Bitter Harvest

Rural people once watched the weather. Now they track the price of oil.

by Bruce Schimmel

I once lived among the bitter people. In 1996, after I sold City Paper, I left Philly for a small town in rural Delaware called Milton. At the time, Milton was a farming town with a working cannery. Today, its cannery is closed, and sprawl is the only harvest of its fields.

Living there full time until 2003, I enjoyed the genuine gentility of an American small town. But I also experienced its deep-seated fears. As Barack Obama so impoliticly put it, there's a strain of rural folks who "cling to guns or religion or [to] antipathy to people who aren't like them. ... "

I am not like them, which is why I moved there. To listen, to understand. As a reporter for a local NPR station, I garnered hundreds of personal stories about the good things to which rural America clings — from family to farming to folklore. (Hear a sample at schimmel.com.)

To an outsider, an urbanite like me, it was wonderfully comforting to hear how much country and city folk do have in common. We owe it to our fellow Americans — to ourselves — not to despise them.

But make no mistake: Rural America is bitter, and in a way that most urbanites don't get (as witnessed by Obama's prejudiced remarks).

To be sure, America's cities and its rural towns have their share of despair. Still, rural America's deep disaffection is in some ways more terrible than the pain of the inner city. Because urbanites never harbored any illusions about the Republicans' deceptive rhetoric.

My neighbors listened to Rush Limbaugh. They wanted to believe George Bush, because they felt in their gut that the best government governs least. As children of farmers, watermen and craftsmen, my rural neighbors still cling to remnants of rugged individualism.

But in the last decade, multinational corporations have replaced their rural culture. In just 10 years, I've seen little working towns in Delaware shrivel up, as the Wal-Marts and the McDonald's spread out. Corporations — powered by oil and pampered by Washington — reached into America's small towns, and scooped out their souls.

My neighbors once grew their own food. They used to find, fix and fabricate stuff. Now, much of the beauty of rural life — its cuisine, its crafts, its very land — has been displaced by fast food, cheap goods and sprawl. Rural America is disappearing under a mountain of trucked-in crap — including, ironically, much of its food. Today, the same country folk who believe in self-reliance no longer feed themselves.

From the air, with its fields of grain, rural America looks bucolic and prolific. But under those amber fields are what amount to lakes of oil. After decades of intensive factory-farming, most of America's farming fields are too exhausted to yield a profitable harvest, without first soaking them in oil-based fertilizers.

Today's rural economy — from its highways to its strip malls — essentially floats on oil.

Rural people once watched the weather. Now my former neighbors track the price of oil. Last week it hit $117 a barrel, one of them told me. Unable to pay his heating bills, he's had his home on the market for more than a year. "They've stopped even looking in," he says.

So, sure, you bet rural America is bitter. They believed in the neocons who sold them out. Having been duped, they must now swallow a very bitter pill.

Having their rural lives mocked by stereotypes only increases their pain, and their antipathy to urbanites. That's bad, because in the coming crises, we need to hear from everyone — especially from those enmeshed in enmity. Because in the end, their struggle is ours. And the sooner we see what we all have in common, the faster we can set to reclaiming the nation we all love.

(bruce@schimmel.com)