Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
A day or two after the bombing of Iran a meme went out with POTUS 45/47 standing in front of one of those “Mission Accomplished” banners popularized by POTUS 43—you remember the guy. The banner had been edited to read “Distraction Accomplished” which is more accurate. The news rooms were suddenly taken over with opinions on what exactly was accomplished, if anything, and what kind of retaliation would come our way. Once in a while, a progressive thinker would ask who was the real planner—POTUS or Netanyahu?
By dominating the news, the administration manages to distract us from real issues that affect our families — tariffs, corporate consolidation, the effects of AI on our lives, that kind of thing. I’m almost to the point of joining friends who have given up the news completely. When questioned closely, they’ll admit to listening or watching a bit, but for the most part they’ve cut back from a steady diet to, say, an hour a day. For rural folks, more diligence is essential.
Our communities are barely making it, money-wise. Land prices and equipment prices are through the roof and the weather is dicey, so the big guys won’t make it without subsidized crops, crop insurance, CRP money for marginal land, that kind of thing. To see how future farm bills and budgets can impact my neighborhood, I always look to the Environmental Working Group at EWG.org. For years, they have pointed out the inequities of the subsidy system. Most of the money goes to the big farm corporate guys including several members of Congress, while USDA eliminates funds for school lunches, SNAP and other hunger programs.
Every aspect of rural life is set to be impacted by announcements and actions from Washington, D.C. And everything that hits us goes back to smack rural and suburban folks. An estimated half the food at the grocery store is harvested by workers without documentation. Their misery — and expendability — means that food prices are low. When they are rounded up by ICE, fields go unharvested.
And Washington capers don’t just hit immigrants. Loss of medicaid means loss of hospitals and entire medical communities. Health.mo.gov estimates that 55 rural counties had hospitals in 2020 and a recent article in the Columbia Missourian estimated that 25 are at-risk. With 114 counties in Missouri and one independent city (St. Louis) I’ll let you do the math.
I know Missouri’s a cheap-to-live-in state. My kids never forget to tell me that our gasoline is half price compared to their adopted California. But medical expenses are high, no matter where you live. According to Jess Piper, a Dem “influencer,” “Almost 40% of babies born in Missouri receive care with Medicaid funds. Two in Three nursing home residents rely on Medicaid.”
When hospitals close, there are more repercussions. Doctors, nurses and other trained professionals move away. Besides the obvious public threat to human health, loss of medical professionals removes a certain gravitas from local conversation. Who speaks out about environmental pollution? Who notes the rates of cancer or other diseases? Who asks if new industry is safe for workers or neighbors? The answer, of course, is nobody. Are our county governments taken advantage of by incoming industry like water-stealing animal confinements and potentially dangerous industries? Uh, yeah!
Further down the chain, but perhaps more important in numbers of folks affected, is the impact of cuts to education. For towns dependent upon small colleges, and there’s a bunch in your state and mine, expulsion of foreign students means loss of millions of tuition dollars. Anti-DEI initiatives also cut funding to under-resourced students and other cuts hit disabled students.
The diversity (uh oh. I used a forbidden word) that international students bring to a campus cannot be overstated. When I was teaching, a student from Maldives informed my class about rising ocean levels in her land, then went home to work on it full-time as a college graduate. A Palestinian student helped my class understand the arrogance of their new Israeli neighbors emboldened by U.S. dollars. And an English teen gave me the best line about Missouri weather I’ve ever heard. After a spring day that began hot, then turned high wind and ended up freezing cold drizzle: “I wanted to come to a place where I could experience four seasons, but I didn’t think I’d have them all on the same day.”
When a college goes, struggling downtowns are at risk. Restaurants and bars, of course, depend on college kids and celebrations. Services like apartment rental agencies, auto repair shops, fast food chains, plumbers, electricians, attorneys, ditto.
No question we need to worry about the deficit, but the obvious fix, for the future of our nation, our rural communities, our food security, is to tax the ultra-rich and take care of the most helpless. How is it that they don’t understand this basic reality?
Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.”
Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.
