• buttwater [they/them]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Tl;dr: what no class consciousness does to a mf

    I live in Henry County, Kentucky, which I can remember as a part of a thriving agricultural region with many small family-run farms and flourishing local economies. Now, as in every place I know in rural America, the small towns here are dead or dying, much of the farmland (long priced above the reach of farmers) is consigned to toxic, continuously cropped large acreages of corn and soy beans; communities and families are breaking up. The education system prepares our young people to leave, and they are leaving. Other problems are addiction, depression, bad health, poverty, and the boredom with rural life that is induced and expected. At present we are suffering a solar panel land rush and a Bourbon boom land rush, which further increase land prices, go after the best farmland, and turn neighbor against neighbor. I believe I have given a fair representation of the plight of rural America, a land of worsening problems that it did not cause and cannot solve, from which urban America derives its food, clothing, and shelter, plus “raw materials.” For these necessary things rural America receives prices set in urban America. For the manufactured goods returned to it, rural America pays prices set in urban America

    Yeah, those are all real problems.

    Because I have watched for half a century and more the decline of my own community and others like it everywhere in rural America, along with the increasing ecological and cultural damages of industrial agriculture, I have made a practice of reading newspaper and magazine articles by Democratic or leftward experts of politics and economics, hoping that I would see an acknowledgement, first of the economic importance of the natural world, and then of the importance of the land-use economies of agriculture, forestry, and mining, by which the goods of the natural world are made available for human use.

    You're right, the Democrats aren't interested in addressing real issues.