In a recent televised forum on rural issues, it was stated that only 16% of the American population lives in “rural” areas while only one-tenth of 1% of all private philanthropy ends up going there. This revelation was startling, but also could be wholly expected. Because for most Americans, rural people barely figure any longer into our social equations since increasing numbers in our suburbs and our cities have no personal connection whatsoever with rural America except as the folks-out-there who we meet only on one of our getaways from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
The 16% factor is interesting because it reflects a well-known and steady decline in the population of rural America. For centuries, high percentages of Americans lived in “the country” and they incrementally, farm by farm, produced the raw materials and the food that we as a nation have required to survive. The agricultural number has fallen drastically as farm mechanization, effective pesticides and herbicides, improved packaging and preservation techniques, genetically-engineered crops and farm consolidation has turned a hit-or-miss mom-and-pop occupation into a sure-fire method for turning out vast quantities of food to feed an ever-growing population.
Corporations have replaced the family farm and for good reason: Family farms are in many cases as antiquated and cost-ineffective as the corner grocery store. Today huge supermarkets on one end distribute the food produced on factory farms on the other, and the American people are the beneficiaries. Food today consumes less of the American dollar than ever before in history, and less than anyplace else in the world. Meanwhile US agricultural technology has spread around the globe, and is saving billions from malnutrition. What a nation we are…
And perhaps it is this economic conglomeration that has led Americans to forget our rural brethren. In the 1930s, when large populations of rural Americans still lived in poverty, we focused our national attentions on them through government programs and federal projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority which brought much-needed development to place like Appalachia. Today we have a much smaller but generally healthier and more stable rural population, but hardly without economic woes, some of which are worsening.
The 16% of Americans who still live in rural areas can be divided into two groups, the “old timers” who have lived there for generations, and the new educated people who have decided that the laid-back life out in the countryside and in the small towns of America is superior to that in the cities and suburbs.
And these educated classes naturally tend to have a higher standard of living because they are in many cases connected to the world through the internet, and through business ties in the wealthier cities and suburbs.
That leaves our less educated and more marginalized “old timer” rural folks at the mercy of economic factors that often are beyond their control, as they have been for centuries. And this also leaves them susceptible to timeworn stereotypes as uneducated, uncouth and hardly worth a thought.
But that is far from the truth because these people truly keep us alive. Where would our coal and oil supplies come from if the rural people did not work the mines and the oil fields? Where would our copper and iron ore and other essential elements come from if it were not for the hard-working people out in the countryside who really want to work, and for whom the word “philanthropy” sounds like a foreign noun? Where would our timber come from if not for the industrious loggers who work the woods year in and year out? Who would run the tractors on our increasingly mechanized farms and man the factories that convert these goods and foodstuffs into finished products for our consumption? And this group increasingly is populated by immigrants who are doing the hard work that many Americans are leaving behind in their flight to the suburbs.
Yet still, according to the forum on rural issues, only one-tenth of 1% of all philanthropy ends up in the hands of this crucial segment of our American economy. Amazing…
The question is why. And the answer is simple. Rural people are more conservative and straightforward and have not been instilled with the welfare culture and the charity mentality that permeates so much of America. Rural folks think like this: If I work, I get paid. Period. They are not the type of people who see “easy money” from grants and charities and philanthropy and welfare and government jobs as a way of life as many do in our cities and also at our universities where thousands of professors and other career grant-writers corral billions of dollars for their own use.
In an accident that brought down a freeway overpass in California last Spring, the structure was rebuilt in record time of less than one month. Yet in that brief period, one college professor managed to lasso a grant to write a summary of the project… as if a summary were needed beyond that which the newspapers and the overpass builders and the state already would have issued. But that is the nature of the “easy money” grant-writing culture. Write a grant, get cash. Write another, get more money. Easy as pie.
At the same time that these rural folks are unable and uninterested in taking advantage of the billions available in the philanthropy business, other academic and urban elitists in the environmental movement are increasingly making life more and more difficult for rural Americans. Endless eco-regulations have dried up jobs in mining, ranching, logging, farming and myriad other development projects that even the “new”, educated rural Americans often are opposing as well in order to preserve a pristine environment all over “the countryside”.
The loss of 30,000 rural logging jobs alone in one state, Oregon, over the phony “spotted owl” controversy, was devastating to many times that number in families, towns and associated businesses. The people there did not want charity and government re-training. They wanted their jobs back! But no. And it is indicative of the power of urban and academic environmental groups to use their legal and financial thrust to throw the hicks and hayseeds in rural America out of work with hardly a second thought. And with little economic or political clout themselves, rural Americans have few avenues of recourse against the lawyers and other sharpshooters in the enviro movement and the universities.
Today, in New England and in many other parts of the nation, the very suggestion of even a cell-phone tower installation raises hackles, mostly among the “new”, elite rural people and among second-home owners. In the town of Becket, Massachusetts, horror stories about radiation (what else?) have scared some citizens into fighting one tower, while another opponent was a wealthy second-home couple from Connecticut who decided that a cell-phone tower would spoil their view.
In another case in New York State, a wealthy environmentalist landowner who had put his property into a conservancy trust, decided that he did not want a small fire station down on the main road near his property. The station was intended to offer centralized fire protection to the surrounding towns. Eventually it cost the small rural town of Chatham, New York $32,000 to fight the landowner’s lawsuit. These are not isolated incidents by any stretch. These are routine cases. And this is the type of incremental environmentalism that is sapping the vitality of rural America at a time when development should and could be proceeding apace in order to provide jobs for the good people out there. Just go to www.globalcomputing.com and select newspapers from around rural America to read the stories in real time. They are everywhere.
What we are seeing in rural America is a subject that Nikitas3.com has been addressing and will continue to address in the future. Rural living always has been hard, and, for decades, we had have made great strides toward creating a more sustainable life for the remaining population of folks “out there”. Today, however, rather than appreciating these people for the essential work they do in sustaining our economy, they are being shuffled aside in our thoughts and in our deeds.
What we should be doing is helping this smaller population in rural America to have better lives not by giving them charity and teaching them how to write grants, but by restraining the elites from relentlessly blocking the kind of economic development that will allow rural America to prosper naturally, without the need for philanthropy and government handouts. In other words, we should allow them to make money the natural and old-fashioned way. By earning it.
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