Rural America is Dead

Took a drive over to my neighbor's to feed his pig today while he's in Fort Worth visiting some family. Driving down the road is a visible reminder this Thanksgiving that rural America is dead or dying.

All along the county road are my neighbors, mostly old folks still hanging on to the family farm. For the holiday, their children have returned to enjoy a big dinner. So standing out in many of the yards you see the grizzled old veterans of country life watching their grandchildren scurry about in the yard and talking to their sons and daughters. The sons and daughters who ran off to the city as fast as they could and now stand beside their tanned and weather-beaten elders wearing expensive leisure clothes and looking like they need a trip to the gym and some time outdoors. Fancy minivans are parked alongside the battered old farm trucks.

Ah, America. The strength of our nation was in our farms and our children, but you believed the lies of the government. You put your children in the government schools and told them to go out and get "good jobs" so they wouldn't have to work on the farm as hard as you did. Now the families are broken and you get a few years seeing your children and grandchildren only on holidays before they shuffle you off to the old folks home and then put the farm up for sale because they have no intention of ever going back there.

I guess I'm crazy (of course I am), but I still think the greatest gift you can give your children is the skills to feed themselves and a little bit of land with which to live free of a mortgage.