I don’t often get into politics. This post sort of does, though hopefully in an informative rather than partisan way. It is also based mostly on a very small sample, one section of a rural county in Wisconsin. It is also a city-person’s view. I know there is a lot about life outside the city that I don’t understand. Still, I thought that what I saw was eye-opening. Feel free to put your own interpretations on what I saw. I can only vouch for what I saw personally and point out that the stories I heard were from people I consider credible.

While a lot people talk about Red State/Blue State conflicts in the US, the biggest and most bitter divisions in the US are often relatively local, between cities and less urban areas within the same state. Localities are where you see the only real instances where the normal set of laws don’t in reality apply. In a lot of cases, those conflicts are between a dominant city and the rest of the state, or even between small cities and the countryside within counties.

As an example of a dominant city versus the rest of the state, a lot of downstaters and suburbanites in Illinois would love to see Chicago be its own state and blame Chicago for most of the culture of corruption that has embarrassed and nearly bankrupted the state.

As I recall it, at least half of our last six governors have been convicted of felony charges after leaving office—though that ratio has gotten better in the years since I first wrote this, and the record for lesser office-holders is pretty bad too. In a lot of ways Chicago operates as a semi-independent city-state that obeys the laws it wants to and ignores the rest, abetted by its power at the state and federal level. I suspect that there is a similar urban versus suburban and rural divide in New York, and a bitter coast versus inland divide in California. I know there is a bitterness between small-town Louisiana versus New Orleans. One of my friends interviewed for a job down there not long after Katrina and heard comments like “God flushed the toilet. He needs to do it again.”

There are quite a few places in the US where what the president or congress or the Supreme Court say don’t matter as much as what the local warlord says. Of course we call that warlord a gang leader and usually crack down hard if he or she openly defies authorities instead of buying them off and/or pretending to obey them. I remember people in gang-run neighborhoods in Los Angeles saying that when the National Guard went in after the Rodney King riots that was the first time in decades that they had been able to walk around their neighborhoods without being afraid of the local gangs.

A lot of the blue-state/red state business is misstated. The divide is usually more blue-city, red-rest of-state, with the cities overwhelmingly liberal and the balance of the states maybe sixty to sixty-five percent conservative. A lot of liberals misread that divide as a license to promote policies that ignore or actively harm non-urban populations, but the reality is that there are a lot of people in smaller towns who vote Democratic or at least are potential Democratic voters.

Part of the problem is that cities and the countryside really don’t understand each other, but they think they do. I got a taste of how little I understood the country when I had to spend a lot of time at my aunt’s farm a few years ago. Believe me, if you haven’t been in the country a substantial amount of time you don’t have the slightest clue what it’s like out there. The biggest surprise for me was how hollow the countryside is getting. When it takes over a thousand acres to have a financially viable farm there isn’t room for a lot of farms. Add to that the fact that so many farmers are nearing retirement age, and their children have no interest in farming, and rural America is starting to have an echo.

That has political implications most people haven’t thought through. A farming area with as much land area as Chicago might have a couple thousand people in it. How much government can a couple thousand people support? How much law enforcement? Last time I checked, Chicago had on the order of ten thousand to twelve thousand police. A rural area the same size may have a fraction of that many people as their total population. Granted, the small population usually means a low crime rate, but it also means that when crime does happen, help is a very long ways away. My aunt’s neighbors claimed that the county sheriff’s office would get deputies out to their farm in half an hour normally. If there was shooting involved, that went up to an hour or two. Hopefully they were being ironic about that last part, but I stayed at my aunt’s farm for two weeks after her husband died and during those two weeks, I never saw any sign of law enforcement, not a single car cruising by and I probably would have seen one if it came by in the daytime.

Why so little law enforcement out there? Because county sheriff is an elected post, and the county has several medium-sized towns—thirty to forty thousand people. With resources spread thin, the sheriff at the time had a policy that police cars go where the /v/o/t/e/r/s/ people are. As a result, the sparsely populated areas like my aunt’s farm got essentially no policing.

That gave me a little taste of what an area with no government would look like. It was mostly peaceful and very quiet, but sometimes things got a bit Mad Max if I can believe my aunt’s neighbors. That was mostly from non-farmers who noticed the lack of law enforcement and came out to do things law enforcement frowned on. They would hunt illegally, organizing surrounds to drive deer into an area where they could shoot them, in some cases grow illegal substances or organize gangs to steal from farmers. My aunt’s neighbors lost thirty thousand dollars’ worth of tools and equipment to a well-organized gang. This bunch would watch a farm until they knew how many people lived there, then wait until everybody from the farm drove into town to shop. Then they would have somebody follow the farmer(s) with a cell phone and tip off the rest of the gang as to when the farmer started back home. In the meantime, they would pull up trucks and load them full of valuables.

