General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If The Dems Made A Concerted Effort To Appeal To Rural Voters What Would You Recommend They Do?.... [View all]Skidmore
(37,364 posts)but that is changing. I also think that the nature of the work to get food or raw materials from the land to the consumer chain is very misunderstood by those who are further removed from the process. Working the fields and animal husbandry are not limited by seasons so much anymore but involve work throughout the year. There is a tendency to belittle the ag industry here in DU but I've not found one person here who is willing to live without food. I know lots of us grow our own gardens but we can't grow everything we needs and, like it or not, the nation does need what we in agricultural states produce.
Now I live in Iowa, where a lot of good decent people live. Sure we have a few knuckleheads but mostly the people here tend to have a good sense of fairness and do value equality and justice and recognize the importance of education. We have some of the finest public schools in the nation. If you take note of Iowa's history, we also are a progressive state which has been the first to move social justice issues ahead many times. However, we tend to be dismissed as red state by the left and assumed to be a red state by the right, both failures to understand who the people are.
Now during the 2008 election year, we worked very hard in our county which had voted Republican historically to turn it blue. You don't shame or name call people into coming agreeing with you. Your conservative neighbor has the same needs of a society that you do as a liberal. Sometimes it means just calling attention to those because there has been about 20 years of propaganda to dig through that has been sold to the nation by Frank Luntz, FOX/Murdoch, Rove, and Limbaugh and his ilk. Stop to think about how the communications market has been bought up (radio stations, newspapers) have been bought up and consolidated by the right wing machine. Cutting through the language with which people have grown accustomed to hearing issues framed is important. Human values have been twisted and sold as identity politics. Everything has been personalized to the nth degree while the needs of our greater society has been denigrated. The left does a version of this too--e.g., derisive dismissal of the middle of the nation as being ignorant and not worth the effort of civil discourse.