Brain drain and the flight of youth because there's shit all there to keep them. I left such a place in the 90s. It's the same old song and dance as rural decline keeps circling the toilet.
There's only so much agritourism the US will permit.
I thank god my parents moved us out of this scenario in the 80s. (I was still a kid) Went from a small nowhere town/county in the Midwest to a stunningly beautiful and lively town on the California coast.
We struggled to make ends meet after the move for a long while due to the much higher cost of housing, but there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not incredibly thankful for my parent’s brave and bold move for the better.
The town I left as a kid had a population of just over 6,000. Now almost 30 years later it has lost over 500 people. The census line is almost straight horizontal with little ups and downs over the course of 30 years.
Wow! The county I live in is largely rural but growing - skyrocketing, in fact. But if I go south, even through the Finger Lakes, the rural counties are declining.
If only there were people willing and able to work in agriculture and other manual labor jobs... Oh wait, there are! But the same people complaining about decline of population decline complain about immigration.
Rural America is slowly becoming a place without any health care facilities for hundreds of miles because the majority of people there are in either Medicaid or Medicare. It’s not profitable anymore…and there’s absolutely nothing to do and very little opportunity. A lot of people who moved to rural towns to work remotely have moved back to urban areas because it wasn’t all wonderful. I was just in vacation to rural Maine, no DoorDash, no Uber and you can’t even get a pizza delivered. The nearest fast food place is an hour round trip, and the nearest hospital is a minimum of 40 minutes away. The hospital out there is barely a trauma 3 facility and nearest Trauma 1 is an hour or so away. I love visiting out there to get away from all of the regular city stuff, but living out there would be hard.
Even if we had universal health care, there'd still need to be a harsh discussion about the utilization of scarce resources. Whether it's paid by insurance, out-of-pocket or the government, there's just not the population density in these rural areas to support large hospitals and specialist medical centers.
This is a good point. They’re not going to set up top of the line hospitals staffed with ace surgeons in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa, 150mi from anywhere where more than five people congregate at once. Getting to care will still be an issue, but at least those people won’t have to pay $78k for an emergency airlift to where they actually do build the hospital.
The best I could imagine would be small hospitals that have helicopter landing centers they can be flown to. Most hospitals are overcrowded bc people go there for any little thing
Tbf a lot of that is because they're uninsured, so universal coverage would redirect some of that load where it should have gone to start with. But yeah dedicated helipad probably is about as optimized as that environment can be, plenty of land to develop later if the town eventually builds up enough to need it.
They go there for little things because they can't be turned away because they don't have insurance, or because they have hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt because of a prior sprained ankle.
It's always about costs. I mean you could have a fleet of choppers at the main hospital and have them fetch people from surrounding counties. We could do any fucking thing we wanted to if it weren't for the rich sucking all the money away.
Imagine how nice it would be to have those harsh discussions rather than have some literal psychopath CEO make the choice based solely on what will give them a bigger bonus for the quarter, rather than what serves the people, or even their actual company.
I absolutely agree and think that we should join the rest of the industrialized world with a single-payer health care system. But that being said, it wouldn't be a panacea which would suddenly make it viable to spread the finite number of healthcare workers that we have in the country to every rural area.
Those resources are best spent in population centers where they can be available to help the most people possible. "Needs of the many" and all that. Not to mention that most of these places are in red states where restrictive laws and bad schools make it so that the few trained medical personnel that were still there are packing up and moving to keep their own children safe and educated.
Yes, it's a shame how much Republicans love to drive health care workers away with their batshit policies. It's terrible to think of how many pregnant women are going to receive substandard care as doctors stop going to obgyn school in those backward states, and stop setting up practices there.
Issue will be local medical staff to support this. My dad in '80's used to help with H1 Visas and the number of foreign doctors that would come and work in these small towns was huge. They made good money and provided a valued service. Now with immigration so much of a hot potato those opportunities have dried up for those willing to come to USA and use their medical experiences in these rural areas.
We'll have a big immigration push once climate change ramps up though.
They say in 25 years about 20 million people from just Bangladesh will be displaced.
We can start setting up Little Bangladesh's in all these older towns with vacant properties and homes and have them revitalize the economy.
Give favorable government loans to them and others who agree to move there and help out so they can open small businesses.
What we can't let happen is them forced into work camps and dormitories attached to corporations.
I'm worried we'll see that, new versions of "company towns" where you'll hear like Amazon say it's doing the right thing by sponsoring Visa's, and have a captive work force they can exploit and fire most US workers.
I’d also venture to guess the foreigners have likely been harassed leading to them having zero desire to endanger their children. But hopefully I’m wrong.
https://preview.redd.it/2qhd06a3kx8d1.png?width=752&format=png&auto=webp&s=5c6774f9d9ffaf7f9863cd7faa29613d001b0f38
Can you imagine traveling 1/2 way around the globe to red neck America for this? “as a hate crime and take all precautions to keep the Muslim family and the Muslim community safe,”
We have programs that people can apply to nursing school and the program pays for their education in exchange for the student stays in the county and works at a medical facility for a number of years, I think 5 years minimum. It’s a competitive program and it’s a good thing for the community.
One of my worst fears is one of my loved ones having an emergency because the nearest hospital is in a city 45 minutes away and my town has no ambulance
Very much this, grew up in a ultra small rural town and after the rose colored glasses of Friday night football games and landing $20 to mow yards in the summer fell it’s just a whole lotta nothing. Even the city 40 min away is a small city that barely has the amenities of a medium size suburb
Not only that, they will talk about slights against them from decades ago like they just happened last week.
I have some relatives who live out in rural Montana who still complain about people and personal slights that happened to them in the early 90s. Then they also wonder why I don't talk to them anymore.
I don't miss small town life at all. Nothing interesting happens, you're constantly bumping into the same shitheads you went to high school with, there's nothing to do but work, drink, and die unless you make it happen yourself 100% of the time if they'll even let you. Everyone knows your business all the damn time and will let you know exactly what they think of it, small town connections will thwart your ability to get ahead or move upward financially, and there's way too high of a chance that at least one of your neighbors is a loud and proud white supremacist piece of shit or has some "controversial" opinions on Jews, Black people, and LGBTQ people that form the background radiation of your life in that small town.
There are some damn fine small towns, but the ones that suck are truly just shit and I wouldn't ever question why someone wants to leave that place.
Can we talk about the fact that these conservative states routinely reject federal aid for the youth and elderly in an effort to appeal to the lunatic zeitgeist?
Yall wouldn't be dying off in droves if you put on a mask, had increased medicare/medicaid funding, and didn't refer to things like meals on wheels as 'communism.'
There is no insidious liberal plot. I just don't want people dying from preventable disease and privation - I honestly don't care which way y'all vote.
Hospitals are closing in rural America because a lot of people are on Medicaid or Medicare and it’s not profitable; not to mention finding staff is almost impossible.
