Tumbledown Goes Downwardly Mobile

Tumbledown noticed the spate of articles and editorials today bemoaning the latest census data:

"More Hoosiers sink into poverty, Indianapolis Star, Wednesday, August 30, page 1 above the fold.

"Downward Mobility," New York Times editorial.

"Census Reports Slight Increase in '05 Incomes," New York Times article.

What got Tumbledown's attention was the generalizing nature of the editorials, the hidden assumptions about wealth and poverty (the altogether goodness of one and the wholly unmitigated badness of the other). Especially when Tumbledown hears statistics about the top fifth of earners living in metropolitan areas (90.8 percent vs 9.2 percent rural) and the bottom fifth of earners living in rural areas (21.2 percent rural vs. suburban or city), Tumbledown begins to ask "what were we measuring?" Just cash? What about the bounty of life lived "at nature's pace" (Logsdon), cordoned by sunrise and sunset, shared with a strong community, sustained by fresh produce from one's own place? Doesn't anyone in the census bureau remember Jesus' comment about serving mammon?

The mindless repetition of such statistical claptrap reinforces a stereotype and prejudice that is destructive of rural culture, the most valuable assets of which are not measured in cash. The inability to ask more subtle questions of the census data means that we will continue to offer "strong support for public education, a progressive income tax, affordable health care, a higher minimum wage and other labor protections" (NYT editorial; none of which Tumbledown opposes) as the cure-all remedies for rural and urban poor alike, when what is needed in rural areas is simply a right valuation of rural life and produce.

Such bandying of blunted statistics perpetuates what Gene Logsdon, following Wendell Berry, calls "our hidden wound"--the opposite pole of which is the suburban invention of a "divine right to be mindlessly rich" (emphasis mine; Berry, The Long-Legged House, "The Tyranny of Charity," p. 5; Logsdon, Living at Nature's Pace, p. 50).

Want to feed some country bumpkins with food stamps (with food stamps?) and give them MRIs and CATscans? Fine. But dealing with rural poverty in the abstract, as Berry says, will simply "encourage the exceptional to become ordinary" (p. 10). Let's not follow governmental thievery and neglect with cultural destruction, if there is still a rural culture that can be nourished, celebrated, justly compensated, and protected.

Let's do good and do a good accounting of the things that matter most--so that we may all be enriched--rural, urban and suburban.