Rural Communities Quotes

And there are loners in rural communities who, at the equinox, are said to don new garments and stroll down to the cities, where great beasts await them, fat and docile.

sometimes, what i see is a library in a rural community. all the tall shelves in the big open room. and the pencils in a cup at circulation, gnawed on by the entire population. the books have lived here all along, belonging for weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face, a pair of eyes. the most remarkable lies.

Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines.

Some of us came to the cities to escape the reservation. We stayed after fighting in the Second World War. After Vietnam, too. We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can't leave a war once you've been you can only keep it at bay -- which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, that fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets. The quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced. (9)

It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime.

We are not preparing for the world we live in - we are preparing for the world we find ourselves in.

IT WAS EASIER FOR PEOPLE to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor. It may be for that reason that people who were born in small towns are statistically overrepresented among the eminent.68 If

It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come.35 This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote.

A rampage shooting has never happened in an urban ghetto, for example; in fact, indiscriminate attacks at schools almost always occur in otherwise safe, predominantly white towns. Around half of rampage killings happen in affluent or upper-middle-class communities, and the rest tend to happen in rural towns that are majority-white, Christian, and low-crime.

We’d be safer with musket in a safe town than with an assault rifle in a “without rule of law” world. That may not be sexy, but it’s the truth.

The quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.

Second, burdened by social stigmas, status anxiety, and feelings of inauthenticity or guilt, the ultra-wealthy use nature and rural people as a vehicle for personal transformation, creating versions of themselves they view as more authentic, virtuous, and community minded.

It is not uncommon for people in poor urban neighborhoods and in rural communities to say that when boys become teenagers they face two options, migrate to the United States or join a gang.

Everybody is frustrated when they are fifteen, I know, but knowing this doesn't ease my frustration. It feels as though I am an island, apart from everybody else. Perhaps we are all islands, apart from each other. Perhaps everyone else feels foreign in their hometown too. Yes, perhaps we are all just islands, as wild and merciless as each other, separated by our countless defects.

The lifetime prevalence of dissociative disorders among women in a general urban Turkish community was 18.3%, with 1.1% having DID (ar, Akyüz, & Doan, 2007). In a study of an Ethiopian rural community, the prevalence of dissociative rural community, the prevalence of dissociative disorders was 6.3%, and these disorders were as prevalent as mood disorders (6.2%), somatoform disorders (5.9%), and anxiety disorders (5.7%) (Awas, Kebede, & Alem, 1999). A similar prevalence of ICD-10 dissociative disorders (7.3%) was reported for a sample of psychiatric patients from Saudi Arabia (AbuMadini & Rahim, 2002).

Death by drugs is now a national problem, but the crisis began as an epidemic of overprescribed painkillers in the distressed communities that were least likely to muster the resources to fight back. It erupted in rural fishing villages, coal communities, and mill towns—because Purdue’s sales strategy was to convince doctors that the nation’s injured miners and factory workers were better and more safely served by OxyContin than its weaker competitors. The company even maneuvered to convince the FDA to back this bogus claim.

The gospel isn't just the message we take to small places; it's our motivation for going to them in the first place and our means of fruitful ministry once we get there.

I have come to see that the time-honoured practice of bestowing anonymity on our communities and informants fools few and protects no one - save, perhaps, the anthropologist's own skin.

There is a unique wisdom of the small American community, the isolated rural hamlet, and it is this: Everyone matters. Not in some clichéd humanistic sense, but in a literal, practical sense.

Moreover, because only Maine and Vermont allow the incarcerated to vote, prisoners in every other state have no political voice. To put a finer point on it, America’s mass incarceration has led to thousands of black and Latino bodies from Democratic-leaning areas being counted in rural white communities that are typically Republican, where most of the penal facilities are located.

In 2020, the age-adjusted gun death rate in rural communities was 40 percent higher than that for large metropolitan areas. The same year, the murder rate in rural America surged 25 percent. Donald Trump was still president in 2020, yet somehow the same media that blamed liberals and Joe Biden for urban crime never held Trump to account for the rural crime surge during his presidency,

food security for rural communities. When the household and community are food-secure, the girl child is food-secure. When the household and community are food-insecure, it is the girl child who, because of gender discrimination, pays the highest price in terms of malnutrition. When access to food diminishes, the girl child’s share is last and least. The politics of food is gendered at multiple levels.

It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come.

I met the Homeville Women's Institute, a whole gaggle of rural women who have monthly meetings to make their community better. They realized that by joining together they had a stronger voice, and that is empowering,

We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can't leave a war once you've been, you can only keep it at bay—which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, that fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets. The quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut ... We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn’t the opposite equally true?

When you find a community that nurtures you and your family, it isn't enough to just live in it; you must also nurture and protect that place and all the people who give you respite, solace, joy, and just enough hell to keep life interesting.

