#rural/urban divide

[benevolentbirdgal]

10 ways a lack of infrastructure makes rural life harder

Why living in the rural United States is hard: an incomplete list of how so much of the country is screwed over by a lack of infrastructure:

Note: I’m not saying EVERY SINGLE ONE of these things applies to or applies evenly to everyone in the rural U.S., nor that I am some sort or rural Lorax (I’m not), nor that these are never problems elsewhere - just that these are very common and very real problems in the rural U.S. and worth consideration in that specific context.

 1. Lack of grocery stores, restaurants, and food options. Food deserts exist in urban areas, but the issue is exacerbated by ruralness. There are counties in the U.S. without a single grocery store and the best is a convenience store and there are places without either. There are places that have only one and it may have wonky hours or a severely limited selection.

2. Shipping times that make you feel like you’re on Mars. Not to mention that for some addresses (particularly on dirt or barely-not-dirt roads) your mail box may be a bit of hike. 

3. Having to schlep your own garbage and recycling (if that’s even an option) to a designated location, it’s not getting picked up from your house. Maybe a friend or relative does it for you, maybe you just take it yourself, but if you can’t get a mailbox next to your house, it’s unlikely the garbage truck is going out there either. 

4. One or two doctor options max. Bless your heart if you think there’s going to be a range of specialists. It could be an hour or two each way if you need a specialist or if the local providers don’t take your insurance.

5. Same goes for education - it’s entirely possible you only have (1) option for each level of schooling, maybe 2. It might be absurdly far from your house. Community college is possibly a thing in your area, but we might be talking a 1-2 hour drive each way. 

6. Internet: At minimum, 4.5% of the U.S. (mostly in rural areas) doesn’t have internet and another 7.5% doesn’t have high-speed internet. That’s widely viewed to be an undercount and the information the FTC gathered was from the internet companies, who are you know, internet companies. Other estimates put, for rural America specifically, the lack of broadband (high-speed) internet) at 20%-40%. So yes, you *probably* have internet in any randomly generated rural spot in the U.S., but it’s also probably not great internet, you have a max of (1) option, and if something knocks it out, it’s going to be a while before it’s fixed (especially in a natural disaster when urban and suburban areas are also knocked out).

7. Transportation: Public transit - almost always not a thing. Private transport (Uber, lyft, etc.) is also not usually a thing. Assuming you have a car, your options for getting gas are limited. 

8. Roads - roads sometime are not paved. Sometimes these are bigger roads than you would think would not be paved. If there’s inclement weather, it may take days to weeks to months to get the road properly cleared and fixed. Same goes for down power lines - you’re going to be days if not weeks behind the cities.

9. Limited employment opportunities - this isn’t strictly infrastructure related, but it’s largely lack-of-infrastructure caused. It’s hard to get employers, much less employers across a broad spectrum of skill sets, income brackets, and benefits structures. 

10. The gov’t and many people who’ve never lived in rural areas responding with something to the impact of “omg just move” instead of actually taking issues seriously. 

I only have experience with several counties in four states - 97% of the U.S.’s landmass and about 20% of the population lives in rural areas so I couldn’t possibly know every specific location, but these issues are nonetheless pervasive. The knee-jerk reaction a lot of folks have (and I’ve 100% had it before too, so I’m not shaming you if that’s your immediate thought) is to just leave, but I want to emphasize that is not a useful answer. 

I know I’m making it sound dystopian, but there are good things about the rural U.S. that make people stay - community, family, connection, etc. There are also practicalities (age, ability, probation, skill set, education or lack thereof, family, finances, etc.) that prevent people from leaving. There are also people who stay because they want to make it better. Telling people to just leave is unproductive and if they can and do do, doesn’t actually fix systemic issues impacting millions. 

One in five Americans live somewhere rural - maybe it’s time to start considering their experiences too. 

[rimouskis]

I know this is old hat and no one needs to fawn over celebrities more, but I'm tired of cynicism and I just think to myself: what if a young queer hockey player somewhere out past pittsburgh, like out in pennsyltucky, sees tanger's instagram post and sees that their idol says they're welcome to play. that means something! ah!

