St Vincent and Plurabus… I am glad for your partnership in this endeavor, but I think new framing merits consideration. The old frames – left/right, blue/red, Republicans-conservatives-libertarians, Democrats-liberals-progressives – are so corrupted, no one knows what they mean anymore. As long as you stay inside meaningless frames, you will rehash the same old, same old stuff.

Framing is like a jigsaw puzzle. Without all the pieces, you cannot complete the puzzle.

This link takes you to a map that illustrates where people live in this county. It also illustrates the Rural-Urban divide. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

The only pieces St Vincent and Plurabus have are those tiny red and orange pieces that represent urban and suburban areas where about 274-Million Americans live.

Can you piece the American puzzle together with only red and oranges pieces? No, you cannot. America is 2.43-Billion acres big - and all U.S. cities combined cover a measly 69-million acres of that land. To complete the American puzzle, you need the green pieces that represent the 1.8-Billion acres of land in rural America.

Only 58-Million people live in rural America, and it is easy to dismiss us. The odds are stacked against us. 274-million to 58-million is not a fight – it’s a joke.

Whenever I hear city people talk about colonialism as though it were over, their ignorance astounds me. Rural Americans never escaped colonial rule. Despite our pleas, urban Americans voted time and time again, to sacrifice rural Americans to cheap labor, resource extraction and waste management. Let’s dig in a little, shall we?

Let’s take a really divisive issue and see what happens when we change the frame to the Rural-Urban divide.

Where do city people think 2.3-Million people went when they got sent to prison?

Answer: a huge percentage get shipped to prisons in rural America. These prisons are so big, each one consumes hundreds of acres of land and billions of gallons of water every day. While less than a million people live in my county, we have 19 prisons.

Mass incarceration was as big a rural issue as it was for African Americans. Why were we not fighting it together?

Answer: The Rural-Urban divide. When politicians should have been bringing us together in common cause, they were beholden to corporations and the filthy rich whose “interests” were in keeping us apart, driving wedges between us and pitting us against each other.

The psychological impact on small rural communities where inmate populations outnumber free citizens has been devastating. To understand this better, imagine the impact of a prison for 5,000 inmates in your own, suburban housing tract, gated community or city neighborhood. Will the prison impact your housing prices? Your schools? Your businesses? Your tax base? Your police? Your water supply, roads, utilities, parks and community centers? How would you feel if the children of prison guards outnumbered your children at school? Would a prison impact race relations in your neighborhood? Your churches? Your shops, restaurants, bars and tourist trade?

Here's a rural, farm story for your kids when you pour milk on their cereal tomorrow morning. Hey kids, don’t worry about farmworkers, when they fall into 40-foot tall tanks that store dairy cow waste, they usually die from fumes before they hit the urine. That is a rural labor law story. Did you know there are different labor laws for rural and urban workers?

City people never saw corporations playing monopoly with our nation’s food supply, but rural Americans did. We watched it happening, we shouted warnings, but no one heard us. The Rural-Urban divide was too big. I could go on for pages, but I will stop here.

City people cannot solve our nation’s problems by bridging political divides among themselves. If you think a civil war will be between you and your neighbors, you are wrong. The Rural-Urban divide is the real danger. If this divide gets much wider, civil war is certain.

Both political parties pay lip-service to rural Americans, but their priorities, votes, and agendas are entirely urban centered. In short, rural Americans have NO representation at the national level. This imbalance is the source of division that is tearing our country apart.

As you continue your debate, please test your positions inside a rural frame. Does your position resolve rural issues? If yes, please tell us what issue you are resolving for us. Are you making assumptions, or stating facts about rural Americans? If you are stating facts, please tell us where you got your information.

Until then, statements like “Working class, rural whites are having pretty crappy lives as a group,” is a cheap stereotype. Its better to say nothing, than throw fuel on a fire.

PS. I posted this comment on Plurabus' essay too.