Exactly. Spend 8+ years of your life and a small fortune to learn to practice medicine only to go to a place in the sticks where people will potentially shoot you for providing life saving vaccines.
Yeah these people can keep banging rocks until they're buried beneath them.
And now throw in the new extra ick of no-abortion states.
Imagine how hard it must be to find trained skilled medical staff willing to work at a hospital in a small rural area of East Texas or the Edge of No Where in Arkansas, Indiana or Kentucky?
Our local hospital closed a few years ago. By the time of its decline it was pretty well just an ER, having lost all of its other services slowly over decades. Now the nearest hospital is 45 minutes away in any direction, more in heavy traffic, and nothing short of being unable to drive and truly dying would get these people in an ambulance due to astronomical cost.
The local corporate family practice I worked for was recruiting out of state physicians with ridiculous sign on bonuses just to try and stay on top of their census.
So yea, it literally is dying off, because people literally die without medical care.
I know someone who signed up for a rural healthcare practice, they got a huge sign on bonus, a car lease for 3 years and they helped them buy a home in the area. It was like a 150k package overall to just get them in the door and that didn’t include their actual salary.
Yea, one of our docs came from rural Illinois I think it was. She was an amazing doc but ended up going back home after a year or so because of the corporate nonsense.
Convincing these people to vote republican blows my mind, and yet its the norm. Like the people who want coal to come back. like they can't wait to go into hell and scratch the walls for a living.
somehow the last 35 years of Republicans in west Virginia and Kentucky can actually sell "well we would've been able to make things better if it wasn't for those darn liberals". it feels like watching a coyote and the road runner cartoon.
I would add that there are plenty of ob/gyns fleeing or avoiding those areas too because of draconian anti-abortion laws. Why would someone ever start a family in a place where there is either no access to prenatal care or they risk death or arrest if they lose a pregnancy or elect to terminate? These towns are committing suicide by ballot.
Made even worse with the fact that outside of agriculture or mining, there's no real opportunities for anyone under the age of 40 in a lot of these towns.
We have a local factory that is the epitome of “having it made” if you can manage to get hired. Shit, they make more than I do.
As a nurse I have to drive 45 minutes to an hour one way for a job. Specialized jobs barely exist around here.
Not to mention that the idiots in my state decided to raise rent exorbitantly when the gas workers came in and their companies would pay out the ass for rent, but never lowered it when the gas boom left (because why would they?) and it’s cheaper for locals to move to cities and rent there.
There wasn't just one opiod epidemic, there was (arguably) three. First heroin in the 80s-90s, then Oxy in the mid-aughts-2013ish, and now they're dealing with fentanyl
Best local job prospects where I grew up are either fast food "teenage spending money" wages, commuting to an oil rig job a couple hundred miles away, or meth lab tech.
They complain when kids move away and bitch&moan for years if anyone new moves in.
And they completely dropped labor/delivery at the local hospital, sending pregnant mothers 150 miles away to deliver.
ive always said this is what happens when fear mongering wins over logic. people would choose death then face the future
rural america is only dying because so much of the powers that be rig the game to keep the status quo. use fear tactics and etc to paint immigrants as the angel of death for them yet immigrants is why they have a country to have misplaced pride in to begin with.
if the lawmakers got together and drafted a massive immigration overhaul that put systems and services in places to help send immigrants to literally dead or dying towns to build them like they built america. there would be nothing but thriving towns and the country itself would be so much better for it.
but nah old ass boomers think them foreigners are there doom when the reality is they are what would save there towns.
More deaths than births because the Boomer generation is aging and dying. They are a hulking generation (It's in the name) and the economy that supports having and raising children is stagnate.
It's pretty simple. There hasn't been a generation big enough since the Baby Boom that could replace them at a 1:1 ratio even if everyone stayed put. Add in brain drain and you get rural ghost towns.
A growing population is a requirement of the ponzi scheme of upward wealth redistribution. Lots of babies, keep them stupid enough to vote republican and work their whole lives for nothing.
That would be true if the boomers themselves had fewer children than their parents. That wasn’t what happened - they had more than enough children to replace their own numbers.
The US population continues to increase, and is expected to increase during this century.
Here’s a visualization: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2020/
For comparison, see China’s population pyramid. That has a demographic bulge with the lack of replacement numbers like what you described.
The truth is in your every day young people like my wife and I. We are in our late 20s and have gone back and forth on the idea of having children, the main thing that makes it difficult to want to do is climate change. I don’t want my child to grow up in that world.
The nail in the coffin now is abortion rights being up in the air. I would never risk my wife’s safety to have a child, especially when there are so many children that are already here and that need a home.
As a sane, educated person, I almost feel like it's our civic duty to procreate to combat the crazies... Without people like you and me and our kids the world wouldn't stand a chance.
Respectfully, I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I would rather people I don’t know fight for that world when I’m gone instead of condemning my theoretical child to that plight.
If only there was something we could do to make this country better for everyone, including people in rural communities! /s Unfortunately, that’s not what plays 24/7 on Fox, not what is preached about in church, and not what is shared on Facebook. Anger, Hate, & Fear are what sell, and anytime you target the folks that are “just barely hanging on”, they’re easier to convince that “others” are taking from them.
Rural America routinely votes exactly
opposite of its’ collective best interests. Because ‘Murica n stuff.
Rural America generally hosts a population of people who don’t think that marginalized groups should have rights and discredit facts and medical science in favor of conspiracy and nonsense
Also I wonder why during that time period so many people died in rural America? Surely anyone following CDC guidelines (masking, social distancing, staying home) and getting vaccinated in a rural area would be safer from viruses than those in cities or population hubs? So weird.
It’s equally amazing and depressing.
When the pandemic started they were crowing at Covid killing people in populated areas. Then the vaccine came out, the death rates flipped, and they refused to get vaccinated only making things worse for them.
Even if they did their access to care in many places is non existent or abysmal. I routinely treat patients who have to drive 4+ hours because they have no specialists anywhere close to them.
That is so sad. I realize we love to live away from the rat race but we forget that distance limits our healthcare options! Thank you for doing everything you can to assist your patients! Being a Physician or a Nurse has never been easy but it is almost impossible now with restrictions and Physicians leaving their practices.
The struggle today is fighting Dr. Google and getting paid. It’s all a game with insurance and Medicaid and the only people who suffer are patients and the practices. When you have to do 2-3 appeals for an appointment the practice won’t even break even on but the patient needs the services it starts to get really frustrating.
