Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

I left, too. They're talk­ing about peo­ple like me, in the Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion.

By Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas

What is going on in small-town Amer­ica? The nation's mythol­ogy of small towns comes to us straight from the The Music Man's set design­ers. Many Amer­i­cans think about fly­over coun­try or Red Amer­ica only dur­ing the cul­ture war's skir­mishes or cam­paign sea­son. Most of the time, the rural cri­sis takes a back seat to more vis­i­ble big-city trou­bles. So while there is a ver­i­ta­ble aca­d­e­mic indus­try devoted to chron­i­cling urban decline, small towns' strug­gles are off the grid.

And yet, upon close inspec­tion, the rural and urban down­turns have much in com­mon, even though con­ven­tional wis­dom casts the small town as embod­i­ment of all that is right with Amer­ica and the inner city as all that is wrong with it.

The Har­vard Uni­ver­sity soci­ol­o­gist William Julius Wil­son famously describes how dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, job­less­ness, middle-class flight, depop­u­la­tion, and global mar­ket shifts gave rise to the urban hyper-ghettos of the 1970s, and the same forces are now afflict­ing the nation's coun­try­side. The dif­fer­ences are just in the details. In urban cen­ters, young men with NBA jer­seys sling dime bags from vacant build­ings, while in small towns, drug deal­ers wear­ing Nascar T-shirts, liv­ing in trailer parks, sell and use meth. Young girls in the coun­try­side who become moth­ers before fin­ish­ing high school share sto­ries of lost ado­les­cence and despair that dif­fer lit­tle from the ones their urban sis­ters might tell.

In both set­tings, there is no short­age of guns, although in North Philadelphia's Bad­lands or Chicago's South Side those guns might be con­cealed and ille­gal, while in small towns guns hang on dis­play in pol­ished oak cab­i­nets in the sit­ting room. Res­i­dents of rural Amer­ica are more likely to be poor and unin­sured than their coun­ter­parts in met­ro­pol­i­tan areas, typ­i­cally earn­ing 80 per­cent what sub­ur­ban and urban work­ers do.

The most dra­matic evi­dence of the rural melt­down has been the hol­low­ing out—that is, los­ing the most tal­ented young peo­ple at pre­cisely the same time that changes in farm­ing and indus­try have trans­formed the land­scape for those who stay. This so-called rural "brain drain" isn't a new phe­nom­e­non, but by the 21^st cen­tury the short­age of young peo­ple has reached a tip­ping point, and its con­se­quences are more severe now than ever before. Sim­ply put, many small towns are mere years away from extinc­tion, while oth­ers limp along in a weak­ened and dis­abled state.

In just over two decades, more than 700 rural coun­ties, from the Plains to the Texas Pan­han­dle through to Appalachia, lost 10 per­cent or more of their pop­u­la­tion. Nation­ally, there are more deaths than births in one of two rural coun­ties. Though the hollowing-out process feeds off the reces­sion, the prob­lem pre­dates, and indeed, pre­saged many of the nation's cur­rent eco­nomic woes. But despite the seri­ous­ness of the hollowing-out process, we believe that, with a plan and a vision, many small towns can play a key role in the nation's recov­ery.