I spent part of this week doing my yearly visit with the Spinal Group at the VA hospital in Fargo, North Dakota. I think it was a beneficial visit – more about that in another post.
I have been watching the results of the election. It’s clear that we have a fundamental divide, but I don’t think most of the pundits I have seen on TV understand how the divide has come about. On every one of the maps pointing out which candidate won an area, you see a sharp divide between those living in cities and those who live in the country. I have lived in cities ranging from Toronto, Canada, to Philadelphia. Growing up, often on, I grew up in small towns or the countryside. For the past almost 50 years, I have lived either in a small town or out in the country.
I hear my neighbors making comments that show they have no idea what it is like to live in a high-density urban area. The majority of them also say that politicians pay absolutely no attention to them. They don’t have much voting power, so why would politicians pay attention to them?
On the other hand, thanks to this blog, I am constantly reminded that my urban readers do not understand what it’s like to live in the country. During my visit to the VA hospital, I could use my cell phone to order a pizza there in Fargo. I have no cell phone service here at home, and I’m too far away from any pizza place to get one delivered. It’s not like we haven’t tried to get cell phone service. Various people have offered cell phone companies the land to put up a cell tower but have always been turned down because there are too few people to make it profitable for a cell company. The movement to 5G that so widely advertised will leave us further behind because technically many more cell towers are needed to provide 5G service. That’s okay in the city because you can plunk a cell hotspot down on top of every building needing only a place to plug it in.
We feel left behind in many other areas. If you pick up the phone, remember we only have landlines, and dial 911 needing an ambulance, it will take the very best 30 minutes for an ambulance to reach us and another 30 minutes to get us to medical care. There are many other rural areas where the time to call an ambulance is much longer. In case of fire, your house will be gone before firefighters can reach it. We indeed choose to live in areas that are not urban. However, as of my neighbors would say, “They push all this stuff down our throats on TV and movies all the time. We don’t live in those areas.” We know we are different, but today we are never portrayed anymore.
I could go on, but I think we have to look beyond politics to understand the growing divide between those who live in the country and those who live in urban areas. We know the urban voters outnumber us. We also know that means they will outvote us. We feel forgotten. You hear about the very few farmers left and think they represent the country, but they had to grow so large that they are more like giant corporations, and they are paid attention to by the politicians. Going to Fargo, I drove past some smaller farms of maybe only 500 to 1,000 acres in size. There is no way for a family to plant that many acres in either corn or soybeans and harvested with just a family. Those farmers have become administrators hiring everything from planting to harvesting. Talking to one of those farmers, he told me the only thing he uses his tractor for is to plow the snow in the winter from his driveway.
Those of us living in the country know these things because of our neighbors, and we don’t like the way things are changing, so we are conservative. We’d still like to live in an era of church socials and real family farms. So when you look at the election results and see the states divided up in blues and reds, think how the savvy politicians have earned our votes by promising to stop change.
We can outsmart the politicians by us country folk getting to know you city folk and appreciating each other’s problems and dreams. What say we do that?
