On guns and church in rural Texas

I've been slow in saying anything here on the blog about the shooting last Sunday at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, population 600.  But this interview with "Mike the Gun Guy" (Mike Weisser) on WBUR Boston provided irresistible fodder.  Mike had this to say about the prospects of an armed congregant being able to stop a gunman--and on the likely presence of guns at the church that morning:

First of all, the idea that in a small-town Baptist Church in rural Texas, that there weren't people in the church with guns, is absurd. And why nobody jumped up with a gun is because people aren't trained to do that. And if you're sitting in a church and you're praying and, you know, it's a moment of quiet and solitude and everything else, even if you've got a gun, and somebody comes in, opens the front door and starts blasting away, you're going to do what everybody does: You're going to hit the floor. The idea that the average citizen, even if he's had a little bit of — I don't want to call it training, just experience in using a gun, because it's not training — you don't get trained by just a little time at the range and having some guy tell you, 'OK, you know, point the gun here. Bang, bang, bang.' That's not training.

Lots of media accounts have described Sutherland Springs as "rural," and it is, of a sort.  I would say, more precisely, that it is an exurb, just 20 miles from downtown San Antonio.  The reason the assailant targeted this church:  his mother-in-law attended it, though she was not there on the morning of the shooting.

To recount the basics on this enormous and shocking tragedy, a 26-year-old man from New Braunfels, Texas (also in the greater San Antonio metropolitan area) who had been discharged from the Air Force for bad conduct stormed the church on Sunday, November 5, with a semi-automatic weapon.  He killed 26 people who ranged in age from infant to elderly, 24 of them inside the church.  The man had a history of domestic abuse, including having fractured the skull of his infant stepson several years ago when he was in the U.S. Air Force.  He was court martialed for that and for abuse of his wife.  He served 12 months on those charges, part of the time in a psychiatric hospital from which he escaped at one point.  If the Air Force had reported his conviction for domestic abuse to the salient database, the man would not have been able to buy a gun.  More on what we know about the shooter's mental state is here, including this quote from a former Air Force colleague, staff sergeant Jessika Edwards, who worked with the shooter near the end of his military career, in 2011:

“He was a dude on the edge,” Ms. Edwards added, noting that he would appear at informal squadron social functions in all black and a black trench coat. “This is not just in hindsight. He scared me at the time.”

Even after he left the military, he contacted her on Facebook with disturbing posts about his obsession with Dylann S. Roof, the Charleston mass murderer, and his target practices using dogs ordered online.

Ms. Edwards said the military had tried counseling and tough love, but nothing seemed to work. When punished for poor performance, Mr. Kelley would cry, scream and shake with rage, vowing to kill his superiors, she recalled. His temper was so unsettling that she warned others in the squadron to go easy on him or he was likely to come back and “shoot up the place.”

On Ralph Northam's win and rural Virginia

Ralph Northam has been declared the winner of the Virginia gubernatorial race, and the New York Times coverage of that victory includes this regarding Northam's rural origins: 

A native of Virginia’s rural Eastern Shore who bears a Tidewater accent that reveals his rural roots, Mr. Northam, 58, was a perhaps an unlikely vessel for the resistance-era Democratic Party. But the left overlooked the two votes he cast for George W. Bush before he entered politics and his otherwise sterling resume — he is a pediatric neurologist and Gulf War veteran — proved far more appealing to the state’s broad middle than Mr. Gillespie’s background as a corporate lobbyist.

The playing up of rural-urban difference is interesting--and perhaps something that would not have happened before the Election of 2016 made us more acutely aware of this divide (or, what I tend to argue, is really a continuum). 

Here's a story from last week's Washington Post that might have predicted how Virginia counties would vote, based on economic recovery (or relative lack thereof) from the recession of 2008. I see that Northam's home region includes a number of counties that went for him, in spite of their weaker economic recovery. 

Lessons from history: New England and the Industrial Revolution

An undated picture of Monadnock Mills in Claremont, New Hampshire. From WikiMedia Commons.

Hi everyone! The post below is a partial repost of a post that I made during my time writing Lone Pine Policy for the Bangor Daily News. Since the post is now offline, I wanted to share it again with some alterations.

