Pride and fear in our small towns

Afew days ago, a demolition crew put up a fence around the small Kansas high school I attended in the 1960s. Soon the building will be razed. The town is hemorrhaging people. Weeds grow on vacant lots.

Nationwide, 40% of rural towns have lost population since 1980. I’ve spent the past decade studying people in rural communities. I’ve talked with farmers, teachers, factory workers, town managers, homemakers and retirees.

In the age of Trump, when pundits are obsessed, often in a navelgazing manner, with what these men and women think about Washington politics and policy and economics, it’s worth stepping back to understand and appreciate the larger forces that shape their lives, from their own perspective.

It probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that anger is a recurring theme. “It was a busy little town,” one man said. “It was hard to find a parking space on Main St. Today there’s a post office and that’s it. There are no stores.” He’s angry at Walmart.

Other people are angry about immigrants. Several of the communities had become “majority minority” with the spread of meat and poultry processing plants through the Midwest and South.

“People don’t come out and say, ‘I don’t like Hispanics,’ ” a Hispanic mayor in one of these towns told me. But they considered him an illegal alien even though his parents and grandparents were U.S. citizens.

Immigrants aside, the rural population is older than in cities. And the number of school-age children has fallen dramatically. During the last decade of the 20th century alone, more than 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 schools in small towns closed.

“It’s an ugly, ugly thing,” a resident of a town that had lost its school remarked. “When the school leaves, it just sucks the life out of the town.”

Youth who grow up in small towns increasingly relocate to seek opportunities elsewhere. “It’s definitely a brain drain here,” a preacher in New England explained. “Among the ones who have a high school degree, many of them stay. But any of the kids with a four-year degree, they’re gone.”

Little surprise: Eighteen percent of America’s census-defined “non-metro” population were living in poverty in 2014, up from 14% in 2000 and higher than in our cities. Median household incomes in rural areas grew at half the rate of urban areas.

Views of the poor among the non-poor are mixed. An indigent neighbor can be showered with love; an elderly woman squatting in an abandoned house near a river that flooded periodically told me she was. Church people brought her food and kept her electricity from being canceled.

Indigent newcomers, though, were often described as riff-raff.

I heard a lot about joblessness, teen pregnancy, petty crime and opioid addiction, too.

So why do people stay? This, not the complaints, is crucial to appreciating small-town angst.

While some of them are stuck and can’t get out, most are not. They want to be where they are. They like knowing their neighbors. Stopping to chat on the way to the post office. Seeing familiar faces at the grain elevator.

A national survey I did a few years ago asked people if they could count on their neighbors for help if someone in their family became seriously ill. Two-thirds of the people in small towns said they could; in cities, only a third did.

Besides neighbors helping neighbors, rural communities host an extraordinary number of volunteer organizations. People serve on the Chamber of Commerce, hold offices in Elks and Kiwanis, help at the library, teach Sunday school.

The more I listened, the more I wondered if what I’d been hearing about the politics of rural America the past year wasn’t the whole story. To be sure, rural voters opted for Donald Trump. Seventy-five percent in my home county voted for him. They believe there’s a Washington swamp, full of condescending elitists, to be drained.

But the far deeper fear that’s been brewing for decades is about a way of life that people wanted to preserve and feared they were losing. They knew the school wouldn’t reopen and their children wouldn’t return to the family farm. They wanted to trust their neighbors. They wanted to feel that common sense and fair dealings could prevail.

It was like that old high school in my hometown. People mourned its passing and had no idea what might replace it.