Rural America Needs Help

Rural America Is Done Being Ignored

Urban and rural America are at odds with each other.

That’s not big news, especially if you live in the rural areas.

Kathy and I are in Stevenson Washington producing some video’s on lack of timber management and the devastating impact its having on these places.

I toured the high school yesterday and heard story after story of how rules designed to allegedly protect our resources is destroying the communities around them.

It’s easy to virtue signal when you live in a big city where cuts and reductions don’t impact you, at least not yet.

While interviewing the school superintendent she talked about a board meeting the night before where they had to lay off 9 more positions.

The folks who live in these areas are rugged individualists and don’t give up easily.

They are creative as they scrounge for grants, gifts and whatever funding they can to keep their communities limping along.

Places like Stevenson are expected to dump their timber history, that once provided living wage jobs, for a tourist based economy, which  provides anything but a living wage.

City folks move to these places, buy up the homes, and now workers can’t afford to live here anymore.

They have plans and ideas to change this but it means changing laws, making rules more flexible and allowing them to be what they’ve always been, self reliant.

It feels to me like with our new administration there’s an openness to creative ideas and out of the box thinking.

My reservation is, as I scroll on social media, there are too many nay-sayers who won’t take the time to look big picture and fall back into tradition and what’s always been done, which is the true death of progress.

City dwellers have the numbers so it’s up to them to listen better to the concerns of the heart of America.

We’ve placed a huge burden on a small number of people….it’s not fair.

They’ve paid the price for our poor management of a resource we’ve locked up and many don’t really understand why.

Great days are ahead, they really are but as part of this change we need to listen to those who have held small towns together as our laws and missteps have squeezed the life out of them.

What amazes me most is these folks still have a positive outlook and are willing to work with us, time to listen the voice of small town America.