A friend showed me a newsletter from a church in a small Missouri town.
The pastor previewed his sermons, including a series on “community” leading up to Lent. The final talk highlighted “threats” to the community, such as pornography, drugs, overeducated young people…
Wait a minute…Yup, a warning from the pulpit on youths getting more schooling than they need, causing them to abandon the ‘community which nourished and needs them.’
That theme of overeducation caught fire a while back, well summarized by a piece in The New Republic.
And, the pastor’s sermon yanks on a nerve: rural Missouri continues to hemorrhage residents (in one of many examples, Bates County has half as many residents now as it did in 1890 ).
Those left behind tend to be older and poorer than the average Missourian. As I’ve discussed, a pain belt stretches from Kansas and Oklahoma to the Mississippi River filled with counties still fighting such high unemployment that they could be exempt from food stamp work requirements. In some, such as Ripley and Shannon counties, food stamps represent one dollar in $20 in their local Gross Domestic Products.
Alas, it is hard to imagine an economic scenario where enough business activity migrates to small Missouri towns to reverse the current trend. As bad as things are now, the future for rural Missouri includes continued loss of folks and funds.
Still, that pastor’s theme parrots conventional GOP wisdom claiming Missouri is a predominately rural state and that rural life is best. This week former Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones had a column in The Missouri Times extolling the Better Together merger plan because St. Louis is known for, “Cardinals, crime, and corruption.” (Good news: he likes the Cardinals.)
Despite the fact that most Missourians live in urbanized regions – St. Louis County alone has more residents than the smallest 70 Missouri counties– the mythology and enmity endures. It permeates all levels of state government, resulting in tons of legislation to ‘control’ cities and their people.
Meanwhile, never forget that the big building covered in plastic by the river exists to promote communism: taking resources from better off urbanized areas to steeply subsidize rural Missouri’s roads, schools, health care, and other vital services. That’s classic, “too each according to his needs” from Karl Marx – who stole it from The Acts of The Apostles.
Back to that sermon…I suspect the pastor feels constant pressure working in a community defined by loss and struggle. Young people wanting a better life must move on, to St. Louis or Kansas City or Springfield or Columbia or even out of state. After services he probably hears from a businessman lamenting the higher minimum wage eating his profits and a mom facing an hour drive to get her child to a doctor. He reacts to the world he sees.
Ironically, that pastor is probably the most educated man in town.
Notes From The Unterrified Democrat, February 27, 2019 Edition
- The superintendent in the Chamois R-1 school district wants to give starting teachers a raise of $350 in the 2019 – 2020 school year. That would bump their pay to an even $29,000 a year.
- Missouri state Treasurer Scott Fitzgerald, a 2010 Mizzou grad, told Osage County Lincoln Day attendees that government hurts employers and that his goal is to “keep that experience for business people from getting any worse.”
- Republican Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer (District 3) complained about being on Congresswoman Maxine Water’s committee, and, the new Democratic majority:
“It’s interesting that these people [Democrats] really don’t know how to govern…At the first meeting she got into it with her self-appointed subcommitee chairman, undermining him, and had a little head-to head battle right there. A few minutes later, she fired a staffer. These people have no idea how to govern and yet they are in the majority in the House…These Democrats are giving us exactly what we need, these socialists in the left-wing of the party… These people believe in fairy tales…these people are crazy.”
Glenn