This spells opportunity for all sorts of communities: those off-grid Indian villages with their 300 million electricity-poor residents; sovereign indigenous communities such as Native Americans in the United States or Aboriginals in Australia who seek energy independence; or farmers and other users in low-density rural areas who are cursed by their low level of community demand and for whom the cost of installing transmission lines and relay stations can be extremely burdensome. In many of these cases, power delivery has been subsidized by governments, in effect by taxing urban users with higher tariffs than they would otherwise pay.

[I]t's impossible to overestimate the need to maintain a healthy peasant class, as the basis of the national community. Many of our present evils have their origin exclusively in the imbalance between urban and rural populations. A solid group of small- and mid-scale farmers has always been the best protection against social disease.

Even when the income disparity is very much greater, people are sticky. Micronesians mostly stay where they were born, even though they are free to live and work in the US without a visa, where the average income is twenty times higher. Niger, next to Nigeria, is not depopulated even though it is six times poorer and there are no border controls between the countries. People like to stay in the communities they were born in, where everything is familiar and easy, and many require a substantial push to migrate – even to another location in the same nation, and even when it would be obviously beneficial. One study in Bangladesh found that a programme that offered subsidies to help rural people migrate to the city for work during the lean season didn’t work, even when workers could make substantially more money through seasonal migration.22 One problem is the lack of affordable housing and other facilities in cities, meaning people end up living illegally in cramped, unregulated spaces or in tents.

I wrote MARCH FARM because I fell in love with the farms of Bethlehem when I moved here in 2000. I became passionate about preserving farms for many reasons: to secure the open spaces vital for wildlife habitat, to support my community by maintaining its rural beauty, and to honor a way of life that has deep roots in our cultural psyche.

More than a million of our public schoolchildren are homeless, living in motels, cars, shelters, and abandoned buildings. After arriving in prison, many incarcerated Americans suddenly find that their health improves because the conditions they faced as free (but impoverished) citizens were worse. More than 2 million Americans don’t have running water or a flushing toilet at home. West Virginians drink from polluted streams, while families on the Navajo Nation drive hours to fill water barrels. Tropical diseases long considered eradicated, like hookworm, have reemerged in rural America’s poorest communities, often the result of broken sanitation systems that expose children to raw sewage.

Among those in the United States arrested for criminal activity, the vast majority, 69 percent, is white. Yet white people constitute only about 28 percent of the people who appear on crime reports on TV news, while Black people are dramatically overrepresented. Yes, violent crime rates are higher in disinvested neighborhoods of color than in well-resourced white enclaves, but once you control for poverty, the difference disappears. Crime victimization is as prevalent in poor white communities as poor Black communities; it’s similar in rural poor areas and urban poor ones. In addition, less policing in middle-income and wealthy neighborhoods means that their violent crimes often go unreported.

occur. A rampage shooting has never happened in an urban ghetto, for example; in fact, indiscriminate attacks at schools almost always occur in otherwise safe, predominantly white towns. Around half of rampage killings happen in affluent or upper-middle-class communities, and the rest tend to happen in rural towns that are majority-white, Christian, and low-crime.

So I took to the road with an accomplice and set off to the golden South, the new land of opportunity, North Carolina. Here, with the help of a partner I had only just met (and on the back porch of a rural farmhouse, to boot!), I was going to simultaneously live my version of the great American dream and enrich the lives of the residents of Raleigh, North Carolina.

We tend to cling to what we know and resist what is new—even when the new brings tremendous benefits. Opposition to onshore wind turbines in the UK is a good example. Even though onshore wind is now the cheapest form of energy6 (cheaper than coal, oil, gas, and other renewable sources), rural landowners have significantly resisted it, keen to preserve the appearance of the countryside. When the Conservative Party (which derives much of its support from these rural communities) came to power in 2015, it slashed subsidies and changed planning laws for onshore wind—leading to an 80 percent reduction in new capacity.7 Only now, with climate change awareness rapidly rising among the UK public, is support for onshore wind starting to outweigh an attachment to yesterday’s aesthetics.

The built environment is shaped not only by private sector development pratices, but also by the honored and fascinating field of planning. Planners in towns, counties, regional and state government, consulting firms and in economic development agencies translate ideas about human settlements into concrete designs. They can be generalists or specialize in transportation, urban centers, rural land use, economic development and more. At its best, the planning profession aims to mediate tensions between people, social groups, and the natural environment by creating an orderly process for determining common values, shared priorities and elegant principles for transcending conflicts. Therefore planners may find themselves caught in some of the most challenging political crossfire to be found. But they also have the opportunity to educate many sectors and communities.

Children today are so open. When the old folks die off, we will finally be free of racism.” “I grew up in a small rural community, so I was very sheltered. I didn’t learn anything about racism.” “I judge people by what they do, not who they are.” “I don’t see color; I see people.” “We are all red under the skin.” “I marched in the sixties.” New racism is a term coined by film professor Martin Barker to capture the ways in which racism has adapted over time so that modern norms, policies, and practices result in similar racial outcomes as those in the past, while not appearing to be explicitly racist.1 Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva captures this dynamic in the title of his book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.2 He says that though virtually no one claims to be racist anymore, racism still exists. How is that possible? Racism can still exist because it is highly adaptive.

I think Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West, the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between the rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future.

And all the time boys were being born or growing up in the parish, expecting to follow the plough all their lives or, at most, to do a little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know them, and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that tiny community never came back again. A brass plate on the wall of the church immediately over the old end house seat is engraved with their names. A double column, five names long, then, last and alone, the name of Edmund.

But the most profound irony is currently on display at the very site of Ford’s most ambitious attempt to realize his pastoralist vision. In the Tapajós valley, three prominent elements of Ford’s vision—lumber, which he hoped to profit from while at the same time finding ways to conserve nature; roads, which he believed would knit small towns together and create sustainable markets; and soybeans, in which he invested millions, hoping that the industrial crop would revive rural life—have become the primary agents of the Amazon’s ruin, not just of its flora and fauna but of many of its communities.

Our leading agricultural colleges still churn out "business-focused" young farmers, fired up with productive zeal. Students are taught to be at the cutting edge of the new farming, applying science and technology to control nature. They are taught to think about the land like economists. They are taught nothing about tradition, community, or ecological limits. Rachel Carson isn't on the curriculum. Different colleges and courses elsewhere churn out young ecologists who know nothing about farming or rural lives. Education is divided by specialism, and sorts the young people into two separate tribes who can barely understand each other.

Time was, in places like rural Mississippi, African-Americans lived in stable, traditional, organic communities of a sort often admired by intellectuals who praised them from far away. African-Americans led lives of poverty, disease, and oppression, experiencing the grim security of peonage. Then came machines that picked cotton more efficiently than stooped-over people could, so lots of African-Americans stood up, packed up, got on the Illinois Central, got off at Chicago’s Twelfth Street station, and went to the vibrant South Side where life was not a day at the beach but was better than rural Mississippi. Destruction of a “way of life” by “impersonal” economic forces can be a fine thing.

The desire to experience new kinds of community led a number of thoughtful and idealistic people to reject the patterns of vocation, family life and religion with which they had grown up. Their attempt to establish new patterns of social bonding in uncontaminated rural retreats can be seen as a secular monasticism, but they often discovered that to abolish the boundaries of authority, family and property created a whole series of problems which they did not have the spiritual and personal resources to solve. At their best, such groups have opened up new horizons of discipleship, but they have often learned some hard lessons about the intractable sinfulness and selfishness of partly-redeemed human nature.

The Boston marathon bombings, which took place on April 15, 2013, resulted in injuries to 264 people and the deaths of 3 people. In the ensuing police chase, one of the perpetrators, Tamerian Tsarnaev, was shot several times and run over by his own brother Dzhokhar. When the dust finally settled, the Boston funeral home that had volunteered to care for Tamerian’s body required a round the clock police guard. However, no cemetery in New England would accept the body. Weeks later, in desperation, the Boston police department appealed to the public to help them find a cemetery. In rural Virginia, Martha Mullen, sipping coffee at Starbucks, heard that appeal and said to herself, “Somebody needs to do something about that.” She decided to be that somebody. Through her efforts, Tsarnaev’s body finally found a burial place at the end of a long, quiet gravel road off Sadie Lane in Doswell, Virginia. Needless to say, when this was discovered by the local community, all sorts of controversy arose. The people of her county were upset, and the family members of others buried in that cemetery rose up in anger. Reached by reporters from the AP by phone, she was asked what her response was to all of the hubbub. Her explanation was simple. Martha calmly said, “Jesus said love your enemies.” He did say precisely that, and that revolutionary call echoed through two millennia of time to minister to a dead Muslim’s grieving family in Boston. Is it ministering to anybody around you?

renovating its welfare-warfare capacities into something different by molding surplus finance capital, land, and labor into the workfare-warfare state. The result was an emerging apparatus that, in an echo of the Cold War Pentagon’s stance on communism, presented its social necessity in terms of an impossible goal—containment of crime, understood as an elastic category spanning a dynamic alleged continuum of dependency and depravation. The crisis of state capacity then became, peculiarly, its own solution, as the welfare-warfare state began the transformation, bit by bit, to the permanent crisis workfare-warfare state, whose domestic militarism is concretely recapitulated in the landscapes of depopulated urban communities and rural prison towns. We shall now turn to the history of this “prison fix.

In her book Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America, Jennifer Sherman posits that in places lacking resources, morality is social capital. Appearing “good” unlocks jobs and community resources. But morality is determined in a fluid way; it’s just as much about fitting in and looking the part as it is about good behavior. Being white, wearing the right clothes (not too fancy, not too dirty), being male, being married, and having children were all part of the appearance of morality. But it wasn’t just about “good” behavior. John Sadler had stretched the law in an extra-legal way to get around the tax code. But this was looked on as an example of good behavior—he was conning the government after all. This made him smart and quick-witted, a cunning businessman and someone you would respect. Hell, he was a leader in his community.

