We hear about Red America almost every day. It's a place where people have different values, think different things, and essentially live in a different world then you and I. They don't work in fancy office buildings or dream big dreams, but work more pratically. They're lives aren't as menial as mocked on shows like the Discover Channel's Dirty Jobs, but at the same time their world is different.

Your life certainly is different if you spend your time working under the tractor with hands full of greese, putting boards in some massive machine, or shovling cow dung for a living. Yet, in many ways it is a like. Working class people have to make a living, just like you and I. Most of us still work on our trucks from time to time, or play in the mud with quads, even if that's not our life full-time.

The working-class red America psyche might give us the appearance of being 'hard' like Toby Keith, but that doesn't mean that just because one is kowboy or drives truck (note the hard 'k'), they are that different. They still share similiar hopes and dreams, and face many of the problems that we face from our alternate vision of the world.

Living a hardened life teaches you how to be prepared in a variety of situations, like what to happen if you get lost in the woods, but it can also make you dumb. Brute strength in a virtue, but it can't get lost in all that exists in our often delicate natural world.I'm not an Red America, nor do I claim to be one. I can sympthize with some of their causes, and partially understand the roots of the culture, but I'm still in many ways just another silly liberal with a cowboy hat.