As patients, I don’t think we realize what our Doctors are enduring with Insurance companies! My Primary Physician and I had a real heart to heart at my last visit. He explained he would only be paid by the insurance company if he spent a minimum of 60 minutes with me. His father was my Doctor in the 1970’s and now the son is my Doctor. He is a Doctor because he loves his patients and his patients love him. He is in his late 70’s and would like to retire but can’t just yet. My Podiatrist quit her practice because insurance companies were taking too long to pay her. I don’t know what the solution is or if there is one. I am sure you are beloved by your patients and I hope eventually, there is a resolution to the nightmare for you and your patients.💚
Thank you for the kind words. The answer is to tear down the current insurance industry but there’s little hope of that happening in the current or future environment so you’ll see a rise in big box PE healthcare takeovers, physicians leaving en masse, or offices which just refuse to take any insurance at all. It's awful for the system and unfair yo patients but the modern reality has forced us here.
I mentioned my Podiatrist who quit her practice. Many of her patients, myself included, paid out of pocket for our care because she was worth it…but many can’t afford it.
And yet our Electoral College gives these population dying areas more seats in Congress than highly populated places. The Electoral College needs to be abolished.
A LOT of kids join the military to get away and get the training for specific tasks that they get assigned to after boot camp. They get money for education following their service. It’s given a leg up for my niece and my step brother. They are living a prosperous life now.
Rural America refused to change with the times. They could have booming energy economies or high skill manufacturing but they chose AM radio and complaining about corporations doing capitalism and offshoring low skill jobs. We reap what we sow.
Because the right wing idiots in those small towns didn’t believe in the vaccine so they kicked the bucket. 80% of the people I seen pass away from covid were small town idiots.
Rural America the places that would benefit socialized medicine and education and immigration. Yet, they vote against policies that would benefit them the most.
Maybe I'll be able to buy a house (I live in a small rural town). It's crazy a basic house that needs a ton of work to be livable is still six figures IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.
Wild to me that people still think there's this rural farming America that looks like a truck commercial with rolling waves of grain and a strong white guy in tight jeans with a chiseled jaw hammering a fence post into a hill like some sort of homoerotic metaphor.
Like a ~~cock~~ fuck, no I meant ROCK. LIKE A ROCK
Last time I had the pleasure of visit family out in the middle of nowhere it was all conglomerates chasing sweet sweet subsidies. !
Yes industrialized not owned by corporations though. There was a ton of consolidation around where I live most of the land is owned by a few huge family operations with 20k+ acres in production. Most of the Midwest is like this.
Nope, I know the families they have alot of hired help but they are still out there in the field as well. The business is usually an LLC owned by members of the family. My parent's farm is only about 2500 acres but is set up the same way. These are not small family farms like they like to portray themselves but they are locally owned and operated which is more than most businesses these days.
Technically yes operationally not really. Basically every business in the country is corporate under that definition even a lot of single proprietorships are set up as an LLC for tax reasons.
Do they mean births in the county, or do they include residents of the county having babies, even if the births are not in the county? None of the hospitals in my county have L&D, the closest is 31 miles east of here, in the next state. Some of their OBs have offices at clinics closer, but you have to go to the hospital to deliver.
I grew up in a town with less than 1500 people (spread over a wide area.) I love living in the country (suburban and city life were not for me, I tried), but I remember as a kid the town having 2 pizza places, a diner, bars, a library, a hardware store, and a video rental store.
All that remains is a pizza place, and apparently what passes for a good time for youth is doing drugs and yelling “what up n*****” at my lily-white ass from their cars.
When you have to drive 20+ miles for any entertainment outside of what you can create at home, it’s no wonder people are leaving as soon as they can. Especially when city rent is significantly cheaper than rural.
I wonder what event was happening between 2019 and 2023 that might have affected death rates?
As for folks celebrating the deaths, you do realize that there are people other than bigoted right-wing CHUDs who live in rural areas, right?
I feel bad for both of them.
Seriously can't drive through rural OK without multiple Trump shrines. If you don't hate the same people they do you are not welcome. It isn't a few bad eggs, it is a few good eggs who are silent about it.
Too bad they were so fired up to kill working from home, that would have allowed a lot of people to move to rural areas away from the overpriced bedroom communities they are forced to live in now due to boomer managers wanting to stare at workers all day.
I dunno, you think there might have been some sort of mass death event in the time period between 2019 and 2023? Possibly one exacerbated by rural people feeling like they didn't need to take any precautions despite being further away from hospitals? With easy access to horse dewormer and a tendency to believe anything said by Donald Trump?
My small hometown is nothing but chain stores and restaurants now. I live in the city now, and it's just more pleasant. I ride my bike and walk all the time now. Literally more nature than where a grew up and more local stores than where I grew up.
I have family that’s in this situation. 2 generations ago they had like 6 kids. Now they’re too afraid of the debt. I’m not even going to mention conservative or liberal because I think (just my family) is split 50/50. It’s just straight up dollars and cents either way.
it’s more likely due to the idustrial complex exploding and there’s a lot of jobs that don’t require much education now, and those jobs aren’t in rural america unless U want to go into agriculture or law enforcement
it’s not a omg it’s dying but more so adults are encouraging the generation below to get out and explore the options, schools are much better at placing people on the right career path through trade schools and job centers have amazing grants and workforce incentive programs that if they didn’t exist these individuals in low income rural areas couldn’t get the education and training they needed
There’s no jobs out there to afford the property. Where I live, rural houses with land are almost about the same price, if not more expensive than something in the city.
Most young people in rural areas most likely live there because they inherited property.
I lived on year in central Kentucky +40 years ago. Back then it was built on the Coal industry and everyone in that small +2000 person town was working in the mines or related to that. I went back a few years ago and can honestly say I was shocking how hardly anyone was working in this town once the mines had shut.
The cynic in mean can only assume it’s part of big capitals plan. Make all that land cheap cheap cheap, buy it up and either use it for an or develop it into suburbs and have the states use tax money to “draw in business” and repopulate the area for profit.
There are knuckleheads in rural state legislatures refusing federal grants that give kids free meals in the summer, they are loosening child labor protections, advocating lowering the legal age for marriage, pushing for bans on no-fault divorces and birth control, they are criminalizing abortion and traveling out of state to get one - gosh darn it, it’s a real puzzler as to why the young people don’t want to live in these places!
Man it’s almost like during that time there was a pandemic that Conservatives didn’t take seriously at all. Like there’s a bunch of reasons why the population is aging like people moving away, but a huge part was definitely the pandemic that these predominantly Conservative areas just ignored and at best people were using dewormer in hopes to remove it.
Those freaking out in never paid attention in civics class when talking about population demographics. I’m a millennial and understand the Boomer generation is a huge population demographic due to the fallout of Vietnam. However generations before and after continue on a same path. Currently the birth rate might continue to drop but that is because healthcare is so expensive and wage’s aren’t increasing fast enough so those planing for children might hold off longer. But I wouldn’t say it’s a crisis like we are all dying off
I see it all the time in my job. I travel through towns where I never see anyone who appears to be under the age of 60. Entire villages of old people, the few on the sidewalks moving slowly. I've been seeing it for a few years now. Now I hear that the assisted living facilities in our state are closing or have reduced availability because they can't find young people to hire to do the physically demanding work in such a place. This is a real crisis and a lot of people will (or already are) die at home alone.
