Bridging the divide

I don’t remember how it started, but my Zweber cousins have a book club. I am a member of this club as I love reading any and all books. Sometimes, I think they may wish I weren’t a member, as I enjoy picking rather long books. What can I say? We have an Audible account with quite a few credits banked up, and I have a lot of time in the skid loader to listen to books. I haven’t chosen “Les Misérables” yet, which takes somewhere around 60 hours to read. However, I think I’m up to pick the next book soon, and that is an excellent book.

Similar to my Dairy Star articles, our discussions of books rarely stay quite on topic. The conversation usually starts with us talking about the book we read, and then it just kind of wanders where it will to tangential topics. The book my cousin Laura picked last month was “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.” Somehow, the discussion of a book wherein unwed pregnant teens in the late 1960s practice witchcraft drifted to the urban/rural divide in politics. The weird part was that the election of our current president was the start of a somewhat contentious debate, but the president wasn’t really the contentious part. We were debating whether rural areas should have the amount of influence they do in politics, as there are so many fewer people there.

Depending on your viewpoint, the Senate and the electoral college are either essential to make sure our vast country isn’t run by the two most populous cities on opposite coasts of the country, or it’s a way to prevent the populist vote from choosing the president and deciding the laws. I’m going to guess the audience I’m writing for here, being largely rural and agricultural, is opposed to New York and Los Angeles running the show on a federal level. That said, there seems to be a lot of animosity between urban and rural areas currently, or at least when it comes to politics.

A Minnesota Public Radio article I read on Facebook talked about why the author thought rural areas have mostly voted Republican in recent history. I thought it was a well-thought-out article, and they interviewed a number of people from rural areas. The interviewees talked about not feeling heard by the democratic party that is seen to be elected and run by the urban areas of the state. They didn’t want to vote for candidates whose party would ignore them.

I made the mistake of looking at the comments section, curious if anyone wrote they felt a greater understanding of rural voters or if any rural folks added their thoughts on the article. The comments were nearly all about how stupid rural people are that they would vote for a party that would cut funding for farm programs and hold up promised grant funds. It seemed not only did no one gain any understanding, but they were even more upset that people weren’t ashamed of how they voted. Comment sections on the internet should in no way be taken as an indicator of most people’s views.

I’m not writing this to tell you how to vote. I’m concerned that urban and rural communities understand each other less as farming has become more consolidated. There are just fewer of us in agriculture and the rural areas than there had been in the past. Because of that, fewer and fewer people come from farms or know someone who farms. We need to step up and have those hard conversations in a respectful way with people from urban and suburban areas. We can’t just say, “They aren’t worth talking to, they’ll never understand.” It’s not about convincing people you are right or they are wrong about some political issue. It’s about explaining why you think about an issue the way you do and also listening to them about how they came to their conclusions. Together, you can lay down a few pieces in the process to build a bridge across that divide of understanding.

Until next time, keep living the dream, and be a bridge builder rather than a burner. Rural America has been wishing for the replacement of many of its literal bridges, and maybe the way to help make that happen is by maintaining and building the figurative ones.

Tim Zweber farms with his wife, Emily, their three children and his parents, Jon and Lisa, near Elko, Minnesota.