Hello! I’m glad you’re still here, checking in again at MY RURAL AMERICA’s website.
I’m returning from the year-long chaos and delights of remodeling a rent-to-own house for our dancer daughter. I have shopped for construction materials, painted endless hours of drywall and new ceilings, and worked alongside an initially competent but later dishonest contractor. Still, we’ve successfully transformed a battered house and its dog-destroyed grounds. At the same time, our city’s planning office stayed buried in its focus on major multi-unit projects, with no timely permits to protect a family project like ours.
Still! The home’s two floors glow with the redesign and reconstruction our daughter provided her artist’s esthetics for. The remodel stands rescued from our first contractor’s growing incompetence and dishonesty by a dedicated, skilled grassroots contractor she found through a friend. Our first contractor’s missteps were demolished and redeemed with fine finish work.
So, happy and relieved, I’m back. A new farm bill is in debate. A coming national election will backdrop various clumsy attempts to sabotage our Constitution. Can you, dear readers, and I find our spots to engage and make minor, essential differences? The MY RURAL AMERICA op-eds I wrote for you last year found leaders in Iowa’s Kossuth County who, with some support from Denver folks, imagined and created a project to open bipartisan space in their county’s overly divided politics.
In May, they awarded the first non-partisan Kossuth County Democratic Party’s “Dolores Mertz College Scholarships” to two deserving students. Then they quadrupled the initial scholarship fund—just as we began our remodel by sledging down a light-blocking kitchen wall.
At the same time, our nation’s post-pandemic networks were struggling to provide good teaching and learning, inclusive and effective healthcare and mental healthcare, suitable accessible housing, reliable news and information, and business practices that prioritize actual community needs and bottom lines.
Some of our political institutions struggle with spiteful partisanship that distracts from creating needed support for their grassroots citizens. Social and economic inequality grows, and gun violence in cities and small towns touches more and more of us. In contrast, our mainstream churches struggle for relevance and moral leadership, especially in the cities.
But—I’ve been discovering ordinary, excited people working in successfully designed local work that
benefit their families and communities in significant ways—like in Kossuth County. Rural and urban people are working together, organizing local pieces of renewal our country needs to rebuild its democracy.
The Washington Post recently published an article (one of four) analyzing what chief correspondent Dan Balz and his researcher see as dangerous cracks in our democracy.
Impressive in research, his article provides data for why so many people believe their government no longer represents them. This not-optimistic look at our nation’s future frequently mentions the rural-urban political divide. Perusing it carefully, I looked for two keywords in its analysis: “grassroots organizing.” They were not highlighted, in fact never mentioned, as essential blueprints for our democracy’s strengths, divisions, or weaknesses.
My op-eds this fall will seek to fill this vacuum with stories of local vision and hope in action. We began our remodel without a developed architectural plan for several reasons, including economic ones and the unpromising darkness of its dungeon-like basement. This “no plan” invited problems with our initial contractor, giving him dodges for redoing new walls, for example, at inflated labor and materials charges.
The lack of plans for the social organizing and restructuring necessary for successfully linking our rural and urban communities will create challenges for us all. Some passionate leaders who have developed plans have also revised them into action plans, solving problems and inspiring family members, friends, and peers to join them in success. We need more people to do this.
See below for previews of my “Coming Attractions:”
- Deborah Taylor, a first-grade teacher in Colorado’s main agricultural university town, who, instead of leaving her Covid-chaotic profession as many did beginning in 2020, found herself inspired by the heroism of New York’s front-line healthcare workers. She came up with her morning-mirror mantra of problem-solving courage. It launched her imaginatively into plans that converted her Covid’s classroom oppressions into a transformed career. She continues with her daily mantra, tapping ever more deeply into her own and her second graders’ capacities for learning and wonder.
- Faatma Oné, an experienced urban Colorado farmer of color, opens us to the shared and differing challenges farmers of color face amid little-noticed networks of urban and rural farm and ranch innovators and activists who are building new, sustainable rural and urban food networks—while crossing race and class lines and producer and consumer lines.
- Paul New and his father, Ernie New, had an unlikely dream 40 years ago: to introduce and grow an ancient South American grain- quinoa- on a North American family farm for the first time. That dream brought Paul, a Colorado State University graduate headed for city life, back to rural Colorado. The results of their farming methods, as well as their tiny town and high-altitude valley’s agricultural base, make a wildly unlikely story of rural and urban leaders sacrificing and creating together long-term agriculture sustainability.
I will be writing more “YES, WE CAN!” stories of how local “remodeling” of our much-loved and challenged country is hungry for. Having traded my sledgehammer for a keyboard, I’ll meet you here next time—with Deborah Taylor’s story.