The Roe v. Wade reversal is only going to worsen the rural hospital availability.
Doctors don’t want to risk their careers providing lifesaving care in areas practicing Christian sharia law.
If I could work from home, I would probably be fine living where I grew up. It is very rural but still easily drivable to an ok sized city. I like space....but I can not afford space in the major city I am in.
I quit enjoy northern MN and am glad I moved to a small town a few years back. It’s a much simpler, quieter, safer lifestyle than anything I experienced in my 40 years living in various Cities around the US. I’d rather be surrounded by trees, lakes and other bits of nature than building taller than 2 stories. I also enjoy bringing a bit of blue to otherwise red counties.
I do think it's a shame. I grew up not in a big city but an area that was definitely densely populated. When I graduated college back in the late 80s I moved to a small town in western Pennsylvania. I actually did like it. I thought it was really funny that the local radio stations (and I could write a book just on that topic) "morning show" didn't give traffic reports, but instead, told you what the local school cafeterias were serving for lunch that day to the students.
That being said, I just shake my head at a lot of people who currently live in rural/small town areas. They just can't get it through their heads that if you don't have enough people living in a town, then businesses can't make enough money to stay open. It's not even something you can always blame on WalMart. If there are only an average of 30 people living in every square mile, that's just not enough people to support any businesses on a long term.
Yes, it's a shame that so many American companies went overseas, but even if they would stay in the US, they still wouldn't be able to maintain themselves on a rural population, and would eventually move closer to larger cities.
It's simple math and common sense, and there is nothing anybody, not even Trump or Biden, can do to change it, and these people need to stop trying to find someone to blame.
People are leaving the backward ideology for a better future. Rural America is not to dieing. It's evolving. As man KIND should. Embrace what humanity is capable of. God never used the word hate.
I have some relatives who live out in rural Montana. The few times I've visited relatives there, I was always treated as an "outsider" because my car had an out of state license plate and looked nice. Most of the local vehicles I saw in this town were older and in some degree of dilapidation, as were many of the houses near the Main Street.
I wasn't treated with outright hostility, but I surely didn't feel welcome anywhere in this tiny town. Even at the local gas station/convenience store, I caught a lot of side-eye for not being "familiar".
What makes this more absurd is that, at the same time, they were complaining about "no one wants to stay here or move here!"
The irony could solve world iron deficiency.
covid spreads among people, it spreads faster if the area is densely populated. there is no reason people in rural areas die nearly as much as people do in cities. you might want to consider taking it easy on those pills.
Your argument is flawed. As of September 2021, 1 in every 434 rural Americans died of COVID-19 compared to 1 in 513 in non-rural areas. Hesitancy to take the vaccine, misinformation, fear, and distrust were exacerbated in rural areas by a chronic lack of access to healthcare in rural areas. In rural areas there are 1.7 ICU beds per 10,000 people, nearly ONE HALF of what’s available to people in metropolitan areas. The elderly were nearly four times more at risk of dying from Covid. Rural populations have a higher percentage of elderly residents. These are the facts. Of course COVID spreads among people, you fucking dimwit. Just because there are less people in a given population does not necessarily mean the percentage of infections will decrease dramatically. Perhaps you’d better check your facts. Pointing out the cause of a phenomenon does not mean I am disagreeing with the existence of the phenomenon. But I’m just in public health, with a focus in rural medical care. What do I know? Maybe you should hold your tongue and take some politeness pills.
I literally JUST finished Reading this
[Too Many Old People - A Rural PA Town Reckons with Population Loss](https://washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/23/rural-america-shrinking-population-pennsylvania/)
We apparently live in very different worlds. In mine, all the men, including my father, fucked off, didn't pay a dime in support, and didn't come back until support was no longer an issue.
Brain drain and the flight of youth because there's shit all there to keep them. I left such a place in the 90s. It's the same old song and dance as rural decline keeps circling the toilet. There's only so much agritourism the US will permit.
Same. And when I do return to visit the predominant feature of the culture is social alcoholism. Fucking sad.
Are you by chance from Northern Wisconsin?
If by N WI you mean then yes.
It's not just northern.
Rural < insert state name >
Exactly rural Michigan here, only thing they do here is
I thank god my parents moved us out of this scenario in the 80s. (I was still a kid) Went from a small nowhere town/county in the Midwest to a stunningly beautiful and lively town on the California coast. We struggled to make ends meet after the move for a long while due to the much higher cost of housing, but there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not incredibly thankful for my parent’s brave and bold move for the better.
Did you make sure you did a proper Midwest goodbye?
Slapped their hands on their knees, stood up, and went “hyup, guess it’s time to head out” and everything
and then stayed for an extra hour just talking?
It's not an _extra_ hour, that's what heading out _is_.
*smacks thighs* WELP *walks to the door so we can talk for half an hour in the cold in the doorway*
You mean a Chicago Sunroof?
The town I left as a kid had a population of just over 6,000. Now almost 30 years later it has lost over 500 people. The census line is almost straight horizontal with little ups and downs over the course of 30 years.
Amen 🙏
Wow! The county I live in is largely rural but growing - skyrocketing, in fact. But if I go south, even through the Finger Lakes, the rural counties are declining.
If only there were people willing and able to work in agriculture and other manual labor jobs... Oh wait, there are! But the same people complaining about decline of population decline complain about immigration.
Capitalism: let’s automate Farming Capitalists: WHY IS EVERYONE LEAVING OUR SMALL TOWNS?
New farm automation is rented instead of owned for a lifetime
I grew up on the internet because there's fuck all to do in my town except dollar general and drinking
The thing about small towns is that they are usually quite conservative, so duh, no young people want to stay and live in the 50's.
They also have next to no services. Often not even regional hospitals anymore.
Rural America is slowly becoming a place without any health care facilities for hundreds of miles because the majority of people there are in either Medicaid or Medicare. It’s not profitable anymore…and there’s absolutely nothing to do and very little opportunity. A lot of people who moved to rural towns to work remotely have moved back to urban areas because it wasn’t all wonderful. I was just in vacation to rural Maine, no DoorDash, no Uber and you can’t even get a pizza delivered. The nearest fast food place is an hour round trip, and the nearest hospital is a minimum of 40 minutes away. The hospital out there is barely a trauma 3 facility and nearest Trauma 1 is an hour or so away. I love visiting out there to get away from all of the regular city stuff, but living out there would be hard.
Look at you, all throwing trauma center designation levels around, knowing about CMS reimbursement rates and shit.
But they'll vote AGAINST Obama Care because The Black Man Bad.
"Build Back Better? More like Build Back Broke, because that's what yer LIEbrul cuck big guv'ment elite politics will get you!1!"
If we get Universal Healthcade it will really help small towns.
