America—our mother, our country—is dying.
Our mother, our country, is dying. Her rural and urban children need to stop squabbling and manage her estate.
Urban and rural America depend on each other in ways that daily life allows us to ignore. Food, energy, and materials move inward from the countryside. Credit, medicine, equipment and technology flow outward from the cities. Each sustains the other. Our arguments may satisfy us culturally, but it’s our interdependence that keeps us alive.
In managing our inheritance, we must confer as equals. The hands reaching across the divide must meet at navel level; our interdependence is such that no hand can reach down in condescension, none can reach up in supplication. The hands that meet, whether calloused or polished nails, are not merely the hands of equals, but of co-dependents, co-conspirators, co-heirs.
We don’t have a choice. America only works because we can depend on each other. It isn’t ideology; it’s facts on the ground. Farmers need tractors, antibiotics, and markets. Urban dwellers need food. Calloused hands and polished nails need each other. The imperative is cooperation. We don’t have to agree on the social issues of the day to survive, but we do have to recognize that survival is shared.
Respect is seeing the value in another’s work, the dignity in every trade, the shared contribution to the common good. Feeding this country is an enormous and complex task. So is shaping and managing dense, diverse urban populations and industrial supply. When we take time to recognize one another’s challenges, gratitude replaces suspicion, and the distance between us begins to close.
The culture wars flatter us with false choices—blue or red, urban or rural, educated or working, north or south, religion A or religion B. That flattery, those choices, are a distraction. The real work before us is keeping our inheritance: our rich farmland, our infrastructure, our technologies, our shared values—and maybe, just maybe, rediscovering the trust and respect that built them to begin with. That work won’t be accomplished by ideology. It will be accomplished by us.
