[krapp]

There are very few rural areas in the US in which most people don't get their food from the supermarket, water from utilities and power from a power company, just like everyone in a city. They didn't build their homes from trees they felled by hand, they don't grow their own food, or sew their own clothes.

As far as hunting and fishing goes, few people living in rural areas would be capable of living entirely off the land for an extended period of time, so the premise that they would be able to survive a disaster more or less unscathed while the city dwellers starve is just really not true, at least not as true as Americans would like to believe.

One problem rural areas do have is lack of disaster preparedness funds. I live in Texas, and I've seen what happens when disasters hit rural areas. The same people who complain about Washington and city dwellers wind up in tent cities being tended to by the Red Cross and FEMA.

See how well agricultural communities do without farm subsidies, housing loans or food stamps. Without the state keeping them alive, a lot of them would simply die out.

And this is my ultimate point - most Americans who live in rural areas are little less domesticated than their urban counterparts.