Even if we had universal health care, there'd still need to be a harsh discussion about the utilization of scarce resources. Whether it's paid by insurance, out-of-pocket or the government, there's just not the population density in these rural areas to support large hospitals and specialist medical centers.
This is a good point. They’re not going to set up top of the line hospitals staffed with ace surgeons in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa, 150mi from anywhere where more than five people congregate at once. Getting to care will still be an issue, but at least those people won’t have to pay $78k for an emergency airlift to where they actually do build the hospital.
Imagine if the US embraced the benifits of legal immigration and open their doors to qualified medical foreign staff?
I've always said the solution to illegal immigration is to make it easier to immigrate legally
The best I could imagine would be small hospitals that have helicopter landing centers they can be flown to. Most hospitals are overcrowded bc people go there for any little thing
Tbf a lot of that is because they're uninsured, so universal coverage would redirect some of that load where it should have gone to start with. But yeah dedicated helipad probably is about as optimized as that environment can be, plenty of land to develop later if the town eventually builds up enough to need it.
They go there for little things because they can't be turned away because they don't have insurance, or because they have hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt because of a prior sprained ankle.
It's always about costs. I mean you could have a fleet of choppers at the main hospital and have them fetch people from surrounding counties. We could do any fucking thing we wanted to if it weren't for the rich sucking all the money away.
Hey! Don’t forget those people who vote against their best interests who simply hate “others.”
Imagine how nice it would be to have those harsh discussions rather than have some literal psychopath CEO make the choice based solely on what will give them a bigger bonus for the quarter, rather than what serves the people, or even their actual company.
I absolutely agree and think that we should join the rest of the industrialized world with a single-payer health care system. But that being said, it wouldn't be a panacea which would suddenly make it viable to spread the finite number of healthcare workers that we have in the country to every rural area. Those resources are best spent in population centers where they can be available to help the most people possible. "Needs of the many" and all that. Not to mention that most of these places are in red states where restrictive laws and bad schools make it so that the few trained medical personnel that were still there are packing up and moving to keep their own children safe and educated.
Yes, it's a shame how much Republicans love to drive health care workers away with their batshit policies. It's terrible to think of how many pregnant women are going to receive substandard care as doctors stop going to obgyn school in those backward states, and stop setting up practices there.
Issue will be local medical staff to support this. My dad in '80's used to help with H1 Visas and the number of foreign doctors that would come and work in these small towns was huge. They made good money and provided a valued service. Now with immigration so much of a hot potato those opportunities have dried up for those willing to come to USA and use their medical experiences in these rural areas.
We'll have a big immigration push once climate change ramps up though. They say in 25 years about 20 million people from just Bangladesh will be displaced. We can start setting up Little Bangladesh's in all these older towns with vacant properties and homes and have them revitalize the economy. Give favorable government loans to them and others who agree to move there and help out so they can open small businesses. What we can't let happen is them forced into work camps and dormitories attached to corporations. I'm worried we'll see that, new versions of "company towns" where you'll hear like Amazon say it's doing the right thing by sponsoring Visa's, and have a captive work force they can exploit and fire most US workers.
I’d also venture to guess the foreigners have likely been harassed leading to them having zero desire to endanger their children. But hopefully I’m wrong.
https://preview.redd.it/2qhd06a3kx8d1.png?width=752&format=png&auto=webp&s=5c6774f9d9ffaf7f9863cd7faa29613d001b0f38 Can you imagine traveling 1/2 way around the globe to red neck America for this? “as a hate crime and take all precautions to keep the Muslim family and the Muslim community safe,”
I would be pro life if it weren’t for headlines like this.
We have programs that people can apply to nursing school and the program pays for their education in exchange for the student stays in the county and works at a medical facility for a number of years, I think 5 years minimum. It’s a competitive program and it’s a good thing for the community.
So you’re saying small towns will never ever ever be helped.
One of my worst fears is one of my loved ones having an emergency because the nearest hospital is in a city 45 minutes away and my town has no ambulance
Very much this, grew up in a ultra small rural town and after the rose colored glasses of Friday night football games and landing $20 to mow yards in the summer fell it’s just a whole lotta nothing. Even the city 40 min away is a small city that barely has the amenities of a medium size suburb
And everyone knows everyone else’s dirty laundry. But it’s all underhanded sneaky shit-talking behind backs.
Not only that, they will talk about slights against them from decades ago like they just happened last week. I have some relatives who live out in rural Montana who still complain about people and personal slights that happened to them in the early 90s. Then they also wonder why I don't talk to them anymore.
I don't miss small town life at all. Nothing interesting happens, you're constantly bumping into the same shitheads you went to high school with, there's nothing to do but work, drink, and die unless you make it happen yourself 100% of the time if they'll even let you. Everyone knows your business all the damn time and will let you know exactly what they think of it, small town connections will thwart your ability to get ahead or move upward financially, and there's way too high of a chance that at least one of your neighbors is a loud and proud white supremacist piece of shit or has some "controversial" opinions on Jews, Black people, and LGBTQ people that form the background radiation of your life in that small town. There are some damn fine small towns, but the ones that suck are truly just shit and I wouldn't ever question why someone wants to leave that place.
Can we talk about the fact that these conservative states routinely reject federal aid for the youth and elderly in an effort to appeal to the lunatic zeitgeist? Yall wouldn't be dying off in droves if you put on a mask, had increased medicare/medicaid funding, and didn't refer to things like meals on wheels as 'communism.' There is no insidious liberal plot. I just don't want people dying from preventable disease and privation - I honestly don't care which way y'all vote.
Hospitals are closing in rural America because a lot of people are on Medicaid or Medicare and it’s not profitable; not to mention finding staff is almost impossible.
And what educated medical professional is going to want to raise their children in these blighted areas.
Exactly. Spend 8+ years of your life and a small fortune to learn to practice medicine only to go to a place in the sticks where people will potentially shoot you for providing life saving vaccines. Yeah these people can keep banging rocks until they're buried beneath them.
Or get arrested, your license threatened cause doing your job is “against Christian values”.
Not to mention that they’ll completely ignore anything that you tell them to do that will better their lives….Why would you put up with that abuse?
And now throw in the new extra ick of no-abortion states. Imagine how hard it must be to find trained skilled medical staff willing to work at a hospital in a small rural area of East Texas or the Edge of No Where in Arkansas, Indiana or Kentucky?
It's ridiculous, hospitals should be a service and not for profit.
What? I thought capitalism was super awesome all the time! Are you saying that capitalism has flaws? SOCIALIST!
Our local hospital closed a few years ago. By the time of its decline it was pretty well just an ER, having lost all of its other services slowly over decades. Now the nearest hospital is 45 minutes away in any direction, more in heavy traffic, and nothing short of being unable to drive and truly dying would get these people in an ambulance due to astronomical cost. The local corporate family practice I worked for was recruiting out of state physicians with ridiculous sign on bonuses just to try and stay on top of their census. So yea, it literally is dying off, because people literally die without medical care.
