Read this by Esther Cepeda in The Columbian, out of southern Washington state. An excerpt follows, including Cepeda's musings on her recent travels in south central Wisconsin:
Being in the country is beautiful, with tons of wide-open spaces, green pastures and picturesque farms filled with horses, cows and goats.
The people are, of course, Midwestern nice — I hadn’t expected to be the only brown face in nearly every single one of these settings, but no one hesitated to smile or greet me warmly.
This is how it’s done in the rural Midwest. Sure, you can hardly get away from Fox News playing in the background at virtually every diner, bar and auto repair shop. But there’s tranquility and the unhurried pace necessary to do what few Americans in big cities can afford to do: put it all in a perspective that’s open to whatever it takes to maintain a culture of quiet and a focus on nature’s bounty.
This is exactly what the One Country Project is hoping to capitalize on as it seeks to rebuild trust and respect between coastal elite decision-makers and the people in rural communities who have to live with government policies.
Helmed by former Sens. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., the One Country Project is attempting to reopen the dialogue between rural communities and the rest of the country to develop more inclusive policies.
To start, the organization conducted something of a “listening tour” of Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by analyzing social-media traffic from Feb. 15 to May 15 to identify the most regularly discussed social, economic and political issues. The most salient topics were farming, climate change, education, health care, immigration, abortion and women’s issues.
What they also learned is that rural folks are, understandably, scared about the future of farming culture — due in no small part to what One Country’s analysis calls “an underlying feeling of ‘disrespect’ toward farmers and the agricultural economy from their fellow Americans.”
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