The problem is that while most of us mostly urban dwellers put the country in a whole different category, the countryside is never far away. I could drive to my aunt’s farm in a little less than an hour. It was half an hour’s drive from the nearest major cities. That meant that big city problems were less than the average commute away.

During my time out at my aunt’s farm, I also got an idea of how much farmer hate it when city people come out to the country with rose-colored ideas on how the country works and then try to impose those ideas on the country people around them.

In the part of Wisconsin where my aunt lived, people would argue bitterly on a democrat/republican and liberal/conservative basis, though a lot of the staunchest Democrats were from the old-time Yellow dog Democratic mindset, mixing a healthy helping of the N-word with the latest Democratic party talking points in what struck me as a macabre way.

One thing united them though. They universally hated the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for supposedly cooking up ideas that made farming life a lot harder and clueless city people who dumped toxic stuff or unwanted cats in their fields. They always had more than enough farm cats, thank you very much, so dumping strays was not doing them a favor. The more kind-hearted people tried to spay or neuter the strays that kept being dumped off, but in my aunt’s case the vet bills to do that were astronomical and she still ended up with over thirty cats loosely associated with the farm by the time my uncle died. That many cats made the farm a death zone for squirrels, rabbits and anything else the cats could catch. I think I saw one squirrel in all the time I went up there.

People in that area, Republican or Democrat also almost universally owned guns and used them often and casually. A stray dog starts hanging around and eating chickens. They call animal control. Animal control doesn’t come because the control officers are spread way too thin. Remember the bit about low populations meaning not much in the way of tax-revenue and not much in the way of government? No animal control to take care of the stray dog, so out comes the rifle. Raccoons going after the chickens? Out comes the rifle. Coyotes coming too close to the house, getting too bold, killing farm cats. Out comes the rifle.

My uncle, a big, burly Korean War veteran and a big union guy (massive UAW supporter), came away from the Korean War hating guns and not wanting any around him. When he moved out to his farm, he started out keeping his no guns policy. That didn’t work out well for him. After getting pistol-whipped by a bunch of trespassers when he tried to stop them from chasing a squirrel in one of his trees and having a large bunch of hunters come onto his property “chasing a wounded deer” and spend the day blazing away at anything they felt like blazing away at, he reversed that entirely.

After he passed away from cancer, we helped my aunt clean up his stuff and I realized that there was no place in the house where he was more than two steps away from a loaded gun. We just kept finding more of the things. I have to admit that finding all that was more than a little disconcerting, especially since I spent a lot of time there chatting with my uncle in the last weeks of his life, while he was dying of cancer. He was on a lot of pain-killers and other meds and was experiencing auditory hallucinations. I would have been distinctly less comfortable sitting there talking to him if I had known that he had a revolver hidden in the TV-tray/table next to him.

To me in my college town, I don’t encounter or think about guns much. Raccoons are cute and it’s cool to see them in the distance. In the country, they’re pests–smart, adaptable and very capable of getting into stored food and destroying it, killing small farm animals and even breaking into houses.  My cousin had that problem, with raccoons repeatedly getting into the upstairs of his house and chewing up random stuff. Not a fun thing to meet at night if you get up to use the bathroom, especially if you accidentally corner it. A scared and cornered raccoon is not what you want to deal with at 2 am when you desperately need to get to the bathroom.

I could go on for far longer than most people reading this blog would continue reading about what I learned out there, but I want to close with one other thing. After my uncle died, my aunt rented parts of the farm to a group of farmers with a unique farming strategy. A large part of my aunt’s farm was in the flood plains of a little river. That area flooded as many years as it didn’t, making farming very iffy. My uncle mostly used it as grazing land. This group planted any part that was dry enough to plant, not worrying about flooding. If they got a crop in, that was great. If they got flooded out, which happened about forty percent of the time, they got federally-backed crop insurance. Our tax dollars at work, subsidizing farming in areas that should be left alone as wetlands.

Finally, I science fictionalized a lot of my experiences at my aunt’s farm and put them into my novel Char, which added a brilliant young lady from a primitive alternate reality and a murder into a mix with some of my real-life experiences at the farm and things that could easily have happened out there. Char is in some ways the favorite among my novels. It was one of five finalists in the TruTV Search for the Next Great Crime Writer quite a few years ago, a success that revived my flagging interest in writing and spurred me to write fifteen more novels, with more in the works. If you’re interested, here is the Amazon link: