Snow Day and Stayers
As we enjoy yet another snow day, it’s time to pick over the Sunday paper and note an article in the Des Moines Register about “stayers.” The article offers a somewhat glorified view of it calls stayers, people “who were not often encouraged by teachers or parents to attend college, worked through school to buy a pickup truck, and became invisible to the town’s more moneyed and educated classes.” It offers a heroic view of the stayer as the forgotten common man of rural Iowa. However, it buries the real issue, that many young people are leaving rural Iowa because there are no jobs. Towns are shrinking as agriculture becomes increasingly mechanized and small factories are shutting down. Bigger towns are getting smaller, smaller towns are losing their school and post offices and the small whistle stop towns of a century ago are now just grade crossings.
Iowa has 947 towns and cities. It is an infrastructure that goes back to a horse and buggy age when the state was composed of small farmers and rural towns designed to serve those farmers. In the 21st country, many of these towns lose their purpose for existing. At a time when further west, much of the Great Plains has become totally depopulated, Iowa is still in much stronger shape. But without long term employment solutions, the stayers will develop into a rural underclass, or just as likely, leave rural Iowa like everyone else.
Add comment December 10th, 2009
