Okay, phew, you wanted this discussion
@JayDee so here it comes!
50% of the population lives in Urban cities that have no understanding of how the other 50% live and vice versa. The first 50% all take up about 10% of the landmass and rely heavily on the other 50% to stay alive without even realizing it.
It's a symbiotic relationship. Your experience has instructed you to highly value food production, and that's great, and it is important. But the idea that one group "relies on" the other is extremely misleading.
Where is farm equipment engineered, built, and produced? Even if the answer isn't in cities, which it increasingly isn't, where is the capital raised to fund the purchase of said equipment? Moreover, which areas provide the tax revenue to subsidize farmers and agribusiness conglomerates who produce the food?
It's a cycle, and at any point it could breakdown and leave both urban and rural people in a lurch. It's not one group of people depending on another, everyone is depending on each other.
Those people in the city talk about bathrooms and gender equality because they don’t have to worry about anything else. They talk about raising minimum wage and free college because they actually have the luxury of choosing their future.
I've lived in a large city on a below average wage. It is hard. In every job I've ever had in a major metropolitan area, I've taken public transit (and remember, I'm on the west coast). I've ridden trains with cooks, teachers, housekeepers, and yes, surely bankers and investors and lawyers as well. But the idea that people in "the city" care about these issues because they have no other worries, is just wrong.
We care about these issues because we are actually exposed to people who are different from us, whereas rural areas are nearly 80% white, overwhelming cisgender, and so it's possible to demonize or disregard people who hold concerns immediately different than your own.
None of us out here own property, so every week we have to take in enough money to pay rent and basic needs or we are homeless. So we understand the importance of a high minimum wage (whereas 82% of rural Americans own property).
There are pro's to living in cities which is why we do it, but man the overwhelming majority of us would love to see more "luxuries" you're talking about!
Those people everywhere else talk about paying the mortgage and praying to whatever God hears them that it rains tomorrow so they have enough corn to harvest.
Those people in the city want to ban pesticides that are bad for the environment, the others need those pesticides to stop critters from destroying the crops that *you* rely upon to feed yourself.
There are plenty of ways that we can innovative and get creative with farming that doesn't involve some of the really dangerous side-effects of some pesticides.
I actually have no idea why you chose this hill to die on, because I think nearly everyone in the world would agree they don't want harmful pesticides draining into their water supply, soil, killing other sources of food like fish etc.
You don’t understand? Yeah. I know.
What I do understand though is there is absolutely no reason for people in rural America to get an outsized voice in the choosing of policy outcomes. We are all in this together. We all have different concerns and experiences, and those need to be heard, but at the absolute same frequency please!