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In an age restless and mobile, with family traditions less strong, and transportation exceedingly cheap and inviting, it is hardly strange that so many of the young people are eager to leave the country which they pronounce dead-as it literally is to them-for the lively town or city.” - Ernest R. Groves, "Psychic Causes of Rural Migration", American Journal Of Sociology, March 1916

To begin to understand the current problems facing rural America, it might be helpful to look to the past and the major economic changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. At the turn of the 19th century, the vast majority of New Englanders lived in small towns and mostly farmed to provide for themselves and their families. Because of this, most farmers were generalists. As the century wore on however, a great change started to occur. The industrial revolution started to take hold in the Northeastern United States and people began to migrate towards urban areas in search of economic opportunity.

According to a 1903 study published by the American Statistical Association, New England’s population increased during their period, in raw numbers, but the rural population actually declined. In 1912, Alexander Cance of the Massachusetts Agriculture College (present-day University of Massachusetts – Amherst) observed in his writing, “The Decline of Rural Population of New England” that many predominantly agricultural towns in Western Massachusetts had just one third the population that they had at their peak. The migration out of rural communities created a great social upheaval that also dramatically altered the economic landscape.

What will follow is a cursory look at the conditions of rural New England during the Industrial Revolution. As you read this however, I want you to ask yourself two questions: How did New England small towns retain their economic relevance during the last major economic upheaval? Are there any lessons to be learned as we navigate towards a post-industrial economy?

The Creation of the Mill Town

Growth however was not limited to pre-existing urban areas such as Boston or Hartford. Mill owners, eager to take advantage of New England’s network of waterways, began to set up mills along rivers. In 1810, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company founded Manchester, New Hampshire, so named because it was thought that it could one day resemble Manchester, England in its manufacturing prowess. Manchester, then a sleepy village named Derryfield, was located along the banks of the Merrimack River, which provided easy access to Boston. Like Manchester, other mill towns popped up along the Merrimack. Lowell, Massachusetts would spring up in the 1820s as a planned company town by the Boston Manufacturing Company and named after its founder Francis Cabot Lowell.

This phenomena was not just limited to towns in southern New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts however. During the Industrial Revolution, Lewiston, Maine went from a sleepy Maine village to a bustling center of industry, largely due to its location along the Androscoggin River. At its peak in the mid 19th century, Lewiston was the wealthiest city in all of Maine. In New Hampshire, entrepreneurs took advantage of the water power generated by the Sugar River to grow Claremont into a bustling center of industry. Cities were also able to take advantage of their proximity to natural resources and access to power generated by water to grow and thrive. In Berlin, situated in New Hampshire’s North Country, they were able to harness, much as Lewiston had already, the power generated by the Androscoggin to run sawmills to process the lumber harvested from the vast woods of the North Country. All across New England, sleepy riverfront towns were transforming into centers of industry.

Agricultural Reorganization

How did rural New England markets, particularly those who were not along navigable waterways or rivers that could easily produce power, adjust to these developments? There was an increased focus on specialization as farmers started to specialize in crops that could be sold to the growing urban centers. Prior to the industrial revolution, there was not much of a nonagricultural population in New England and thus, not much of a market for a farmer to sell his crops to. However, the emergence of these urban centers provided a market for farmers. Due to increasing competition from farmers in the Midwest (due in part to part to the development of the canal and railroad systems), it was particularly advantageous to specialize in items where close distance was essential. For example, according to Percy Bidwell in his 1921 writing, “The Agricultural Revolution in New England,” the production of dairy subsequently became very important in rural New England. Bidwell speculated that the population of cows increased during this time as farmers moved to specialize to meet the growing demand for dairy product. In terms of raw numbers, between the 1870 and 1900 Censuses, New Hampshire increased its production of milk from 2 gallons to 29 gallons. Without the advantage of modern refrigeration, the fast transport of daily products was essential and New England farmers were wise to take advantage of that.