[crionic-dubs]

Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution by Richard Stites

[the-world-i-have-known]

Never before has the rural/ urban divide been more apparent to me than it has this week. Speaking to my extended family about (and hearing them talk about) topics such as climate change, Canadian history & politics, gender & sexuality, religion, education, technology etc. there is such a clear contrast, even within the same generations.

Hearing about this divide is one thing, seeing it unfold in front of you is something completely different.

[bene-darkmans]

We absolutely should be talking about education disparities between men and women and how they reflect an inability by democrats and progressives to address post-industrial realities

Y’all are just classist, you’re snooty and elitist

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

* THIS IS FROM SEPTEMBER 2013. IT MAY BE OUT-OF-DATE, IT MAY REFLECT JOURNALISTIC BIASES AND BLINDSPOTS OF ITS TIME. THE INTENT OF “BACK ISSUES” IS TO COUNTERACT GEOPOLITICAL TUNNEL VISION COMMON AMONG LEFTIST BLOGOSPHERES AND IRREGULAR NEWS READERS. (this is a rough draft disclaimer and may change as putyourbodyuponthewheels is fine tuned)

[neurosismancer]

There's a stereotype that city dwellers, especially East Coast city dwellers, and especially Northeastern Megalopolis City Dwellers are rude. I'd like to dispute that. We're not rude, it's that we have a different set of social and behavioral norms and how we enforce them.

For example, cities are dense and have a lot of people walking around—often on narrow sidewalks. And they have places to be, and often not a lot of time. If you're coming from a place that doesn't have a pedestrian culture, you might not think anything about stopping on the sidewalk to check your phone, or look at some art, or just get your bearings.

To us city folk, this is rude, because you're in the way.

And we enforce the social norm of not stopping on the sidewalk either by going "Hey! Get out of the way!", or by shoulder-checking as we push by. Or both. Because, again, to us, you're the obstacle, and we've got enough obstacles. So many of us are trying to keep moving and get where we're going, the person slowing everyone down is the rude one. That's why our cashiers don't make small-talk unless the store is empty. That's why we don't stop to talk on the sidewalk. We got shit to do, and places to be.

There's three things you need to know about city life to understand why we are as we are:

1. We're crammed in pretty tight, so even minor social violations have an outsize impact.

2. We're all busy and have to get somewhere, often on a tight schedule. Anything we can do to keep things moving is a net benefit.

3. The jerk you had to deal with today? You might never interact with them again. And next time you do, it might be positive.

A good city dweller has a short memory for individual bad social behaviors, but a long memory for aggregate bad social behaviors. Today, that guy is the jerk. Tomorrow, you might be the jerk. That's life. You learn to deal and to forget individual instances of jerkitude.

I will wrap up this post with one piece of advice for anyone new to city living: Keep Moving and Get Out of the Way. That's not two different pieces of advice. It's one. Keep Moving and Get Out of the Way. If you Keep Moving and Get Out of the Way, and I Keep Moving and Get Out of the Way, we'll both be a hell of a lot happier and make life in the city a lot more tolerable. And people won't be rude to you.

As much.

[newstfionline]

As companies relocate to big cities, suburban towns are left scrambling

By Jonathan O’Connell, Washington Post, July 16, 2017

OAK BROOK, Ill.--Visitors to the McDonald’s wooded corporate campus enter on a driveway named for the late chief executive Ray Kroc, then turn onto Ronald Lane before reaching Hamburger University, where more than 80,000 people have been trained as fast-food managers.

Surrounded by quiet neighborhoods and easy highway connections, this 86-acre suburban compound adorned with walking paths and duck ponds was for four decades considered the ideal place to attract top executives as the company rose to global dominance.

Now its leafy environs are considered a liability. Locked in a battle with companies of all stripes to woo top tech workers and young professionals, McDonald’s executives announced last year that they were putting the property up for sale and moving to the West Loop of Chicago where “L” trains arrive every few minutes and construction cranes dot the skyline.