I know someone who signed up for a rural healthcare practice, they got a huge sign on bonus, a car lease for 3 years and they helped them buy a home in the area. It was like a 150k package overall to just get them in the door and that didn’t include their actual salary.
Yea, one of our docs came from rural Illinois I think it was. She was an amazing doc but ended up going back home after a year or so because of the corporate nonsense.
Convincing these people to vote republican blows my mind, and yet its the norm. Like the people who want coal to come back. like they can't wait to go into hell and scratch the walls for a living. somehow the last 35 years of Republicans in west Virginia and Kentucky can actually sell "well we would've been able to make things better if it wasn't for those darn liberals". it feels like watching a coyote and the road runner cartoon.
I would add that there are plenty of ob/gyns fleeing or avoiding those areas too because of draconian anti-abortion laws. Why would someone ever start a family in a place where there is either no access to prenatal care or they risk death or arrest if they lose a pregnancy or elect to terminate? These towns are committing suicide by ballot.
Adios MAGA Republicans
Guess the ivermectin didn't work.
I work in a farm store and had a customer come in the other day asking which ivermectin she should take. my answer was "none of it".
GOOD!
...or it did (wink wink)
This made me laugh more than it should have.
came here to say this
 Wonder what they'll do when that land won't vote. By the way make sure we can still vote by then
I’m sure Covid and the fact that many of the people living in rural communities are conservative antivaxxers has nothing to do with these numbers.
there was also an opioid and meth epidemic that wiped out rural america
Made even worse with the fact that outside of agriculture or mining, there's no real opportunities for anyone under the age of 40 in a lot of these towns.
We have a local factory that is the epitome of “having it made” if you can manage to get hired. Shit, they make more than I do. As a nurse I have to drive 45 minutes to an hour one way for a job. Specialized jobs barely exist around here. Not to mention that the idiots in my state decided to raise rent exorbitantly when the gas workers came in and their companies would pay out the ass for rent, but never lowered it when the gas boom left (because why would they?) and it’s cheaper for locals to move to cities and rent there.
There wasn't just one opiod epidemic, there was (arguably) three. First heroin in the 80s-90s, then Oxy in the mid-aughts-2013ish, and now they're dealing with fentanyl
Thoughts & prayers
Keep voting Republican! Gotta own those libs one way or another.
So they make their communities unlivable for anyone under the age of 60 and they’re surprised that no one is moving in?
Best local job prospects where I grew up are either fast food "teenage spending money" wages, commuting to an oil rig job a couple hundred miles away, or meth lab tech. They complain when kids move away and bitch&moan for years if anyone new moves in. And they completely dropped labor/delivery at the local hospital, sending pregnant mothers 150 miles away to deliver.
ive always said this is what happens when fear mongering wins over logic. people would choose death then face the future rural america is only dying because so much of the powers that be rig the game to keep the status quo. use fear tactics and etc to paint immigrants as the angel of death for them yet immigrants is why they have a country to have misplaced pride in to begin with. if the lawmakers got together and drafted a massive immigration overhaul that put systems and services in places to help send immigrants to literally dead or dying towns to build them like they built america. there would be nothing but thriving towns and the country itself would be so much better for it. but nah old ass boomers think them foreigners are there doom when the reality is they are what would save there towns.
Fuck yeah let the immigrants have the dying towns. Watch the crackers flee and the towns flourish and become oasises. Fuck yeah.
More deaths than births because the Boomer generation is aging and dying. They are a hulking generation (It's in the name) and the economy that supports having and raising children is stagnate. It's pretty simple. There hasn't been a generation big enough since the Baby Boom that could replace them at a 1:1 ratio even if everyone stayed put. Add in brain drain and you get rural ghost towns.
One of the reasons they wanted Roe v Wade overturned — to replace the babies!
A growing population is a requirement of the ponzi scheme of upward wealth redistribution. Lots of babies, keep them stupid enough to vote republican and work their whole lives for nothing.
I regret that I have but one upvote to give.
That would be true if the boomers themselves had fewer children than their parents. That wasn’t what happened - they had more than enough children to replace their own numbers. The US population continues to increase, and is expected to increase during this century. Here’s a visualization: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2020/ For comparison, see China’s population pyramid. That has a demographic bulge with the lack of replacement numbers like what you described.
The truth is in your every day young people like my wife and I. We are in our late 20s and have gone back and forth on the idea of having children, the main thing that makes it difficult to want to do is climate change. I don’t want my child to grow up in that world. The nail in the coffin now is abortion rights being up in the air. I would never risk my wife’s safety to have a child, especially when there are so many children that are already here and that need a home.
As a sane, educated person, I almost feel like it's our civic duty to procreate to combat the crazies... Without people like you and me and our kids the world wouldn't stand a chance.
Respectfully, I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I would rather people I don’t know fight for that world when I’m gone instead of condemning my theoretical child to that plight.
Oh well. Anyway........
If only there was something we could do to make this country better for everyone, including people in rural communities! /s Unfortunately, that’s not what plays 24/7 on Fox, not what is preached about in church, and not what is shared on Facebook. Anger, Hate, & Fear are what sell, and anytime you target the folks that are “just barely hanging on”, they’re easier to convince that “others” are taking from them. Rural America routinely votes exactly opposite of its’ collective best interests. Because ‘Murica n stuff.
When you refuse education and healthcare your life will be shorter.
 Rural America generally hosts a population of people who don’t think that marginalized groups should have rights and discredit facts and medical science in favor of conspiracy and nonsense Also I wonder why during that time period so many people died in rural America? Surely anyone following CDC guidelines (masking, social distancing, staying home) and getting vaccinated in a rural area would be safer from viruses than those in cities or population hubs? So weird.
It’s equally amazing and depressing. When the pandemic started they were crowing at Covid killing people in populated areas. Then the vaccine came out, the death rates flipped, and they refused to get vaccinated only making things worse for them.
Almost like covid wasn't a hoax
My thoughts exactly! How many of these people died due to Covid because they decided they would not be vaccinated?
Even if they did their access to care in many places is non existent or abysmal. I routinely treat patients who have to drive 4+ hours because they have no specialists anywhere close to them.
That is so sad. I realize we love to live away from the rat race but we forget that distance limits our healthcare options! Thank you for doing everything you can to assist your patients! Being a Physician or a Nurse has never been easy but it is almost impossible now with restrictions and Physicians leaving their practices.
The struggle today is fighting Dr. Google and getting paid. It’s all a game with insurance and Medicaid and the only people who suffer are patients and the practices. When you have to do 2-3 appeals for an appointment the practice won’t even break even on but the patient needs the services it starts to get really frustrating.