The implications for civil government are equally obvious—expanding social services, city administration, and rule of law into periurban areas is clearly important, as are investments in infrastructure to guarantee supplies of fuel, electricity, food and water. Less obvious but equally important are investments in governance and infrastructure in rural areas, as well as efforts to mitigate the effects of rural environmental degradation, which can cause unchecked and rapid urban migration. Given the prevalence and increasing capability of criminal networks, police will need a creative combination of community policing, constabulary work, criminal investigation, and special branch (police intelligence) work. And local city managers, district-level officials, social workers, emergency services, and ministry representatives may need to operate in higher-threat governance environments in which they face opposition. The

Many Southern communities developed two school systems: an underfunded public system mostly attended by black students, and private schools set up for white children. Within a decade, these segregation academies would be an accepted part of the Southern landscape. By 1969, three hundred thousand students were enrolled in all-white schools across eleven Southern states. And twenty years after Brown, in 1974, 10 percent of the South's white school-age children were attending private schools, only a fraction of which had been open before Brown. The region's 3,500 academies enrolled 750,000 white children,a number that reflected a migration from public to private schools that was linked to the movement of black children into formerly all-white public schools. In Jackson, Mississippi, white enrollment in the public schools fell by twelve thousand students, from more than half of the student body in 1969 to less than a third eight years later. The proliferation of segregation academies threatened to create all-black public school systems in the rural South, particularly in communities with majority black populations. The effect of these private schools would be felt decades later.

THE GLOBE | Unlocking the Wealth in Rural Markets Mamta Kapur, Sanjay Dawar, and Vineet R. Ahuja | 151 words In India and other large emerging economies, rural markets hold great promise for boosting corporate earnings. Companies that sell in the countryside, however, face poor infrastructure, widely dispersed customers, and other challenges. To better understand the obstacles and how to overcome them, the authors—researchers with Accenture—conducted extensive surveys and interviews with Indian business leaders in multiple industries. Their three-year study revealed several successful strategies for increasing revenues and profits in rural markets: Start with a good distribution plan. The most effective approaches are multipronged—for example, adding extra layers to existing networks and engaging local partners to create new ones. Mine data to identify prospective customers. Combining site visits, market surveys, and GIS mapping can help companies discover new buyers. Forge tight bonds with channel partners. It pays to spend time and money helping distributors and retailers improve their operations. Create durable ties with customers. Companies can build loyalty by addressing customers’ welfare and winning the trust of community leaders.

The first stage can be called stage of potential power… A nation is not industrial. Its people are primarily agricultural and the great majority of them are rural… Such a nation may be very powerful in a world where no nation is industrial. But compared to any industrial nation, even a small one, its power is slight... The second stage of the power transition is the stage of the transitional growth… to an industrial stage… its power grows rapidly relative to that of the other pre-industrial nations whom it leaves behind. Fundamental changes take places within the nation. There is great growth in industry and in the cities… Large number of people move out of farming and into industry and service occupations… They move from the country-side to the growing cities. Productivity per man-hour rises, the national income goes up sharply… Nationalism runs high and sometimes finds expression in aggressive action toward the outside… So many of these changes have the effect of increasing the ability of the nation`s representatives to influence the behavior of other nations, i.e. of increasing the nation`s power… The changes that occur at the beginning of the industrialization process are qualitative, not just quantitative. It is these first fundamental changes that brings the great spurt in national power. Of course, the speed at which a nation gains power depends largely upon the speed with which she industrializes, and both these factors have a great influence on the degree to which the rise of a new power upsets the international community (302-304).

The real improvements then must come, to a considerable extent, from the local communities themselves. We need local revision of our methods of land use and production. We need to study and work together to reduce scale, reduce overhead, reduce industrial dependencies; we need to market and process local products locally; we need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If. we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide "jobs" to the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non- polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the wealthy, and the powerful. It is work for everybody. I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession-not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting and destroying their homeland. The great, greedy, indifferent national and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing America's cities--it is killing our country. Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community. All true patriots must find ways of opposing it. --1991

During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity." Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.

There are a few other programs for low-income people that are less known. There are HOME Funds and Community Development Block Grants that help bring down the cost of renovating existing housing in disrepair for low-income persons. The Guaranteed Rural Rental Housing Program is nearly identical to the USDA loan we previously talked about except that you do not have to live in the project, and tenants are capped to incomes of 30 percent of 115 percent area median income.

Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, these communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which people in prison frequently come.35 This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote. Exclusion from juries. Another clear parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is the systematic exclusion of blacks from juries. One hallmark of the Jim Crow era was all-white juries trying black defendants in the South. Although the exclusion of jurors on the

A commercial, high-tech, service-based economy prevailed throughout the region, and a growing majority placed environmental protection ahead of resource extraction. Rural communities have won delays but, despite their efforts, forests have been preserved, wolves roam and multiply across the plains, and rivers and wetlands thrive under federal protection.

The most common understanding of place is that it is space turned into something with meaning.