In Chicago, McDonald’s will join a slew of other companies--among them food giant Kraft ­Heinz, farming supplier ADM and telecommunications firm Motorola Solutions--all looking to appeal to and be near young professionals versed in the world of e-commerce, software analytics, digital engineering, marketing and finance.

Such relocations are happening across the country as economic opportunities shift to a handful of top cities and jobs become harder to find in some suburbs and smaller cities.

Aetna recently announced that it will relocate from Hartford, Conn., to Manhattan; General Electric is leaving Connecticut to build a global headquarters in Boston; and Marriott International is moving from an emptying Maryland office park into the center of Bethesda.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said the old model where executives chose locations near where they wanted to live has been upturned by the growing influence of technology in nearly every industry. Years ago, IT operations were an afterthought. Now, people with such expertise are driving top-level corporate decisions, and many of them prefer urban locales.

“It used to be the IT division was in a back office somewhere,” Emanuel said. “The IT division and software, computer and data mining, et cetera, is now next to the CEO. Otherwise, that company is gone.”

The migration to urban centers threatens the prosperity outlying suburbs have long enjoyed, bringing a dose of pain felt by rural communities and exacerbating stark gaps in earnings and wealth that Donald Trump capitalized on in winning the presidency.

McDonald’s may not even be the most noteworthy corporate mover in Illinois. Machinery giant Caterpillar said this year that it was moving its headquarters from Peoria to Deerfield, which is closer to Chicago. It said it would keep about 12,000 manufacturing, engineering and research jobs in its original home town. But top-paying office jobs--the type that Caterpillar’s higher-ups enjoy--are being lost, and the company is canceling plans for a 3,200-person headquarters aimed at revitalizing Peoria’s downtown.

“It was really hard. I mean, you know that $800 million headquarters translated into hundreds and hundreds of good construction jobs over a number of years,” Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis (R) said.

Long term, the corporate moves threaten an orbit of smaller enterprises that fed on their proximity to the big companies, from restaurants and janitorial operations to subcontractors who located nearby.

“The village of Oak Brook and McDonald’s sort of grew up together. So when the news came, it was a jolt from the blue--we were really not expecting it,” said Gopal G. Lalmalani, a cardiologist who also serves as the village president.

Lalmalani is no stranger to the desire of young professionals to live in cities: His adult daughters, a lawyer and an actress, live in Chicago. When McDonald’s arrived in Oak Brook, in 1971, many Americans were migrating in the opposite direction, away from the city.

To Peorians, Caterpillar’s change of heart came suddenly. Two years ago, the company’s leadership team joined state and local officials at a ceremony to announce plans for a new $800 million, 31-acre headquarters aimed at reviving a downtown pockmarked by vacant storefronts.

“We’re here in Peoria to stay,” Caterpillar’s then-chief executive Doug Oberhelman declared at the time. Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) stood to applaud.

Then, in January of this year, Caterpillar abruptly canceled the Peoria headquarters complex and said it would move about 300 top executives to the Chicago area.

The local reaction wasn’t just disappointment but bewilderment. Three generations of the city’s residents have worked at Caterpillar--designing, assembling and painting tractors and pipelayers.

Like other firms, Caterpillar had a digital hub in downtown Chicago, just over a mile from the new McDonald’s headquarters. But now it is also moving many of its top executives away from where colleagues are designing, producing and shipping the company’s products--and the possibility of more Caterpillar jobs leaving looms.

“There are definitely people in this region who don’t want to go to Chicago and are worried that their jobs are going there,” said Jennifer Daly, former chief executive of the Greater Peoria Economic Development Council.

If more jobs go, it will diminish the options for highly qualified managers and executives who have chosen to make their homes in Peoria--a far more affordable, less congested place than Chicago or Deerfield.

The decision has left Peoria officials scrambling. They are focusing on different industries, such as health care, and helping the city’s other manufacturing firms to find work beyond building tractors. About 100 small manufacturers in the area rely largely on Caterpillar contracting work.