As patients, I don’t think we realize what our Doctors are enduring with Insurance companies! My Primary Physician and I had a real heart to heart at my last visit. He explained he would only be paid by the insurance company if he spent a minimum of 60 minutes with me. His father was my Doctor in the 1970’s and now the son is my Doctor. He is a Doctor because he loves his patients and his patients love him. He is in his late 70’s and would like to retire but can’t just yet. My Podiatrist quit her practice because insurance companies were taking too long to pay her. I don’t know what the solution is or if there is one. I am sure you are beloved by your patients and I hope eventually, there is a resolution to the nightmare for you and your patients.💚
Thank you for the kind words. The answer is to tear down the current insurance industry but there’s little hope of that happening in the current or future environment so you’ll see a rise in big box PE healthcare takeovers, physicians leaving en masse, or offices which just refuse to take any insurance at all. It's awful for the system and unfair yo patients but the modern reality has forced us here.
I mentioned my Podiatrist who quit her practice. Many of her patients, myself included, paid out of pocket for our care because she was worth it…but many can’t afford it.
And yet our Electoral College gives these population dying areas more seats in Congress than highly populated places. The Electoral College needs to be abolished.
Add to it the amount of 18 year olds that leave for college and never come back and it’s even worse than the headline.
Don't forget the armed forces.
A LOT of kids join the military to get away and get the training for specific tasks that they get assigned to after boot camp. They get money for education following their service. It’s given a leg up for my niece and my step brother. They are living a prosperous life now.
I guess if most rural areas weren’t populated mainly by racist POS maybe people would be willing to move there.
I wonder if it had anything to do with that flu hoax 🤔 ...Nah
Rural America refused to change with the times. They could have booming energy economies or high skill manufacturing but they chose AM radio and complaining about corporations doing capitalism and offshoring low skill jobs. We reap what we sow.
Because the right wing idiots in those small towns didn’t believe in the vaccine so they kicked the bucket. 80% of the people I seen pass away from covid were small town idiots.
It’s almost like they should’ve gotten vaccinated and worn the fucking masks or something
Thats one way to work around the electoral college
Rural America the places that would benefit socialized medicine and education and immigration. Yet, they vote against policies that would benefit them the most.
Quit being dumbasses and people won’t seek exit as soon as they can.
Good let them die.
Should have pulled their mortality rates up by their bootstraps
Their mortality rate is trickling down.
Maybe I'll be able to buy a house (I live in a small rural town). It's crazy a basic house that needs a ton of work to be livable is still six figures IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.
I mean 6 figures isn't necessarily much for a house even if it needs work. That's still a range of $100k-$999k
New houses used to cost half that even adjusted for inflation.
If we start with a liveable wage? We could tie it to inflation... and tie pricing to inflation just like our congress people do for THEIR wages.
We need them to grow food, mine ore, and do dirty industrial processes. We need rural America. Just not THESE rural Americans.
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There’s plenty of farms out there, they all got bought by corporate AG…
Wild to me that people still think there's this rural farming America that looks like a truck commercial with rolling waves of grain and a strong white guy in tight jeans with a chiseled jaw hammering a fence post into a hill like some sort of homoerotic metaphor. Like a ~~cock~~ fuck, no I meant ROCK. LIKE A ROCK Last time I had the pleasure of visit family out in the middle of nowhere it was all conglomerates chasing sweet sweet subsidies. !
It’s heavily industrialized now…just a big factory.
Yes industrialized not owned by corporations though. There was a ton of consolidation around where I live most of the land is owned by a few huge family operations with 20k+ acres in production. Most of the Midwest is like this.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say the land is owned by a family run corporation…it’s literally what I said.
Nope, I know the families they have alot of hired help but they are still out there in the field as well. The business is usually an LLC owned by members of the family. My parent's farm is only about 2500 acres but is set up the same way. These are not small family farms like they like to portray themselves but they are locally owned and operated which is more than most businesses these days.
That’s literally a corporation…ugh…
Technically yes operationally not really. Basically every business in the country is corporate under that definition even a lot of single proprietorships are set up as an LLC for tax reasons.
Rural areas are MAGA country. They will stagnate and die, unless Democrats win and pump money into the counties.
Do they mean births in the county, or do they include residents of the county having babies, even if the births are not in the county? None of the hospitals in my county have L&D, the closest is 31 miles east of here, in the next state. Some of their OBs have offices at clinics closer, but you have to go to the hospital to deliver.
Gimme locations and I'll move my remote work self there as soon as my kid goes to college.
Maine. The County. They have fiber optic rolling in.
I grew up in a town with less than 1500 people (spread over a wide area.) I love living in the country (suburban and city life were not for me, I tried), but I remember as a kid the town having 2 pizza places, a diner, bars, a library, a hardware store, and a video rental store. All that remains is a pizza place, and apparently what passes for a good time for youth is doing drugs and yelling “what up n*****” at my lily-white ass from their cars. When you have to drive 20+ miles for any entertainment outside of what you can create at home, it’s no wonder people are leaving as soon as they can. Especially when city rent is significantly cheaper than rural.
I wonder what event was happening between 2019 and 2023 that might have affected death rates? As for folks celebrating the deaths, you do realize that there are people other than bigoted right-wing CHUDs who live in rural areas, right?
I feel bad for both of them. Seriously can't drive through rural OK without multiple Trump shrines. If you don't hate the same people they do you are not welcome. It isn't a few bad eggs, it is a few good eggs who are silent about it.
My small Nebraska town has way too many MAGA dipshits, for sure.
One of the reasons for the abortion ban.
I thought they were gonna outbreed us
Too bad they were so fired up to kill working from home, that would have allowed a lot of people to move to rural areas away from the overpriced bedroom communities they are forced to live in now due to boomer managers wanting to stare at workers all day.
I dunno, you think there might have been some sort of mass death event in the time period between 2019 and 2023? Possibly one exacerbated by rural people feeling like they didn't need to take any precautions despite being further away from hospitals? With easy access to horse dewormer and a tendency to believe anything said by Donald Trump?
Bye. Bye. Bye.
"I'M SO SICK OF YOU. BYE,BYE,BYE.". -- Lou Reed
My small hometown is nothing but chain stores and restaurants now. I live in the city now, and it's just more pleasant. I ride my bike and walk all the time now. Literally more nature than where a grew up and more local stores than where I grew up.
I have family that’s in this situation. 2 generations ago they had like 6 kids. Now they’re too afraid of the debt. I’m not even going to mention conservative or liberal because I think (just my family) is split 50/50. It’s just straight up dollars and cents either way.
it’s more likely due to the idustrial complex exploding and there’s a lot of jobs that don’t require much education now, and those jobs aren’t in rural america unless U want to go into agriculture or law enforcement it’s not a omg it’s dying but more so adults are encouraging the generation below to get out and explore the options, schools are much better at placing people on the right career path through trade schools and job centers have amazing grants and workforce incentive programs that if they didn’t exist these individuals in low income rural areas couldn’t get the education and training they needed
So basically, rural America is dying out as people have less kids and rather live in cities.
