Saving Rural America
I’m a little suspicious of the common notion that community well-being is simply a matter of good jobs. We hear that refrain constantly from those politicians whose thinking is limited to how much money is involved. But community well-being is much more than just a matter of dollars and cents. Demographic factors are just as important, if not more so. A community losing population, stratifying its population by age or income, and losing its schools and hospitals is not healthy.
We’ve known for all the decades since the end of World War II that we’ve been becoming more urbanized and that too many of our small and medium sized towns are in decline. They’re moving backward and even dying.
In West Virginia, for example, as our economic base, tied historically to extractive industries (mining, drilling, logging), has stiffened and atrophied, we’ve lost population in almost all of our counties, especially those located in coal country. It seems that those who could get out, did so, leaving behind those who were not ready to leave or couldn’t leave.
Many of those who stayed didn’t have resources enough to make a move or were tied to aging or incapacitated family members who didn’t make it out of the coal mines with functioning lungs. Coal mining is a declining industry everywhere, not just in West Virginia. Even so many, maybe most of those who stayed, stayed because they are proud of who they were and where they lived. It was their home, their Mountain Home, and it was where they belonged. It didn’t help that our politicians were lying to them that the coal jobs would be coming back.
But as proud as they might be, the reality of increasing poverty and not knowing how to make poverty go away, gradually took a toll on the resolve of the communities. Many of them came to believe that there wasn’t any possible solution, that there was no way forward. This is not to say that the individuals making up these communities gave up. They still looked out for their families and their neighbors, but the scope of their community involvement narrowed and there wasn’t the energy to care about their downtowns, their service network, their cultural environment, or their infrastructure.
Small town America and small town West Virginia, in particular, stopped believing in a viable future, or, more honestly, only believed in an economic miracle that would come along and save them. It was the mindset of people whose history had been forged by outside interests, by people not of their community making decisions about how much “the locals” could expect to get out of life. It was the out-of-state coal and gas companies, railroads, telecom companies, timber interests, corporate agriculture that lacked the same attachment to community and place as those born and raised there.
Okay, so enough complaining about the past and the reasons for why we’re losing our rural way of life. What do we do about it? Is it even worth doing anything about it? What is there about a rural way of life that’s worth preserving?
I think it’s enough to say on this last question that there are people who prefer living outside of big cities in closer connection with their environment, and maybe there are businesses that prefer employees like that too. Then the other questions have their answers. Yes, it is worth preserving a rural option for people. But to make that happen rural communities need the wherewithal and resolve to attract the kinds of economic forces that want to integrate into a rural setting.
So now comes the hard part. What’s the right combination of political and social planning that respects the way of life of the resident population and attracts appropriate businesses? It seems logical to me that solutions that will work come about from not one great idea or one great mind. Instead, it takes many great ideas sprung from many great minds. This is an argument for diverse thinking, in other words.
Another way of saying the same is that it isn’t Republicans alone or Democrats alone or Libertarians alone or Socialists alone that create solutions. It’s all of the above, but under the proviso that they are all willing to collaborate on finding solutions.
But here’s the bad news. Rural communities are often way, way too monolithic in their political thinking and in their willingness to engage. They are overwhelmingly conservative, Republican voting, and dismissive of other views. And of course, we can say the opposite for urban areas, namely that their left leaning majorities are largely dismissive of conservative ideas. But urban areas, including their surrounding suburbs, are not losing population or suffering overall economic decline. For now anyway, many urban areas, led often by progressive leaders, are thriving, albeit with their own brand of social problems.
It’s probably not entirely fair to say that comparing urban and rural areas simply on economic measures of success tells the whole story, because it suggests that the “fault” lies with the rural communities for the condition they’re in. It does suggest though that the burden on reviving and sustaining rural communities rests with those wanting to live in those communities. They largely have to do it themselves. And, to the extent that the road to success is on the path that urban areas have followed, it might mean that rural areas have to become more accepting of progressive political ideas. Maybe “tolerant” is the better word here, since conservatism is so baked into the fabric of rural communities.
Conservatism seems wedded to the proposition that there are good guys and bad guys. The way it was is the way it should be. We’re us and they’re them. Embrace the us and reject the other.
The reality of course is that there can be some bad in the “good” guys, and some good in the “bad” guys. Communities put themselves in jeopardy when they can’t tell the difference. In West Virginia, along with the incomes the coal companies provided, came black lung, poisoned rivers, scarred mountains, and bankrupt pension plans. The owners made a mess and then left, taking their profits with them. Their “commitment” to their communities lasted only until the coal ran out. It’s hard not to see that our communities got a bum deal in the long run.
And now it looks like West Virginia is opening itself to another wolf at the door, that being another mining concern, not coal this time, but data. The owners again are overwhelmingly out-of-state interests with a limited understanding of the communities they’re determined to bend to their economic goals. All their arguments come wrapped in the same “good jobs” promises of companies in the past that have taken so much and given back so little. And our Republican dominated legislatures are deaf to the concerns of the people and the rural communities that will be affected.
These communities want good jobs, of course. But they want those jobs to come from companies dedicated to their communities, companies that want to do more than extract what they can and leave a mess behind when the resources dry up.