Issues of local politics may not be as "sexy" as those that take place on the national level, but their effects are no less important to our larger community.

From the fifteenth century, rural England was undergoing Enclosure, the process by which the community rights of the poor to the land of the rich were transformed into what we understand today by ‘private property’. The rural poor found themselves without access to common land, and had only their labour left to sell. It was an economic revolution, with profound social repercussions. For the landless, options were few.

Guess & Co. extends its expertise to organizations, including colleges, universities, and non-profits in rural and neighboring urban communities.

Women were sensitive to the basic issues MGR raised—the availability of food and water, as they are homemakers; and temperance, as excessive male drinking bled their family budgets and often led to violence against them.’ Rural women desired protection against a culture that was associated with alcohol, violence and the perception of women as whores. MGR gave them status and a sense of dignity by calling them ‘thaikulam’—community of mothers.

So, why is it that from the start of the pandemic the young and middle-aged in marginalized groups, not just Black and brown but Indigenous groups and people in poor white rural communities, have been more likely to suffer severe COVID-19 and die from it than their white, more affluent counterparts? The answer is part of a broader question: Why are the largest health inequities between these groups and nationwide averages—whether in infectious disease or the early onset of chronic conditions of aging such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes—seen among those aged twenty-five to sixty-five?7 The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown these inequities into stark relief. It’s not just that Black Americans are nearly twice as likely to die of COVID-19 as white Americans.8 Consider these statistics (among the many, many more you will see in chapters to come): Black mothers die during childbirth at an overall rate that is nearly three times as high as the rate for white mothers.9 For Black mothers in their mid-to-late thirties, the figures are even more dire: They die at a rate five times higher than white mothers of comparable age.10 Yet, the working- and reproductive-age years are those we have been led to believe should be the healthiest, following the higher-risk periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and before the most serious risks of aging set in.

It’s not surprising that these old myths and stories of Europe that I’m offering up should be populated with European women. Although migration has been a major force throughout human history, most of these old folktales have their roots in poor, often rural communities in which travel — either in or out — was much less of an option, and in which there was much less diversity than we experience in our world today. But that doesn’t mean that they exclude others. These stories offer up wisdom which is accessible and relevant to all women who are now rooted in these lands — whatever their skin color or ancestry. It’s a wisdom that’s accessible and relevant, in many different ways, to all those who identify as women.

Property rights, land ownership, and gun ownership are all tied up in this political worldview. It doesn’t matter to people in Clinton how destitute they are, how fundamentally poor the soil is, how frayed its social safety net. It doesn’t matter that the antigovernment sentiment they espouse is heading to a nihilistic endpoint calling on the government to cut valuable programs they use themselves. Or that their outrage over taxation only helps the kind of wealthy people who don’t live in Clinton. It doesn’t matter to them that they have more in common with poor people of color than with rich white people. The white women in this community don’t seem concerned that the systems they support shield their abusers and circumscribe their lives. Their inheritance came down to them as land, so that’s what they want to protect. They concentrate on their own personal redemption, even as their communities are dying. It makes them withdraw from one another, ever further from a sense of community, so that people like Darci, who suffer the most, struggle to find anything safe to grab on to.

The picture of Kehoe as an aloof, unsociable youth, however, seems to be contradicted by the evidence. Into his twenties, Andrew appears to have been an active participant in the communal gatherings known as Farmers’ Clubs. The American Farmers’ Club movement sprang up in the years following the Civil War. In contrast to city dwellers and townspeople, farm families in rural areas had little contact with their neighbors. To combat this social isolation—and promote the exchange of ideas within their community—they formed themselves into clubs that typically consisted of twenty to twenty-five families, each of which hosted a regular gathering at its home. These monthly get-togethers began with a dinner—invariably described as a “delicious repast” in the local newspapers—followed by a set program of musical performances, poetic and comic recitations, humorous sketches, the presentation of informative papers by club members or invited guests, and lively discussions on topics of practical concern to farmers.9

Among the various reformist crusades that characterized the years between 1890 and 1920 in America—the Progressive Era, as it is known—was a movement to overhaul the badly outdated school systems in rural districts throughout the Midwest. While city children were being educated to compete and succeed in a world of rapid industrial, technological, and scientific change, youngsters in country towns like Bath were being schooled in much the same way as their pioneer grandparents. Though a warm nostalgic glow surrounded the one-room schoolhouses of their childhoods in the minds of many older residents of farm communities, that “type of education,” as one newspaper editorialized, was “antiquated and must go.”4 Throughout the nation, and particularly in the Midwest, large, modern “consolidated schools” providing education from first through twelfth grades began to replace the old-time “little red schoolhouses.

