Law professor Chad Oldfeather ruminates on the meaning of his tiny Minnesota hometown, which is slowly dying. Excerpt:

The school building and the still-open theatre are now owned by nonprofits created by community members – who still care about the town – but that are struggling to find the money to keep them going.  The lone remaining grocery store has been through a couple periods of municipal ownership to keep it going.  (Some might call that socialism.  I think the folks back home would call it doing what needs to be done.)  Cindy sees how things have become and is not optimistic: “So my tears roll and my heart sinks and there goes the theatre and the school and only the Lord knows what else.”

I hope that she is wrong.  I am encouraged by the trend toward agriculture that is more local and more sustainable, and can make a persuasive case to myself that a place like Kiester that’s maintained itself through the past few decades could with just a little luck and a spot of marketing find rejuvenation.   But maybe it is just easy for me to see what I’d like to see.

Too often, in the circles I now tend to find myself in, I am part of conversations in which I hear a casual disdain for rural people.  I find the prejudice inherent in these comments every bit as misguided as the prejudices the speakers seem to imagine all rural people harbor.  No doubt there are small places where many or even most – it is never all – of the people hold views that we should rightly condemn.  But I can assure you they are not all that way, and I am skeptical of the suggestion that there are even all that many that are that way.