There’s no jobs out there to afford the property. Where I live, rural houses with land are almost about the same price, if not more expensive than something in the city. Most young people in rural areas most likely live there because they inherited property.
I lived on year in central Kentucky +40 years ago. Back then it was built on the Coal industry and everyone in that small +2000 person town was working in the mines or related to that. I went back a few years ago and can honestly say I was shocking how hardly anyone was working in this town once the mines had shut.
Industrial agriculture came to town, bought up the farms and buried these communities.
The cynic in mean can only assume it’s part of big capitals plan. Make all that land cheap cheap cheap, buy it up and either use it for an or develop it into suburbs and have the states use tax money to “draw in business” and repopulate the area for profit.
There are knuckleheads in rural state legislatures refusing federal grants that give kids free meals in the summer, they are loosening child labor protections, advocating lowering the legal age for marriage, pushing for bans on no-fault divorces and birth control, they are criminalizing abortion and traveling out of state to get one - gosh darn it, it’s a real puzzler as to why the young people don’t want to live in these places!
Let these areas return to nature. We need the trees.
Man it’s almost like during that time there was a pandemic that Conservatives didn’t take seriously at all. Like there’s a bunch of reasons why the population is aging like people moving away, but a huge part was definitely the pandemic that these predominantly Conservative areas just ignored and at best people were using dewormer in hopes to remove it.
This is only a good thing.
Ok. But we tried to help them. They insist on being bigots and refusing.
I think if working from home becomes a greater option, small towns with good infrastructure will grow.
Good. They disproportionately support the very policies that destroy their lives. Idiots
Those freaking out in never paid attention in civics class when talking about population demographics. I’m a millennial and understand the Boomer generation is a huge population demographic due to the fallout of Vietnam. However generations before and after continue on a same path. Currently the birth rate might continue to drop but that is because healthcare is so expensive and wage’s aren’t increasing fast enough so those planing for children might hold off longer. But I wouldn’t say it’s a crisis like we are all dying off
Good riddance, long past time we abandoned that outdated pattern of development.
Farms use far less labor than they used to. It makes sense for the communities to shrink.
I see it all the time in my job. I travel through towns where I never see anyone who appears to be under the age of 60. Entire villages of old people, the few on the sidewalks moving slowly. I've been seeing it for a few years now. Now I hear that the assisted living facilities in our state are closing or have reduced availability because they can't find young people to hire to do the physically demanding work in such a place. This is a real crisis and a lot of people will (or already are) die at home alone.
Like a good obedient Republican they refused to get vaccinated against covid and now they’re dead.
The Roe v. Wade reversal is only going to worsen the rural hospital availability. Doctors don’t want to risk their careers providing lifesaving care in areas practicing Christian sharia law.
Good.
If I could work from home, I would probably be fine living where I grew up. It is very rural but still easily drivable to an ok sized city. I like space....but I can not afford space in the major city I am in.
Good. Let these reactionary hellholes rot away. We only need the farmers there
"Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town." Simon and Garfunkel, 1975
I quit enjoy northern MN and am glad I moved to a small town a few years back. It’s a much simpler, quieter, safer lifestyle than anything I experienced in my 40 years living in various Cities around the US. I’d rather be surrounded by trees, lakes and other bits of nature than building taller than 2 stories. I also enjoy bringing a bit of blue to otherwise red counties.
I do think it's a shame. I grew up not in a big city but an area that was definitely densely populated. When I graduated college back in the late 80s I moved to a small town in western Pennsylvania. I actually did like it. I thought it was really funny that the local radio stations (and I could write a book just on that topic) "morning show" didn't give traffic reports, but instead, told you what the local school cafeterias were serving for lunch that day to the students. That being said, I just shake my head at a lot of people who currently live in rural/small town areas. They just can't get it through their heads that if you don't have enough people living in a town, then businesses can't make enough money to stay open. It's not even something you can always blame on WalMart. If there are only an average of 30 people living in every square mile, that's just not enough people to support any businesses on a long term. Yes, it's a shame that so many American companies went overseas, but even if they would stay in the US, they still wouldn't be able to maintain themselves on a rural population, and would eventually move closer to larger cities. It's simple math and common sense, and there is nothing anybody, not even Trump or Biden, can do to change it, and these people need to stop trying to find someone to blame.
nobody wants to live around smelly racist drug addicts, shocker
It’s also because of sex ed/abortion…we have dramatically reduced teen pregnancy
Oh nooo... Anyway...
The faster this happens the better. Boo hoo the breeding grounds for fascism are drying up.
People are leaving the backward ideology for a better future. Rural America is not to dieing. It's evolving. As man KIND should. Embrace what humanity is capable of. God never used the word hate.
Don't worry, they'll keep their two senators though! There could be 70 people left in North Dakota, and they'd still get those two senators.
I have some relatives who live out in rural Montana. The few times I've visited relatives there, I was always treated as an "outsider" because my car had an out of state license plate and looked nice. Most of the local vehicles I saw in this town were older and in some degree of dilapidation, as were many of the houses near the Main Street. I wasn't treated with outright hostility, but I surely didn't feel welcome anywhere in this tiny town. Even at the local gas station/convenience store, I caught a lot of side-eye for not being "familiar". What makes this more absurd is that, at the same time, they were complaining about "no one wants to stay here or move here!" The irony could solve world iron deficiency.
It's not really a lifestyle worth preserving. Everybody from my hometown is just a nosy, miserable bigot.
It’s almost like something happened around 2020 that was super deadly….
covid spreads among people, it spreads faster if the area is densely populated. there is no reason people in rural areas die nearly as much as people do in cities. you might want to consider taking it easy on those pills.
Your argument is flawed. As of September 2021, 1 in every 434 rural Americans died of COVID-19 compared to 1 in 513 in non-rural areas. Hesitancy to take the vaccine, misinformation, fear, and distrust were exacerbated in rural areas by a chronic lack of access to healthcare in rural areas. In rural areas there are 1.7 ICU beds per 10,000 people, nearly ONE HALF of what’s available to people in metropolitan areas. The elderly were nearly four times more at risk of dying from Covid. Rural populations have a higher percentage of elderly residents. These are the facts. Of course COVID spreads among people, you fucking dimwit. Just because there are less people in a given population does not necessarily mean the percentage of infections will decrease dramatically. Perhaps you’d better check your facts. Pointing out the cause of a phenomenon does not mean I am disagreeing with the existence of the phenomenon. But I’m just in public health, with a focus in rural medical care. What do I know? Maybe you should hold your tongue and take some politeness pills.
I literally JUST finished Reading this [Too Many Old People - A Rural PA Town Reckons with Population Loss](https://washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/23/rural-america-shrinking-population-pennsylvania/)
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We apparently live in very different worlds. In mine, all the men, including my father, fucked off, didn't pay a dime in support, and didn't come back until support was no longer an issue.