In the agrarian economy of Aberdeenshire, the crofter, or improving smallholder generally, has filled a most useful part in the past. To them it is due that many hundreds of acres of barren moor have been brought under the plough within the last fifty or sixty years; and from his class, trained up in habits of industry, thrift, and self-reliance, there have continued to go forth into various walks of life men and women fitted to act well their part under any circumstances; the main cause of regret without doubt being that in such limited proportion of numbers have these men and women been retained in connection with the soil as settled labourers, cottars, crofters, and farmers, from the smallest tenant upward. But while it will be readily admitted that the existence of crofts in a county like Aberdeen - and indeed any agricultural county - is in the highest degree desirable; and while one may assert, without much fear of contradiction, that a judicious blending of farm and croft is greatly preferable to either a community of crofers apart from farms, or a collection of farms without a mixture of the crofter element, we are not blind to the difficulties that attend the perpetuation of the crofting system, as we have been wont to view it, under the changed conditions that now obtain.

It is a reason why so many who seek holiness or spiritual improvement impose on themselves a strict austerity. And it is why schools and colleges used to emulate the ways of monasteries. The first Christian hermits and monastics who practiced extreme austerity in the desert saw themselves as emulating Jesus during his sojourn in the wilderness. Once monastic life became institutionalized, removing oneself from carnal temptation was a major reason why religiously minded individuals would choose to take vows. The Rule of St. Benedict, set down around the year 530, included commitments to poverty, humility, chastity, and obedience, and this became the paradigm for most Christian monastic orders. The vow of poverty generally involved renouncing all individual property, although the monastic community was allowed to hold property, and of course some monasteries eventually became quite wealthy. But the lifestyle of most monks in the Middle Ages was kept deliberately austere. Here is how Aelred of Rievaulx, writing in the twelfth century, describes it: Our food is scanty, our garments rough, our drink is from the streams and our sleep upon our book. Under our tired limbs there is a hard mat; when sleep is sweetest we must rise at a bell’s bidding. . . . self-will has no scope; there is no moment for idleness or dissipation.4 Strict precautions to eliminate the possibility of sexual encounters, regular searches of dormitories to ensure that no one was hoarding personal property, a rigid and arduous daily routine to occupy to the full one’s physical and mental energy: by means of this sort monasteries and convents did their best to provide a temptation-free environment. More than a trace of the same thinking lay behind the preference for isolated rural locations among those who sought to establish colleges in nineteenth-century America. Sometimes the argument might be conveyed subtly by a brochure picturing the college surrounded by nothing but fields, woods, and hills, an image that also appealed to the deeply rooted idea that the land was a source of virtue.5 But it was also put forward explicitly. The town of North Yarmouth sought to persuade the founders of Bowdoin College of its advantageous location by pointing out that it was “not so much exposed to many Temptations to Dissipation, Extravagance, Vanity and Various Vices as great seaport towns frequently are.”6 And the 1847 catalog of Tusculum College, Tennessee, noted that its rural situation “guards it from all the ensnaring and demoralizing influences of a town.”7 Needless to say, reassurances of this sort were directed more at the fee-paying parents than at the prospective students. One should also add that not everyone took such a positive view of the rural campus. Some complained that life far away from urban civilization fostered vulgarity, depravity, licentiousness, and hy

For generations, linguists had very little idea what to make of this kind of variation. On the whole, most linguists were inclined to consider the speech of educated people as the primary object of description and investigation, while the vernacular speech of uneducated people was usually dismissed as being of no consequence – except in dialectology, in which the speech of elderly, uneducated, rural speakers was commonly considered to be the most suitable for investigation. Since earlier linguists were overwhelmingly male, there was perhaps also a comparable tendency to treat men’s speech as the norm, while women’s speech, where it differed, was often disregarded as inconsequential. Otherwise, however, the very high degree of variation within a single community was, for the most part, simply ignored: at best it was considered to be a peripheral and insignificant aspect of language, no more than erratic and even random departures from the norms, while at worst it was regarded as a considerable nuisance, as a collection of tiresome details getting in the way of good descriptions.

Since Donald Trump's rise, the national media have devoted tremendous attention to the political grievances of rural White voters. Reporters and pundits routinely descend upon rural communities, sit down with locals at diners and sports bleachers, and listen earnestly to what downscale rural White voters have to say, but the same national media hardly notice that rural minorities exist or are aware that they have legitimate complaints of their own.

The excess coronavirus deaths in rural counties should be classified as suicides by scientific skepticism. By rejecting proven vaccines, conspiracy-addled rural Americans, though living in communities where social distancing was easier than in densely populated cities, squandered their geographic advantage. All told, premature deaths from reduced healthcare access and facility closures, healthcare ignorance and scientific skepticism, and a fatal devotion to guns and drugs are killing rural white Americans—especially downscale rural whites.

We hear communities endlessly debating whether this is good or bad for their community, and the hard truth is that when you’re one of these towns, you don’t get to make that decision,” Rumore told us. “This change will happen whether they like it or not, so instead the conversation needs to be ‘How do you protect the things you hold dear?’ ” A big hurdle, Rumore admits, is that many of these desirable rural western communities are politically polarized: liberal enclaves in a sea of deep conservatism. The ideological split can make something as seemingly straightforward as a community meeting incredibly fraught. But residents of smaller gateway communities tend to share a love of place—its natural beauty, or its seclusion, or its history. When you frame discussions around what’s worth preserving, it can bring people together, even if they disagree on the way to actually go about protecting the places and spaces they love.