Rural areas also benefited greatly from supplying goods that were needed by the mills. While New England farmers were not able to compete with Southern farmers in cotton production, they were successful at producing the wool that could be used by the emerging mills. Vermont was particularly successful in this endeavor. Between 1824 and 1840, the sheep population of Vermont quadrupled. For Vermont farmers, raising sheep was more cost-effective than trying to grow corn or grain in the rocky soil. The growth in wool production also spurred growth in manufacturing in the state as mills opened there so they could take advantage of the proximity to wool. However, increased competition from the West and the lower wool prices brought about the collapse of Vermont's wool industry. Like their neighbors to the east, Vermont turned to dairy farming to reverse its economic fortunes and started supplying another essential good to the growing industrial centers.

Of course, the rural communities closest to the growing industrial centers saw the greatest benefit. According to the 1889 agricultural census, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island were 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively in value per farm acre. Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont were 24th , 20th, and 16th respectively.

We Can’t Give Up

“These towns fell away early both in population and productiveness, and in but few stances have they been able to recover. A perusal of the vital statistics shows that the native stock is dying out. There is little or no immigration and the deaths exceed the births.” – Alexander Cance, “The Decline in Rural Population of New England,” Publications of the American Statistical Association, March 1912

As with any economic change, there will be simply be communities that are unable to quickly adapt to the rapid changes. Cance observed that many of the hillier towns, particularly in western Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, were unable to adapt to a world where specialized, not subsistence, agriculture was the dominant means of survival. The hillier regions after all had poorer soil quality and harsher weather conditions. Some of these towns turned to granite mining, dairy, wool and other products that did not rely on the ability to grow and cultivate crops. The development of transportation infrastructure also presented an opportunity. Tourism suddenly became a viable economic sector.

As an example of a community that was able to take advantage of this, we can look to the Mount Washington region of New Hampshire. The late 19th century brought about a boom in hotel building as the region became increasingly seen as a refuge for urban dwellers who wanted to escape the chaos of the city. The same patterns were seen along the Maine coast and in the Vermont mountains. Some of the more well-heeled urbanites even began to buy former homesteads to use as summer homes. Resort towns began to spring up around rural New England as people flocked to its picturesque beauty.

The rise in winter sports also provided a new source of income for many of the hillier communities in New England. As the 20th century wore on, ski resorts began popping up. The development of these resorts proved to be an economic boon for the communities that housed them. As with the development of general tourism, the growing popularity of winter sports did not just benefit the industries that directly supported it, it also greatly benefited merchants and others who were able to start businesses that supported the growing winter sports sector.

While these developments did little to nothing to reserve population decline, they provided a means of survival for the people who wanted to remain in rural communities and provided opportunities for investment for people who wished to bring in capital.

The Lesson
New England rural communities increasingly embraced the idea of specialization, the legacy of which is apparent today. In New Hampshire and Vermont, the landscape is dotted with towns that specialize in dairy production and in Maine, we see towns that specialized in potato farming, logging and fishing. The lesson is that modern day rural communities should look to their predecessors and not be afraid to change in order to meet the demands of the modern world.

We can also look to New England for yet another lesson. Claremont, Berlin, Lewiston, and to a lesser extent Lowell all continue to bear the scars of the effects of leaders not planning ahead for a post-industrial economy. These areas have higher than average poverty, abandoned buildings, and high rates of unemployment. Tomorrow, voters in Lewiston and Auburn, Maine will even be considering a merger. What were once bustling centers of industry are now shells of what they once were. This lesson, of course, is not just limited to New England. You can find former mill towns in the Carolinas, former factory towns in Michigan and the Rust Belt, and former mining towns in Appalachia where leaders thought that the boom times would last forever and that planning ahead would be a waste of time and effort.

Just as we saw in the 19th century, rural America is undergoing a great economic shift. Manufacturing is no longer the dominant form of employment and agriculture (as a share of the economy) has been in decline for decades. Much like the Industrial Revolution, people are being drawn to cities in search of economic opportunity and as a result, rural communities are shrinking and getting older. Just like in the past, we have to figure out how to maintain an economic structure that allows rural America to thrive. Two centuries ago, rural citizens were unafraid to adapt to the changing economy, something that we would wise to remember today.

