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Thoughts on the plight of disgruntled white, rural people; join us at The Village, 8/16/23 [1]

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Date: 2023-08-16

Senator Chris Murphy has generated a fair amount of discussion recently over some of his tweets, like these ones:

x 5/ The other theme was the lack of trust. Years of underinvestment in rural America leaves people feeling abandoned. All the companies that said they cared about the community left. Schools and churches have been politicized. — Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) August 4, 2023

x Many Americans feel like life is unspooling. Folks are feeling more alone, anxious and empty than ever. We need a dialogue about what's gone wrong and how we infuse values and first principles into our national discussion.



That can't happen in DC. It starts in places like Boone. — Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) August 2, 2023

People are reasonably wondering why he’s so focused on these areas outside of his home state. Is he setting himself up to run against VP Harris in 2028? Is he trying to be the new Bernie Sanders? Does he sincerely have heartfelt concerns about people in these areas?

I think some of the concerns around these messages is that he is focusing and centering small town, low-income white people as a special group of people with different needs than other low-income people. I think it’s a fair concern.

I also understand that his interest in people experiencing loneliness is a valid policy concern. Are there not people in the District of Columbia or Connecticut that feel that way? If he were to check in with them he might realize that they share a lot of the same concerns.

Those years of underinvestment in rural America — that’s largely the fault of the majority of voters in that area voting against their own best interests. I am not so callous that I think they deserve what they’ve voted for, but what else can I do to solve those problems for them? What else can we as a society do to solve those problems when they fight tooth and nail for the status quo?

Here’s a more specific view of what I think Sen. Murphy is getting at with these tweets and his trip.

x 'No one is coming to our rescue': Inside rural California's alarming teacher shortage https://t.co/J7OJ4RZ63V @haileybranson — Brittny Mejia (@brittny_mejia) August 1, 2023

“Not perfect” is the name of the game in classrooms across California. Even the state’s largest public school districts, like Los Angeles Unified, which lists more than 450 teacher vacancies for the coming academic year, struggle to find credentialed instructors and keep class sizes down. In small, rural districts like Modoc Joint Unified in Alturas, a cattle ranching town of 2,700, being short even a few teachers can send a school spiraling. At Alturas Elementary School, there are six vacancies — a quarter of the teaching staff. emphasis my own

The teacher shortage is so dire that administrators say they have no choice but to violate a new state law that will require public school districts to soon offer free TK — an additional year of instruction that precedes kindergarten — to all 4-year-olds. The district, which had a single TK teacher, is scrapping the grade level altogether. To recruit teachers, school officials try to sell the perks of rural life: The slower pace. The deer that walk right along Main Street. The postcard-pretty sunrises over the Warner Mountains. Low crime and so little traffic that there is only one stoplight in the whole county. But they don’t sugarcoat the isolation. When they interview job candidates, they note: Alturas is 100 miles from the nearest Walmart, across the state line in Klamath Falls, Ore. emphasis my own

This is the sentence in the article that really hit me hard, and my first reaction was of anger.

People in California’s rural north feel as if this famously liberal state is leaving them behind — a feeling of alienation that has long fueled the region’s conservative politics.

Let me be very, very clear — Alturas is not just rural California, it’s EXTREMELY ISOLATED rural California. I completely understand that not everyone can move out of the area, but there are people there choosing to live there and then blaming their circumstances on people like me.

******

“It’s a great little community,” Norby said. “It’s where everybody knows everybody. We know our kids by name.” Norby, a 50-year-old grandfather of five, worked at the high school for 12 years. He left his job this summer to be the superintendent in Tulelake, a small town 70 miles northwest. It was a career change he decided on after an emergency surgery this spring to repair an intestinal obstruction. The health scare was a wake-up call: If he ever wanted to be a superintendent, he figured, he should do it now. The assistant principal will take his job. That, of course, leaves an opening for assistant principal.

In my little county of 250,000, and town of 53,000, people know each other. The conversations that happen at the grandkids’ school is probably the same as the conversations that happen at schools, and little league in SF and LA. People in cities know a lot of people, too. We build communities where we live.

The reality of living in this isolated corner of California means problems accessing healthcare, and snowstorm aside, likely a lot of isolated places across the country.

*******

“Alturas is a really good place when you’re a brand-new teacher,” she said. “It is so supportive. The cost of living is so cheap; the pay is good. Then you realize you’re in the middle of nowhere.” In December, Ashley, pregnant with her first child, was teaching when her water broke. Her husband was hours away, working out of cellphone range. So the school nurse drove her, through a snowstorm, two hours south to the hospital in Susanville as she timed her contractions in the passenger seat.

The article states that Ashley was not from Alturas but was recruited there to teach. So clearly she and her husband chose to live in a very remote area of the state. The article goes on to say that Ashley resigned at the end of the school year and they moved to a different rural area where her family lives. She will be doing substitute teaching on the days her husband doesn’t work, and it will involve a 2-hour drive each way. That’s quite the commitment and no doubt her district will be happy to have her.

******

The remainder of the article discusses the new Transitional Kindergarten mandate the state enacted. It has added to the staffing challenges of the district in Modoc. Based on the portion of the article that mentions staffing shortages in Los Angeles Unified School District, I can only imagine that it’s a problem across the state because 12,000 to 15,000+ teachers will be needed to fill the positions across the state.

Here’s the thing, though, that mandate was not passed to torment educators and administrators; it was enacted to provide better outcomes for future students, and ultimately adults.

So, how can I, a liberal in a liberal state help people that are struggling? I vote, and I vote more for their interests than they probably imagine. I pay my fair share of state and federal taxes that help them as well.

California has a good medicaid program — Medi-Cal, that supports hospitals in providers in ‘normal’ rural areas, like Susanville, where Ashley had her baby. Susanville is a town of 16,000, and the county seat of Lassen County, population 33,000. I suspect that there are counties that are even larger in the republican run states that don’t have hospitals with maternity services because of their refusal to accept federal medicaid money. So, I’m not interested in to sob stories about liberal Californians not rescuing rural Californians, because that is simply not true. Facts matter.

It seems to me that life is hard. It can be very hard in extreme rural places like Alturas. It can also be very hard in extreme urban places like Los Angeles, and everywhere in between. Life is hard! I don’t say that with a level of “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” kind of anger. I say it as reality for most people in this country; that’s why I vote, and vote for Democrats. I want society to do better, and be better for the vast majority of people in this country especially for those struggling.

******

So, back to Sen. Chris Murphy. I felt very frustrated when I read the first tweet that I shared of his, where he references the scheduling nightmare that affects far too many workers in this country. I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers Sec. Clinton discussing unpredictable schedules that workers have to deal with, making it so difficult to plan. She brought it up repeatedly in her speeches! It turns out a majority of voters in Boone’s county voted for Sec. Clinton in 2016; so, I guess I’m glad he’s going to a Democratic county.

At this point I’ve decided to not worry about Sen. Murphy. He’s a good guy and I’ll assume good intentions for the time being. As a life long coastal elite I’ve learned to get over the deification of rural people.

I’ll also keep voting and try to keep their interests in mind, as well as my own. I don’t know what the answers are around the plight of of people living in places like Alturas, but I’m willing to listen to specifics.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/16/2185194/-Thoughts-on-the-plight-of-disgruntled-white-rural-people-join-us-at-The-Village-8-16-23

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