In one study of eight villages in rural Uganda, researchers found that willingness to use a net related closely to perceptions of the group consensus. Subjects who believed most people slept under a mosquito net were almost three times more likely to do so themselves than those who did not believe most people used a net. Moreover, 23 percent of subjects believed, incorrectly, that most adults in their community were not using mosquito nets each night. In all, a third of the participants in the study either misinterpreted or were unsure about the norm for mosquito net use in their community.

Von Neumann too wondered about the mystery of his and his compatriots’ origins. His friend and biographer, the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, remembers their discussions of the primitive rural foothills on both sides of the Carpathians, encompassing parts of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, populated thickly with impoverished Orthodox villages. “Johnny used to say that all the famous Jewish scientists, artists and writers who emigrated from Hungary around the time of the first World War came, either directly or indirectly, from those little Carpathian communities, moving up to Budapest as their material conditions improved.

Lola died in her sleep last time I did not even feel her leave. Lola was a true daughter of the Earth, who inherited an extensive wealth of agricultural techniques from her parents and ancestors. For most of her life, they lived in desolate rural poverty but they never lacked for food. They had little money, but everything else they needed, they got from the abundance that nature gifted them. She lived through the age of big cities and concrete dreams, so farming folks like them had zero support from the government. Lola had told me so many stories about encounters with mining corporations and housing developers along with their private armies who never seem to tire converting more farmlands and rural areas into cash cows. They never cared that these lands were scared and had served communities for many generations. But when the pandemic had hit and the global economy had crashed, everyone turned to the rural folks they had always ignored and abused. My lola made sure that her all her children had the ancient wisdom of their people but also schooled in the ways of the city folks. My mother was the first from their community to make their stories known.

Living in London, it’s easy to forget that people can talk to each other. I walk my dogs around Wapping past hundreds of people on pavements and in parks and it is very rare a smile is exchanged or the silence broken. I occasionally get ‘Are you Graham Norton?’ ‘Love the show’ or a simple ‘Faggot!’ but for most people making their way through the capital, you soon learn that people generally only speak to you when they are (a) crazy, (b) want money, or (c) both. We quickly learn the rules and for the most part they work. In Ireland it is impossible to imagine not saying hello or commenting on the weather. When I first started going back home again, it would always take me a day or two to stop thinking everyone I met was trying to sell me something or explaining why they needed £2 to get the train. I know this is true of rural communities the world over, but talking seems to be something we in Ireland are especially gifted at. There are nights in the pub when my friends look on in slack-jawed incomprehension as someone opens their mouth and a torrent of words tumble free. Usually they don’t have anything to say. Their gate fell down. Who put it there. The man who fixed it. The general state of gates in the area. I will then remember an ‘interesting’ fact about my own gate. They will know the man who owned the forge where they made it. Are they a relation of the man who delivers the stuff? And so it goes. A seamless gush of phrases and banter as traditional as a sing-song or drink-driving. It is talking for the pure pleasure of it and not to communicate a single thing. It is the human equivalent of barking or birdsong.

As individuals died and their plots of land were abandoned, people from rural communities slowly began to leave and move closer to the expanding urban centers. Trading, medicine, and social support were more readily available in the more densely populated places. The more isolated villages and farms were neglected and abandoned, as the amount of manpower a community or family had slowly decreased and, with it, their capacity for farming and supporting themselves.

What is the gospel, and how do we bring it to bear on the hearts of people today? What is this culture like, and how can we both connect to it and challenge it in our communication? Where are we located — city, suburb, town, rural area — and how does this affect our ministry? To what degree and how should Christians be involved in civic life and cultural production? How do the various ministries in a church — word and deed, community and instruction — relate to one another? How innovative will our church be and how traditional? How will our church relate to other churches in our city and region? How will we make our case to the culture about the truth of Christianity?

end of March 1948 most of the wealthy and middle-class families had fled Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and most Arab rural communities had evacuated the heavily Jewish Coastal Plain; a few had also left the Upper Jordan Valley. Most were propelled by fear of being caught up, and harmed, in the fighting; some may have feared life under Jewish rule.

Rural communities are facing unprecedented concerns about their future sustainability. And, as they do, so does the rural church.