[meadowslark]

Photo by National Renewable Energy Lab via CC 2.0

Reconnecting With Rural America

Click the headline to move to the article, a 26 min read authored last winter by the former and presumptive Secretary of Agriculture.

Vilsack was a Democratic Governor of Iowa, a state that is increasingly red. As governor he was generally dealing with Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. 

Most recently, in addition to being a ridiculously overpaid lobbyist, Vilsack was tapped by the Biden campaign to boost its reach into rural America. Honestly, not sure how effective that was. Rural America’s irrational devotion to Trump was, and is, tough to confront. But moving forward the Democratic party needs to find a way to win the confidence of rural voters. 

If the Democratic Party is the party of effective government, we should say so and make the case to all Americans that government plays a positive role in our country. ...Democrats should make a consistent effort to communicate to rural Americans using local and regional media outlets, those that people in rural areas read and listen to every day to find out what is happening in their part of the world.

All of those media outlets need content to fill space and time. It would take little effort to circulate a constant stream of material educating people about government’s positive impact on their community or region. For example, the local law enforcement agency could be featured for taking advantage of federal programs to purchase the police car that prevents crime or the ambulance that saves lives. The local banker could be thanked for using federal loan guarantees to make home loans that maintain the value of the local real estate market while giving families a piece of the American Dream.

....It might sound mundane, but if you want to win elections, you have to compete and inform every day. The Democratic Party needs to listen, learn, and inform.

However, our elected officials and our candidates also have to show up in rural areas in order to win. And when they do, they need to talk up, not down, to rural Americans. Acknowledging the contributions rural America makes to the rest of the country is a good place to start. Recognizing their frustrations and concerns, as well as their hopes and dreams, is an important part of an effective and winning message.

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

it really is absurd how self-centered so many critiques of capitalism from the global north are....like the absolute indignation from so many people that they as a consumer play a role in exploitation, the absolute and complete refusal to even deign to say that even a poor person in the west has their life fueled by even poorer people somewhere else. and that’s an extreme! like you have explicitly middle class OR EVEN WEALTHY westerners who refuse to admit they have what they have because other people elsewhere (and here) are exploited. and tbh thats the most insidious part of the globalization of capitalism...is that it separates the consumers from the producers, it makes not only the exploitation, but even just that labor seem alien, even not existent. you don’t even have to think about them

[angryisokay]

“not college educated” is a classist way to describe someone. stereotypes about southerners are soaked in classism. disregarding the experiences and opinions of rural people is classist. the term “flyover state” is classist. 

for all the talking leftists do about classism and “class warfare”, an awful lot of them are also very classist themselves and it’s real fucking irritating.

[missmagicandlight]

guys im writing a supplemental essay and i need a theme for a discussion hit me up in the asks plz

[krishnakumarv]

Article 15 - a mini-review

Last night, I watched "Article 15" after a recommendation from a lady friend of mine who I respect and whose judgment I trust. In the two-plus hours that I spent alongside an almost 50:50 audience of men/women in a relatively packed Mumbai multiplex screen, I went through a psychological riot, shifting from anger/outrage, sadness, laughter, introspection, reflection, hope, and contentment. A few drops of tears broke through my resilience during a couple of scenes. At the end of the movie, I found myself searching for faces that mirror my feelings, and I wasn't disappointed.

Aspects of the dark underbelly of 2019 India that the movie covers--some of which include casteism, gang rapes, honor killings, caste and religion politics, media blackouts, fake news, gender inequality, underwage labor, child labor, socioeconomic divide, urban-rural divide, armchair activism, gun violence, social media outrage, bureaucracy, corruption--are issues that should occupy a larger space in our collective consciousness. I hope this wonderful movie sparks educated conversations on these topics, which is the most effective way changes will percolate to the grassroots of society.

Here’s a useful article on the movie. https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/why-is-article-15-important-for-india-1557401-2019-06-28

#movie #review #Bollywood #India #Article15

[balaqlava]

Serious debate between me and the girlf this morning: is ‘cunt’ particularly offensive? More offensive than ‘bitch’? Do you know loads of people that casually say ‘cunt’?

Irish tumblr, please interact.