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Back on the Trail

The last thing rural and small town America needs now is more division or culture wars

By Diane Smith

I’ve been pretty quiet since the 2016 elections. The elections weren’t a surprise, the likely outcome of 2016 seemed pretty apparent to anyone who’d been listening to folks beyond the coasts. But during most of 2017, the America that I love and believe in, that has given me so much, felt lost to me in ways I had never imagined. So over the last year, I’ve been following the STOP guidelines recommended for hikers lost in the woods. As with most things proposed by outdoors experts, I find these guidelines applicable to a boatload of non-outdoors situations, even one as historically precedential as this one.

The first step, according to hikingdude.com, is Stop. Stay calm, and stay put. The second step is Think. Go over how you got to where you are. During this time, do not move until you have a specific reason to take a step. Next, Observe. Identify landmarks and consider the specifics of your situation. Last, Plan. Then act on your plan.

Hikingdude.com, a great site not only for its STOP guidelines and assorted hiking recommendations, also points out that loneliness, fear, and exhaustion can be big impediments to survival when you’re lost in the woods and recommends combating these by staying busy, turning fear into motivation, and getting as much rest as your body needs. Great advice for life and business as well as getting lost in the woods.

But back to America, the country I love with all my heart.

I spent most of 2017 hoping that with near-zero-impediments to their policy agenda, Republicans would begin rolling out sensible reforms that improved the opportunity equation for those of us living outside big, urban centers. Because that’s where the Republican base lives, right? Having control over every conceivable policy venue from the courts to the White House, Congress and state legislatures all over, Republicans would have to take care of those of us in blue-collar, rural and small town America. Right? Evidently not.

I began the year looking forward to improvements in Obamacare that resulted in even more affordable and widely available healthcare coverage for those of us between the coasts. (Because rural and small towns don’t have a lot of large employers that offer healthcare, we need a well-functioning private insurance market more than most.) I hoped for tax reform designed to benefit folks making less than $100,000 a year as well as small businesses and entrepreneurs, not the super-rich and big Fortune 500 corporations based in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and New York City. I’ve waited for smart proposals to improve our public school systems, because they’re often the only option for students in rural and small towns. A rural broadband funding proposal that prioritizes rural and small town users would actually be pretty easy, but it’s nowhere in sight. Most sadly, I’m still waiting for someone to convene the smartest people in the world to come up with a serious proposal to end the all-too-often fatal epidemic of opioids and gun violence that claims our children daily. And don’t tell me these aren’t real threats, we’ve all been to too many dang funerals.

Well, a year’s gone by, the STOP guidelines worked and the plan is becoming clear. The last thing rural and small town America needs now is more division or culture wars. No, we need real, effective policies that recognize our unique circumstances and improves on them. We’re going to need smart, hardworking, diverse, innovative leadership to pull it off. And it’s going to be tough. Tough to break the habit of listening only to those we agree with; tough to invite in folks who may know lots more about a subject than we do; tough to demand accountability from policymakers we like personally but aren’t delivering. But we’ve got this.

Over the coming months, we’re going to propose some ideas for your consideration. These ideas will challenge folks on both the left and the right to look beyond traditional party dogma, lots of which we find pretty useless and outdated these days, and to think up and evaluate new, smart policies that help make rural and small town America even stronger and more productive than it is today. Look forward to seeing you on the trail.

Diane Smith
Columbia Falls