Why should I care?
September 25, 2010
I come from a ranching family, but I am not a rancher. I have people in my life who love the outdoors, who treasure their right to hike and fish and hunt, but I do not personally take much of an interest in these things. So why should I care about land-use issues?
I should care because without the farmers and ranchers, we loose our schools, our local festivals, our swimming pools and baseball fields, and all the other benefits we enjoy in our small towns.
I should care because my community is not immune to the fate of so many other small towns in the rural West.
Many of our rural schools have been forced by declining population to combine with neighboring former rivals in order to have sports teams. School enrollment has dropped to the point that even in the bigger of the small towns, teacher and principal positions are being lost.
The cowboy is in danger of becoming nothing more than a romantic fairy tale character, like knights in shining armor and Robin Hood.
I spent eight years in a city east of the Mississippi. Many people didn’t even know where Montana was. “Is that near Texas?” one college student asked.
I was often introduced by a former boss as being from Wyoming. When I pointed out that I was actually from Montana, he’d say, “Whatever.” It was all the same to him – a wide open frontier, fun to visit, but who’d live there?
In graduate school, a fellow master’s student asked if I’d ridden a horse to school growing up. Thinking she was joking, I laughed and said yes, I did, up hill both ways, in three feet of snow, with a warm potato in my pocket to keep me warm.
She stared at me in awe. “Wow. That must’ve been really rough. You know, we take so many conveniences for granted.”
She didn’t realize I was being sarcastic. And she treated me like I was from a third world country. She was a graduate student at a Big Ten university. She grew up in Connecticut. And she wasn’t a bad person. Just sorely, naively misinformed.
Many in the rural West view city folks with cynicism. The truth is, we don’t understand them any more than they understand us. Really, there are great people everywhere; people who are reasonable and practical and caring, who love their kids and their communities and their country.
We all view life through the lens of our own experience. City folks love the city because it’s what they know. But it doesn’t mean they won’t listen to reason.
Although I grew up here and love the West, I know little about the debate over public and private land use. I know that much of what used to be private farm and ranch land is now leased from the Federal government. But I don’t know how that affects agriculture, recreation, or my life on a personal level.
To farmers and ranchers, the issues surrounding land use are common knowledge. But for those of us townies, existing in our busy bubble of jobs, parenthood, and Main Street, we lose ourselves in our own routines.
If I can feel disconnected as a 5th generation ranch kid living in rural Montana, it is understandable that those with no connection to the land would feel as though it is not their problem.
City folks aren’t bad. They simply don’t get us, and we don’t get them. There is a cultural divide that must be bridged if we are going to preserve our land and our heritage.
It’s our job to understand, so that we can help others understand, before it’s too late.
If it comes down to a vote, there are more of them than there are of us. We need urbanites to know we’re out here. We need their understanding. We need their hearts. And ultimately, we need their votes. We all need to understand land-use issues, or we won’t have any land left to use.
This article first appeared in the Lewistown News-Argus and the Sidney (Mont.) Herald on September 25, 2010.
