I Hated Vern: The Embarrassing Problem Facing Small Towns

Have you ever had a bad habit? One that was really shameful.

Not smoking or stealing PayDays from the Village Pantry. I’m talking embarrassing.

I did.

I used to hate people. In silence…hate. Deep, raw, “forget you and your mama” hate.

Ya know what I mean?

When I was in college, I directed nearly all my hate toward Vern.

Vern, man. Friggin’ Vern.

Of course, Vern is not his real name. I don’t think anyone born after 1953 was named Vern.

No matter his name, I hated this guy.

I Hated Vern for No Reason

Here’s the kicker—there was no reason behind my hating Vern. He’d never done anything to me. He was a nice guy. Kind. Polite. Respectful. Hardworking. Pretty reserved.

Ok, maybe there was a reason. Vern’s misstep was he dared to exist; he dared to exist and share traits I thought I saw in myself—intelligent, driven, entrepreneurial, ambitious, academic.

How dare he?!

What. A. Prick.

Maybe I was the real problem in all this. Maybe if I had possessed an ounce of true self-esteem and could put aside my ego and insecurity for twelve minutes, Vern and I could have been friends, or at least collegial.

But at 21 or 22, my fragile sense of self couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t bear the thought of someone being as good as me at something I loved or having the same dreams I had and starting on them before I could get the proverbial bat off my shoulder.

I could hardly stand to be in the same classroom as Vern.

VERN!

He Didn’t Care for Me Either

Oh, I should probably let you know I don’t think Vern cared much for me either. Maybe it was because I was so cold to him or because I’m pretty sure he caught me MoFo him with biting gusto one day in the hallway of the business school. Either way, I can’t blame Vern for not liking me, and I’ll accept total blame for our relationship blowing up on the runway before it even got going.

Now, let me say one more thing before we move forward. I knew I was wrong. It didn’t take me years of reflection and intense therapy to wake up and realize “wow, I was a dick to Vern because I was insecure.” No, I knew as I was doing it. Even in my early-20s, I had enough self-awareness to recognize all I needed to do was pick up the phone and call Vern so we could be resources for each other or at least cast some hate out of our hearts.

And ya know what?

It never happened.

And that’s a shame, because recently I ran into an issue with a business that could have been alleviated if I could talk to someone with Vern’s expertise. The problem is, Vern’s the only person I know with that expertise. It took a lot more time and work to put a patch on a problem Vern could have likely wholly corrected had I been able to call him.

What a shame.

It’s not a shame that Vern and I never became best buddies or never stood next to each other at weddings or christenings or never went to family vacations together. That was never in the cards.

The real loss is not being able to bounce ideas and struggles off someone who has a similar brain, drive, and similar values as you. There are few people in the world who you will find alignment within those areas, and when you push one away, your world gets smaller.

The Small Town Vern Problem

Small towns do this a lot. They isolate, keep to themselves, and try to exist as their own islands.

It’s a defense mechanism; a response to trauma or threat.

For decades, small towns had to be interdependent—each of them specializing in one aspect of commerce or providing some input or resource the others needed.

Then came the war-and-post-war boom, and it allowed each town to develop a more robust economy within their city walls. No longer were they dependent on the folks ten or fifteen miles down the road; they were self-sufficient and those folks became the competition. This went ok for a few decades. Factories came in, built industries within small towns, and local economies were supported by a few large players that were able to bring outside money into the immediate geography and create jobs and investment.

But when free trade, deregulation, and outright greed encouraged big industries to uproot from small towns and head to cheaper towns or other continents, those once-self-reliant small towns suddenly found themselves competing in a different way.

What had once been a competition for abundance, overnight became a competition for survival.

Hating Our Neighboring Towns Hurts Us

We know this story and we’ll tell it over and over again, but as the big dogs moved out, they left behind jobless masses vying for only a handful of open positions that would, in many cases, be gone in a matter of months or years themselves.

The folks who grew up watching this kind of competition unfold and seeing their parents and grandparents have to drive two or three towns over to work a job that paid 70% of what they had been making a year prior, they’re now in charge of things. They’re the ones who want to protect their families and their neighbors by creating fully sustainable economies within the city limits. They never want to partner with another town or have to go knocking on the next town’s door for a cup of sugar.

And while this way of doing things is understandable, it must be recognized as a recipe for disaster.

What happens when your small town needs resources the other town has? Are you going to let pride and fear get in the way of growth and opportunity?

What happens when they need what you have? Are you going to leave money on the table?

Small Town Diplomacy and Creating Cooperation Between Towns

Small town diplomacy is rea and should be talked about more.

In fact, in August, I’ll share with you a story of a group of towns in West Virginia who have all come together to create a formal and informal cooperative government agreement that promotes the sharing of resources and the successes those resources afford them.

In the coming decades, we’re going to see more stories like the one in West Virginia, where towns are going to work together to create more prosperous and fulfilling lives for their communities. In many places, this will be born of necessity, not just opportunity.

Great ideas are in no short supply. Plenty of leaders and advocates are committed to creating bridges between towns’ borders and forming special bonds to make life better, healthier, and more meaningful for those who live in these communities. If you’d like to learn more about them, please make sure you’re signed up for our mailing list or taking advantage of our “edu-tainment” packages that give you access to more content, more history, more ideas, and hopefully more fun.

On a final note, as someone who wishes he had talked to his hated Vern 15 years ago, please put your ego down, live with the intimidation and false sense of inadequacy and go talk to your Vern. It truly could improve your life.

Thank you so much for reading.

Tomorrow, I’m going to share with you the Top Ten Things We Miss About Small Towns.

So, make sure you’re on our mailing list to get it right to your inbox.

We’ll talk to you tomorrow!

-AT

Adam Tidrow is a serial entrepreneur, expert in American business and economic history, and scholar whose work focuses primarily on local economic development in the American Rust Belt.

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