'Rural' Versus 'Rural'

If you ever sit down with a guy from Alabama, among the 7,000-odd topics that you might get into (depth of septic tanks, best paint for barn roofs, copperhead snakes, failed camping trips, etc).....there is this PhD-level discussion that would consume an hour over the definition of 'rural'.

Regular folks will classify a junction of two roads....where a church, a cemetery, and a gas-station lay....as being only semi-rural.  Some will suggest that a junction of two roads....where one bank, a catfish restaurant, a Dollar-General store, two churches, and a cemetery....as being truly rural.  So there is a thought process going on and some folks want to define real rural...as just plain rural.

I grew up near a two-road junction, with a cemetery, two churches, and a farm-related-general store....which I tended to note as just plain and absolute rural.

On the opposite direction, about another half-mile was a road that passed along a creek, and this 'town' had around four churches, a cemetery, two gas stations, a barber shop, a catfish restaurant, a post office, and a general store (Ottos).  As much as one might want to define it as rural....it just never had that appeal.

Southerners get into discussions like this because some folks think they've got it 'rough', when they actually have a 'drive-up' burger enterprise, a Dollar-General, a cemetery, and three churches.  Then the next guy will lay out his woes as a kid, where they had only a run-down gas station (with leaking tanks), a beer-joint, a church, and a cemetery. 

This discussion appears to be getting less and less of a topic-item.  Today, that junction of two roads doesn't really matter.  Within a four-mile circle, there's likely two Dollar-General stores, a couple of gas stations, a honky tonk, a cellphone-satellite TV shop, and six to eight churches of various faiths.  People under the age of thirty?  They don't even size up rural status anymore.  In another thirty years....ruralness may not even matter.