The 21st century provides us with exciting opportunities, much like those that were found in the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, the development of the internet provides an opportunity for white collar workers to work from wherever. We live in a world where a person in Augusta, Maine or Lebanon, New Hampshire can be on a videoconference and chat in real time with someone in New York, Boston or even London and Tokyo. The world has gotten a lot smaller and space is no longer a barrier to communication and the sharing of ideas. There are opportunities to attract businesses to rural America that may not have thrived there a generation ago. There are also opportunities to attract workers who may not have been able to live in rural America a generation ago.

The Challenge

The challenge ahead for rural America is figuring out how to adapt to the changing economy. Much as our predecessors did when we shifted from an agrarian to an industrial society, we must figure out how to make the adjustments necessary to maintain economic relevance. We are currently experiencing a transition away from an industrial economy and our ability to take advantage of the opportunities ahead will determine our role in the post-industrial economy.

On the more rural areas of Northern California hit by the deadly fires in October

A few stories this past weekend in major California newspapers have focused on the consequences of the early October wildfires in Mendocino County, as opposed to more populous Napa and Sonoma counties.  The Los Angeles Times reported under the headline, "Wildfires devastate California pot farmers, who must rebuild without banks or insurance," and the San Francisco Chronicle story was headlined "Deadly Mendocino County Fire under the radar of Wine Country devastation."   This lede from the Chronicle story sums up the rural v. urban angle (or at least degrees of rural ....) between these regions/counties:

Like thousands of other North Bay fire victims, the traumatized residents of the bucolic Redwood Valley are sifting through rubble, negotiating with insurance agents and struggling to figure out how they are going to rebuild their fire-scarred lives. 

The only difference is that the hellish inferno that rolled through their community two weeks ago went virtually unnoticed by a world mesmerized by the flaming disasters closer to San Francisco. 

The Redwood Valley Fire was not exactly ignored, but it was a side note during a historic week of calamity in Northern California — subordinate to the conflagrations that destroyed much of Santa Rosa and ripped through Wine Country towns in Napa and Sonoma counties. 

But the aftermath is no less horrible for the 1,759 farmers, vineyard keepers and pot entrepreneurs who live in this rural community between Ukiah and Willits — a place isolated enough for stagecoach robber Black Bart to use as a hideout and, about a century later, for Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple cult to set up shop before moving on to bigger things.

It's interesting that journalist Peter Fimrite refers to Mendocino County as the "North Bay." I'd agree with that characterization for Napa and Sonoma, but not once you get as far north as Mendocino.  Nevertheless, his "per capita" point is well taken (by me, at least):

The fire that swept through the community early in the morning on Oct. 9 killed eight people, blackened 36,523 acres and destroyed 545 buildings, about a quarter of the homes there, fire officials said. It was at least as damaging, per capita, as the cataclysmic blazes to the south.

Fimrite quotes George Gonzaelz, the battalion chief for the Mendocino unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection:

It’s probably the largest modern disaster here in Mendocino County.  But nobody is paying attention.

And that, it seems, is par for the course when it comes to rural America.  I wrote a post making a similar point after the Butte and Valley fires (in Napa and Lake counties) two years ago.

Here's an excerpt from the LA Times story focused on the pot industry's losses.

Because the marijuana culture of Northern California has survived in secrecy for the last 50 years, and mostly still does, no one can know the exact loss to the industry. 

The threat of losing a year’s crop and cash reserves pushes many growers to take risks a grape farmer neighbor might not. 

When the fires broke, farmers thrashed over four-wheel-drive roads with horse trailers full of hastily cut marijuana. Some defied evacuation orders to save the crops. 

Others left, and lost everything.

Lots of posts about California's pot industry--with a focus on Mendocino, Humboldt, and Lake counties (the so-called Emerald Triangle) can be found in this blog. 

Postscript:  "As deadly fires burned Redwood Valley, delays, confusion about evacuation orders" in the Los Angeles Times on November 5.  An excerpt follows: 

But a Times review of police and fire dispatch calls that morning describe a chaotic scene in which officials debated when to send evacuation orders. The recordings provide an overview of communications that night as the fire swept through the valley but do not provide a full sense of what firefighters and law enforcement were doing on the ground. The county so far has declined to provide additional records. 

