I Live Where the Conversation Doesn't

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I'm going to try to explain why I think there's value in writing from rural Nebraska , to readers who pretty much have no idea what I’m talking about and many who could care less.I'm sure I once gave someone who asked me a much longer answer, but this is my attempt to distill it down.

I Live Where The Conversation Doesn't

Political conversations here in America are increasingly held in echo chambers, behind the walls which the other cannot see. My job is to bring these conversations to you.

I have conversations with people in them, though, every day. With real people. My good friend Hank at the lumber yard. The man who buys the barbed wire fence who has no idea why it's getting more expensive but votes the way he does because I know, because he's told me so himself. I don't think you can have that conversation elsewhere, if you're on the other side, or even if you aren't. And it makes me unreasonably defensive when someone who's never set foot in this place decides that these people need to be talked to, if the conversation can possibly get through.

If you're the national Democratic party and you want to talk to rural voters, your conversations with them had best take place where they find each other. That would mean showing up before the election.

I look around, and I see few others attempting to do that. There's plenty of people writing about rural America. There's fewer writing about it from within it. And of those, I think there's an even smaller subset that are listening to the conversations that take place within it, rather than merely writing about them as though they were elsewhere, or as if they'd been filtered somewhere else first, if that makes sense. That doesn't make me feel virtuous by any means, but I think it's safe to say that it's the real difference between me and everybody else, as far as both sides of the aisle are concerned. I'm listening to the people here, if not exactly the people you think I'm listening to. I’m not just talking about the loudest, I’m also talking about the ones that never get asked.

My nephew Scot, for instance, once gave me a pretty thorough dissertation on things like country of origin labels on beef, packers, right to repair laws for his tractors, defending the exemption of his land from the estate tax so that his grandsons would have somewhere to live and vote, and he'll vote for whoever votes for the things he supports, and nobody's asked him about it since, as far as I know, or written about it either.

What I Think I'm Actually Doing Here

I'm a democrat, and I always will be.

I write from a provincial center, if you will, not false but real.

And I have no illusions of being able to convince anyone of anything, anywhere else, because there isn't any, really, save the place where I am.

Being a democrat and being effective to democrats aren't the same thing, and I think that's largely because the people ostensibly writing about rural voters aren't actually writing about the people who should be their natural constituency. They're writing at other people just like themselves, people with the same politics, but with a slightly different regional inflection. If you're supposedly writing about rural Democrats, it doesn't help much to actually be writing at urban Democrats who vote the same way.

Whatever effectiveness I have here is a function of authenticity, of being able to accurately represent what these people have said to me in such a way that makes it clear that this is a conversation about other people, who don't have much reason to talk to one another, but whose thoughts are nevertheless worth hearing.

I can tell you about a hundred mile round trip between here and Cheyenne looking at houses, about a family with a good job who only have so many options

If there's something to be said for that, it's that it acts as a sort of intermediary for a conversation that would otherwise not take place, that's nominally about these people but finding its audience elsewhere, a sort of middleman for people who want to hear what these people think about things, but who haven't been given the opportunity to do so directly. Somebody in Chicago can read about these people and think they know what they think about things, without necessarily having asked them to be particularly considerate in their expressions of the same, while the ranchers in question can read about themselves in the same venue without somebody deciding it'd be a good idea to vote them out of existence for being convenient talking points elsewhere. It's a strange sort of channel, but it seems to serve its purpose.

The Porch Again

I think I'm doing this because I listen.

That's not nothing; as the national conversation gets fractured up into smaller and smaller pieces, the value of somebody who can listen to one and report to the other, honestly, is difficult to overestimate, I think. It serves to keep me humble, if I'm being honest, but I don't know that I'm necessarily a conduit to these people particularly, and certainly not to the extent that other people might be if they're listening as well. Some MSM reporter that shows up for a week, gets a quote and is gone. I am here everyday. Not just for a story, it is where I live.

That's probably the point of all this, if there is one; I can't do it forever, obviously, but having done it as much as I have served as a constant reminder that it's a good thing to want, while I still can, and while these places still occupy my life, to try and remember them and make other people remember them as well.

Why That Makes You Important

I'm not the only person who can do this, obviously.But I may be one of the few still willing to try.I think I'm going to try to be pretty clear in saying that. I think the people that are supposed to do this for a living largely aren't here, though, which makes when they do talk about people like these, that they're talking about things they only know secondhand, which makes most of them unable to really let these people speak for themselves, beyond a handful of people who are writing for the specific purpose of advancing their own particular viewpoint.

If you're only having conversations with these people through these other people who couldn't have talked to them if they hadn't decided to in the first place, you're not really having conversations with them, and you're certainly not having conversations where you're letting them say the things that need to be said for you to hear them.

Either they know what you think you need to hear, or somebody told you what you're supposed to want them to say, and either way, it's hardly a conversation. That's not a request for charity. It's an argument that this kind of listening is worth paying for, the same as anything else that takes real time to do right.

I'm not necessarily asking you to agree with me, and I think you can tell when I'm lying to you, and when I'm not, so I think if you're getting anything out of this, this is the part where you become a paying subscriber or you tell somebody else about this, because if it doesn't happen, it won't happen, and somebody needs to want it to.

I go out most evenings as usual into the gathering dark over this county, and Scot is out there somewhere doing his usual calculations, and Hank is closing the register, and there's a family somewhere between here and Cheyenne who hasn't found what they're looking for yet, and none of this changes, not because of me or anybody else, really, but for one evening at least, the distances are shortened, if only a little bit, for everybody, and that's what we're after, isn't it? That’s probably the real point,if there actually is one.Not an end to distances, but surely an awareness of them on both sides for as long as it takes. Keep reading and sharing.Thank you so much for your support. I love this community.

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