Another rural item in the NYT, this time from David Brooks

Brooks' column on March 21 was titled "What Rural America Has to Teach Us," and it's the fourth big rural "piece" in the New York Times in recent days.  

For the most part, the column is rosy and nostalgic, as Brooks tends to be when talking about this milieu, about people who go to church.  He mostly uses the small cities of McCook (population 7,698) and Grand Island, Nebraska (48,520), to illustrate his points about community, trust, low-crime, church going, and the sort of lack of anonymity that is beneficial to kids.  Here's an excerpt that gets at many of those themes, again with Nebraska held up as the poster child for the concept of "weaving" that Brooks is touting these days.  In short, people in McCook make time for civic life, with many wearing "multiple hats."  People also work (low-unemployment), go to church and stay married.  (Some) schools have very high graduation rates, and the state has the 12th longest life expectancy in the nation.   

Here's an excerpt from the piece in which Brooks muses about the "why":  Why are these Nebraskans so community minded?  

Farm life inculcates an insane work ethic, which gets carried into community life. The weavers are deeply rooted in place. Many said their main goal in life is to make their small town better at their death than it was at their birth. 

There are also 93 counties in Nebraska, several with populations below 1,000. That means there are a ton of local government functions and not that many people to fill them, so everybody has to chip in. 

The word I heard most was “intentionality” — especially about community.

As for that intentionality, among other things it means supporting local businesses rather than shopping on amazon.com.  

And to be fair, Brooks is not a complete pollyanna about rural America.  He does acknowledge that not everything is rosy, specifically poverty (as reflected, for example, in the rate of children who receive free- and reduced-price lunches), the struggle for self-reliance (at least the appearance of it), and the challenge of authentic racial/ethnic integration where some places have LatinX populations as high as 30%.