The dispatches and interviews show the county issued an evacuation order in Redwood Valley more than an hour after the fire was first reported there. During that time, several Redwood Valley residents phoned 911 dispatchers to say they were trapped by fire.

Firefighters struggled with a lack of manpower and equipment in the rural county, which relies heavily on small fire departments and volunteers. State and local engines, including the Redwood Valley volunteer fire department, were sent to battle fires that had started earlier in the night in the adjacent Potter Valley.  

On Trump's declaration of a public health emergency over opioids--and rural angles on same

I heard several radio stories today on Trump's public health emergency declaration, stories that mentioned particular challenges associated with the crisis in rural America.  Several mentioned the shortage of physicians there, and the first report I heard on NPR this morning shortly after Trump's announcement mentioned a loosening of the restrictions on telemedicine to respond to this fact.  But searching around the Internet, I can now find very little "in writing" on these issues.  Here's a short excerpt from the New York Times coverage, which gets to rural in the eighth paragraph:

The designation of a public health crisis, formally made by Eric D. Hargan, the acting health secretary, would allow for some grant money to be used to combat opioid abuse, permit the hiring of specialists to tackle the crisis, and expand the use of telemedicine services to treat people in rural areas ravaged by opioid use, where doctors are often in short supply.

I also found this from In These Times, which reports regularly on rural issues:

CDC reports rising rates of drug overdose deaths in rural areas 

Rates of drug overdose deaths are rising in nonmetropolitan (rural) areas, surpassing rates in metropolitan (urban) areas, according to a new report in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of injury death in the United States, resulting in approximately 52,000 deaths in 2015. This report analyzed trends in illicit drug use and disorders from 2003-2014 and drug overdose deaths from 1999-2015 in urban and rural areas. In 1999, drug overdose death rates for urban areas were higher than in rural areas (6.4 per 100,000 population versus 4.0 per 100,000). The rates converged in 2004, and in 2006 the rural rate began trending higher than the urban rate. 

In 2015, the most recent year in this analysis, the rural rate of 17.0 per 100,000 remained slightly higher than the urban rate of 16.2 per 100,000. 

Urban and rural areas experienced significant increases in the percentage of people reporting past-month illicit drug use. … The new findings also show an increase in overdose deaths between 1999 and 2015 among urban and rural residents. This increase was consistent across sex, race, and intent (unintentional, suicide, homicide or undetermined).

That story also quotes CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald, MD: 

The drug overdose death rate in rural areas is higher than in urban areas.  We need to understand why this is happening so that our work with states and communities can help stop illicit drug use and overdose deaths in America.

I'm looking forward, in the coming days, to more analysis of rural issues/rural health care delivery.  Meanwhile, here is part of the New York Times editorial criticizing Trump for not doing more to counter the opioid crisis:

He declared the opioid epidemic a national public health emergency, which sounds urgent but doesn’t free any significant new money to fight it. In doing so, he ignored the plea of his own opioids commission to declare a full-on national emergency, which would immediately free billions of dollars for emergency response, addiction treatment and efforts to stop the flow of illegal opioids into the country — a comprehensive approach that is so far missing.

Here is the New York Times news coverage of Trump's announcement and here is NPR's.  Here's more coverage from the Times on the crisis, an op-ed from late September, and this feature mapping the crisis and its acceleration in recent years.

On timber and Trumplandia: "timber is a real thing when you get out of New York and Washington DC, right?"

This Q & A feature from the Princeton Alumni Weekly is annoyingly hard to read because it captures the spoken word, unedited. Still, I found myself wanting to share this excerpt from the interview with Carolyn Rouse of Princeton University's Anthropology Department because in some ways it captures beautifully the rural-urban divide in our country.  In particular, it sums up urban folks' failure to understand rural economies, rural labor markets, rural residents, rural concerns.  

...being in California, I was staying in a motel next to a timber mill. We would pass cars with, you know, trucks with timber. Timber is a real thing when you get out of New York or Washington DC, right? And so, how do you frame [a scholarly paper/inquiry] in a way that makes readers in your audience — I mean, the concern is the audience, right? Well, who’s going to read a paper if they’re not interested in timber? So, but timber’s really important. We use it to build houses and buildings, and there’s an ecological element to it, right? So where are we with — I don’t even know. I don’t know where we are with respect to timber in terms of global warming, in terms of — right, the economy, nothing, right?

