Southernization

 It is becoming harder to ignore the evidence that the Midwest, the nation's farm belt, is becoming more southern in its economy and assumptions about its population.  Like the plantation south before the Civil War, the usable assets are concentrating in ever fewer hands.  If the current farm size here in Chippewa county, reaching toward three thousand acres per farming operation does not give sufficient evidence, what about the collectivization of livestock agriculture into huge concentrated confinement operations; five thousand sows in one building, ten thousand milking cows per site on a half dozen sites within a few miles of this farm?

We are busy wringing the "expense" out of farming, or as the late Paul Gruchow, interpreter of his own rural upbringing, once pointed out in plain language, we are taking the human trash out of agriculture.  Like the south with its slave labor, we have supplied ourselves with underpaid and too often terrorized brown skinned folks to do the hard work milking the cows, caring for the hogs, slaughtering the animals that we once took some pride in doing ourselves.  And like the slave economy of the south, we have generated massive inequality in our midst and begun to welcome in the class sorting this inequality permits and encourages. Also like the south we have permitted and encouraged the development of a class of people we think of as "white trash", folks who for one reason or another have not been able to move toward opportunity and who see no great reason for hope here. 

It is difficult for me to believe that the countryside I left for the University of Minnesota in 1966 has anything at all in common with what I see around me now. It feels as if this change over just one human lifetime, is a story not told and not heard, and for all of its killing of dreams and unrequited desire for stability and community is but one small generator of the huge anger and resentment that has taken our political life by storm.