were 18 or 20. They often find the VERY IDEA of a world beyond the hometown to be fishy and untrustworthy. They are, uniformly, uncritical consumers of Fox News. They are the ones posting racist memes about, say, the Obamas, or proudly touting their COVID vax refusenik status.
Solid explanation, but I think anyone can be forgiven for taking that tweet at face value and finding it disrespectful to small town people (good or bad) .
Um no. Tell me, what the point of that statement is other than to be a bigot and spreading hate? Could it have been left out, and less hate spread because of it, without changing the context they provided? So you see, it’s just there to spread hate.
Many don't optimize their life their lives around "better opportunities" and "diverse cities". It sounds like you do, and good for you.