Rouse is talking about timber, but it seems to me we could substitute lots of rural "products"--perhaps even food/farming/agriculture--for "timber" in Rouse's comment. 
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On rural and urban in Catalonia

Several weeks ago, the New York Times ran this story about the tractor having become a symbol of the Catalan secession movement.  It discusses the role of the “tractorada,”or tractor armada, in the Catalan independence movement.  On the occasion that is the subject of this report from early October, a tractorada had convened to block an intersection of two major highways that carry Catalan farm products to other parts of Spain and to nearby France.  The dateline is Vic, Spain (population 41,956), which is the center of a valley of hundreds of family-owned farms.  The story's lede follows:

Rolling his rickety red tractor through a rural valley in Catalonia, Jordi Colom seemed like just another farmer heading to the fields. Except that he was in a line of dozens of tractors lumbering along. And cars honked in approval. People on the side of the road waved red-and-orange Catalan flags and cheered.

The story then quotes 39-year-old Imma Colom, the sister of Mr. Colom.

Today, everyone wants to be a farmer.

Ms. Colom's husband, too, is driving a tractor.  Her brother is also quoted:

People who are Catalans are very Catalan here.

Elsewhere the story picks up the urban v. rural theme, noting that Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, is highly global and cosmopolitan. That status is the theme of this more recent New York Times story from Oct. 20:  Barcelona: A Global City in the Eye of a Separatist Storm.  Here's that story's lede:

These days, the city of Barcelona wears two hats. And not too comfortably. 

On the one hand, Barcelona is a global city, a former host of the Olympics, and the home of one of the world’s most famous soccer clubs, F.C. Barcelona. It is a magnet for more than 10 million visitors a year, an example of the ways large cities increasingly influence global politics, economics and culture. 

On the other hand, Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, Spain’s restive northeastern region, and the nerve center of a drive for Catalan independence that is described by its opponents as parochial, exclusive and nationalist.

It is the "parochial, exclusive and nationalist" that suggests "rural."  I am reminded of other political movements driven (at least partly) by "rural" concerns, such as Brexit, the State of Jefferson, and Donald's Trump's election.   Other related stories are out of Germany and Poland.

On lack of services in the midst of (and following) a natural disaster

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning on the Redwood Valley fire, in Mendocino County,, California (population 87,841) which claimed eight lives earlier this month.  One focus of the story is on the lack of services--the lack of warning in this case--as the fire bore down on the valley.  Joe Mozingo writes:

The escape from Redwood Valley began with no evacuation orders, no reverse-911 alerts, no warning whatsoever from authorities. Residents were left on their own to flee for their lives. 

A mechanic trapped by fire on the ground climbed a tree until it passed. An elderly woman raced out in her underwear. A mother and her four children hiked through the brush of a steep mountain ravine to safety. 

Most who survived had to thread a narrow road with trees ablaze on both sides. Burning debris rained down on them as they drove over fallen limbs in the smoke.

And I can't resist including Mozingo's description of Redwood Valley, population 1,729, which is just north of the county seat of Ukiah. He calls it "bucolic" and then continues:

The braided West Fork of the Russian River wends through it from the north as the valley opens from a narrow canyon to a flat bottom-land of vineyards, pastures, modest new homes and old farmhouses.

As for who live(d) in the valley, Mozingo writes of "teachers, firefighters, mechanics, shop owners, contractors, at least one pot grower and several retirees. They had swimming pools, ATVs and backyard work shops."  The story is also chock-full of tales of local, neighborly heroism, just like you would expect in a rural community like this one.

One family hit by the Redwood Valley fire has been the subject of quite a bit of media coverage because they lost their 14-year-old son Kai, the youngest victim of the California fires.  His 17-year-old sister lost both of her legs to amputation below the knees because she was so badly burned in the fire, and the parents are in hospitals in Sacramento and San Francisco with burns over about half of their bodies.  As the family headed down their narrow driveway, their cars caught fire and they scattered on foot.  Read more here.  This story reports that Napa and Sonoma Counties also did not issue Amber alert-style warnings.

