Mike, please don’t take this personally, but a heartfelt answer might be the only way I can explain it.
82% of Americans live on less than 3% of the total land area in the United States. Unfortunately, these tiny patches of land are the only place where Democracy lives in America.
97% of the land in this country is still governed by corporations. In other words, rural America is still colonized; we are an ‘internal’ colony, but a colony nonetheless. While urban Americans look the other way, corporations do their dirty work - stealing, exploiting, polluting, maiming, and all too often, killing rural Americans.
Colonization is characterized by corporate rule for the sole purpose of generating wealth through resource extraction (both natural resources and cheap labour). Once shitty paid rural Americans extract the riches from rural lands, corporations aided by urban voters and urban politicians, ship our wealth to urban Americans. Like all colonized people, rural Americans remain “dirt poor” – too poor to compete with urban voters and their all-powerful corporations who dominate and dictate our daily lives.
Why are people who have pulled trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars of raw wealth out of the land living in poverty? Why do so many of us have no internet, no grocery store, no hospitals, no emergency room, no doctors, and no colleges? Why are urban Americans allowing their corporations to move us off our land, and throw us out of our homes? For that matter, why are urban Americans complaining about the price of eggs, when they know our chickens are dying?
Perhaps, it is time for urban Americans to ask themselves what they can do to set the other 97% of land in this country free. Perhaps they can start by asking themselves who provides the food, water, energy/power, housing materials, roads, railways, prisons, natural resources, and waste disposal they take for granted? Perhaps they can ask themselves why they support corporations, rather than eliminating them?
Most of all, isn’t it time urban Americans started listening to rural Americans, instead of speaking for us, putting words in our mouths or using our plight as ‘their’ platform?
I have yet to hear one urban American stand up for rural Americans, speak well of us, or show us a little genuine respect, caring, or understanding. Alas, all I hear from urban Americans is ridicule, criticism, platitudes, ignorant opinions, and deadly silence.
