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Last week, some high-powered demographers released a study which concluded that the population of rural areas is growing rapidly. This is happening not just in montane backwaters, which I already knew, but all across America.
In general, America's rural population percentage has been dropping for a century. This reversed in the 1970s with some growth, reversed again in the 1980s with continued decline, and has switched courses again in the 90s with rural growth.
Confused? Then just think about where we Baby Boomers live, or think we should live.
In the 1950s, it was in a three-bedroom one-story brick home in a sterile suburb. In the 1960s, an urban communal bohemia like Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village. Come the 1970s, and we were supposed to migrate to self-sufficient Mother Earth News homesteads and live like the Waltons.
We returned to the city in the 80s to dwell in Park Avenue penthouses and ride limos to work where we practiced arbitrage and perfected hostile takeovers. As for the 90s, this is the era of Martha Stewart gracious rural living on a Ted Turner trophy ranch.
Now it's easy to remember which areas grew when.
The problem with people moving to rural areas is fairly
simple. We define rural
by absence of population. If
too many people move in, then an area ceases to be
rural.
People often try to come up with other definitions, though, especially now that rural is the cool place to be.
For instance, Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the
world, which makes it about as rural
as the Empire
State Building.
But its TV images often feature amber fields of grain, and are always accompanied by down-home folks speaking in peckerwood dialect, talkin' 'bout all sortsa neat stuff.
In one touching scene, a corporate pharmacist spoke of how she loved hanging out at daddy's corner drugstore when she was a girl. She was apparently too dense to figure out what happened to daddy's store after Wal-Mart came to town -- and we're supposed to trust her with our lives?
For other evidence of how hip it is to be rural, there's the prominence of country music, the popularity of Jeff Foxworthy and the soaring sales figures for pickups.
Or we can note how often candidates for national office -- in a nation where four out of five citizens live in metropolitan areas -- will talk about the wholesome values they acquired in hamlets like Hope, Ark., and Russell, Kan.
All this may account for some recent problems out here in the boondocks.
For instance, we've got youth gangs. Not Crips and Bloods (you will hear about those groups, of course, from a rural police chief or school superintendent at budget time), but gangs just the same.
They roar through town in big, noisy pickups with ground-shaking stereo systems that pound out their peculiar gang music.
If they're not driving, they're not hanging out on
street corners, spitting tobacco and annoying passersby.
They also drink a lot and are prone to violence. Many carry
guns. The gang marker
they wear is a wide-brimmed
felt hat with a high crown.
These gangs are not new in the rural West, of course --
more than a century ago, newspapers in Kansas and Arizona
often complained about violence and the general decline in
civility when the cow-boys
came into town.
But they are youth gangs nonetheless, and in most little towns, the police pretty much let them slide -- after all, these gang-bangers are white, and besides, in the current national media symbolic system, it's cool to be a cowboy.
There other reasons to think twice about fleeing the horrors of the city for a laid-back bucolic sanctuary.
You could be quietly going about your life, and have Outside magazine discover your burg -- and then you'll be surrounded by Jeep Cherokees topped by $1,800 bicycles.
Or some avatar of ascended consciousness will announce that you're in a holistic geomantic convergence vortex, and you won't be able to go out to eat any more.
Thank you for not smoking
signs will sprout in
the greasy spoon, ordering a cup of coffee becomes a
15-minute ordeal of selecting among exotic varieties you
don't care about, the waitron will glare when you order
meat (if it's available at all) and hearty breakfasts like
biscuits and gravy or steak and eggs are replaced by fluffy
fare like bran muffins with fruit.
The county Board of Realtors could run out of listings, and pressure the local authorities to adopt rigid zoning codes and expensive new taxes so you'll decide to sell out -- after all, those community-minded Realtors don't make money if you're happy where you are.
Start adding all that up, and the real reason for the
current rural renaissance
should be apparent -- the
American educational system is even worse than anyone
thought, and Americans are swallowing swill by the
carload.
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