And here's a story from last week about a struggle to get relief aid to the more remote parts of Puerto Rico following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria.

A rural hospice, regulated by its neighbors, not the state

NPR ran this story yesterday about a volunteer hospice in Port Angeles, Washington the county seat of nonmetropolitan Clallam County, population 71,404.  Though the feature is ultimately about death, it's actually a feel-good story of a non-profit that is serving its community very well.  Rose Crumb, a retired nurse who is now 91, founded Volunteer Hospice of Clallam County some four decades ago:

"[Rose] let people know hospice is not all about dying," said Bette Wood, who manages patient care for VHOCC. "Hospice is about how to live each and every day." 

In a nation where Medicare pays nearly $16 billion a year for hospice care, and nearly two-thirds of providers are for-profit businesses, the tiny volunteer hospice is an outlier.

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She was the first in the region to care for dying AIDS patients in the early days of the epidemic. 

But the real rural angle on the story is here, regarding the exemption from state regulation for hospices like the one in Clallam County.  The story quotes Leslie Emerick, director of public policy and outreach for the Washington State Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

They don't have a reputation of negligence or complaints as far as I'm aware, but there's always the possibility of that when they're unlicensed or unregulated.   

But Astrid Raffinpeyloz, VHOCC's volunteer services manager, points out that the hospice wouldn't have lasted long in a small town if there were problems.

We don't have oversight from the government, but we have minute oversight from the community. 

#MeToo social media phenomenon resonates in rural America, too

Don't miss Ashley Westerman's story this morning out of western Kentucky, which is where Westerman happens to have grown up.  Indeed this story arose from Westerman's observation that the hashtag #metoo had caught on among those in her home community, something she says is unusual.

People don't usually jump onto social media campaign bandwagons like that ... This is the first time I've noticed an issue campaign like this trickle down in my home community.  

This phenomenon would suggest a greater "feminist consciousness" than is typically associated with rural people and places--though those rural women might not label it "feminist."

One woman Westerman interviewed was Julie Martin, who is probably middle-aged because she has three daughters and four granddaughters.  Martin reported that, especially when she was younger, she was subject to unwanted behavior from male colleagues.  Martin initially worked as a grocery clerk and then in the medical field, but she has spent the last 14 years working at the local school.  Martin is quoted:

They would refer to you as sugar [expletive] or honey bun and sweetheart and darling. And I'm not your sweetheart. And I'm not your darling, you know (laughter)? I had one grab my behind. And after I jumped him and explained sternly that that was not acceptable, I never had that problem with him again. But you always have the verbal harassment--that some guys just feel they have that privilege.

Martin never reported any of the behavior.  Why not?  Well, her answer echoes the rural ethos of  self-reliance:

I've always been one of those that was taught that you deal with problems yourself. You don't shove them on someone else. When he grabbed me on the butt, I didn't go to my supervisor. And to this day, I still regret not going to my supervisor and saying, hey, we have a problem.

Further, she would encourage her daughters and granddaughters to report.  Martin indicated that she thinks women are now more empowered by social media, which has helped to diminish the stigma associated with these incidents.

It doesn't really matter whether you're in a small community or a larger city. That's something that has just always been not talked about. And so many people have faced that. And maybe they felt that they were the only ones. And then when they started seeing me too, me too, me too, they're like, hey, wait a minute. Me too. And it's nothing to be ashamed of.

Here's a great segment on American Public Media's "The World" about sexual harassment around the world.  One woman talked about how having jobs in the service sector, like restaurants, where sexual banter is common, can leave one thinking that such behavior is normal--and that you just have to deal it. 

Here's a post on how the January 2017 Women's Marches played out in rural places, too.

Cross-posted to Feminist Legal Theory.

How prison is like a small town: lack of anonymity

That was a comparison made in this NPR story yesterday.  The transcript is not online, but the quote I wrote down went something like this:  Prison is like a small town.  Everyone knows everyone else's business.

This is relevant because the story is about distributing playing cards featuring details of unsolved crimes in the hope that some prisoner will have information that can help to solve the crime.