In the Brazilian rural workers movement, they speak of “widening the floors of the cage”—the cage of existing coercive institutions that can be widened by popular struggle—as has happened effectively over many years. We can extend the image to think of the cage of state institutions as a protection from the savage beasts roaming outside: the predatory, state-supported capitalist institutions dedicated in principle to private gain, power and domination, with community and people’s interest at most a footnote, revered in rhetoric but dismissed in practice as a matter of principle and even law. Much

Growing up with migrant workers, I knew that they usually worked harder than we did. Sometimes my dad and my uncles would hire a few of my buddies from school to help with the harvest or the branding; they would last maybe a day or two and were often unreliable. But our Mexican migrant laborers worked hard, and we could count on them. Because of this experience, I have always said that I could never look at these migrants and consider them criminals. They were working to feed their families, and we simply could not have gotten along without them. So when during the 2016 campaign Jeb Bush committed a sin of candor by saying that people crossing the border did it as an act of love, well, that’s exactly how I felt, too. And I said so at the time. Having grown up with migrant labor and with the Hispanic community that was here long before we were, I knew that what Jeb Bush was saying was true. Among those who were raised in rural Arizona, it is much more difficult to summon the vitriol for immigrants that fuels so much of the politics in the age of Trump. Of course, Jeb Bush was savaged for saying what he said, just mocked mercilessly. But then, unlike his critics, he knew what he was talking about and dared to speak truthfully, which is both a rarity and liability these days. We have to return to the politics of comity and inclusion and reject the politics of xenophobia and demonization.

community support is the most critical component for any water solution; without it, all of these efforts are sunk. We also know that parts must be readily available, that maintenance workers need to be incentivized, and, ideally, that these technologies are assembled and maintained locally. But we’ve learned this is true for all solutions, both high tech and low tech. Moreover, the idea that high-tech solutions won’t work in rural environments went away with the cell phone. What’s more high tech than a Nokia mobile phone? Yet there are nearly a billion of them working all over Africa.

We can devolve to develop smaller, or even rural, communities that are just as plugged in as living in the heart of a great metropolis.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a reclusive, near-deaf, self-taught rural schoolteacher who, working alone and having almost no contact with the wider scientific community, invented ingenious engineering designs for multistage rockets, orbiting space colonies, and interplanetary craft. Though

Powerful forces led me to the Hammers and then to the neighbors and suggested that the qualities I witnessed in their lives – strength, goodness, harmony, universal order – were worth preserving. Out of friendship alone, nothing more, they consented to become my allegories for those things. In authentic ways, their lives say for me what I cannot say without them about the spiritual and the American heritage of farm families and rural life. With them and with other fragments of experience, I have learned that what I was taught as a child is, or can be, mostly true. I learned that there has been only one true creative act, the making of something out of nothing, an act performed only by the sole Creator. All else is circumstance, experience, invention, innovation, discovery – more than anything else – and a putting together in a particular fashion of things that have always existed. Perhaps every act and every discovery, as Bill Hammer, Jr. would say, "was meant to be.

Because Matthew wrote in Greek, which dominated in Syria’s urban centers, rather than Aramaic, which dominated in rural areas, Matthew’s core audience might have been located in an urban setting. Many scholars thus suggest that Matthew writes especially for Antioch in Syria. Antioch had a large Jewish community, one of the few Jewish communities not devastated by the Judean war; it also was an early Christian center of mission to Gentiles (Ac 11:20; 13:1–3; Gal 2:11–12).

Immediately after the war, blacks separated from white churches to start their own thriving churches. Tens of thousands of freedmen joined the new black Baptist churches, which quickly became the most important centers of community life in black townships and rural villages. Whites accused these churches of being spawning grounds for social and political discontent, which they undoubtedly were. Black resistance to the Klan’s violence and the attempts by white politicians to deprive blacks of civil rights and access to education was centered in the black churches. Individual white Baptists were ambivalent toward black Baptists. Many were suspicious of the danger they thought the blacks posed to white interests, and many still viewed the blacks as little better than jungle animals who were aping their betters. However, many white Baptists, although they had supported or fought for the Confederacy, seemed to genuinely desire the education and uplifting of blacks.

No Place but Here: A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community,

are more open to the Christian faith than they were in their original context. Most have been uprooted from their familiar, traditional setting and have left behind the thicker kinship and tribal networks they once relied on, and most cities in the developing world often have “next to nothing in working government services.”29 These newcomers need help and support to face the moral, economic, emotional, and spiritual pressures of city life, and this is an opportunity for the church to serve them with supportive community, a new spiritual family, and a liberating gospel message. Immigrants to urban areas have many reasons to begin attending churches, reasons that they did not have in their former, rural settings. “Rich pickings await any groups who can meet these needs of these new urbanites, anyone who can at once feed the body and nourish the soul.”31 But there is yet another way in which cities make formerly hard-to-reach peoples accessible. As I noted earlier, the urban mentality is spreading around the world as technology connects young generations to urbanized, global hyperculture. Many young people, even those living in remote places, are becoming globalized semi-Westerners, while their parents remain rooted in traditional ways of thinking. And so ministry and gospel communications that connect well with urban residents are also increasingly relevant and effective with young nonurban dwellers.

There’s a tendency for those unfamiliar with cooperatives to look down on them as the leftovers of the mainstream economy, implying that if these ideologically driven people simply reorganized themselves into “normal” private companies, they would be more efficient and productive. In fact, just the opposite is true: Cooperatives often enter into economic activities that private businesses will not take on. The most fertile period of cooperative growth was during the Great Depression. Rural electric cooperatives spread across the American plains when it became clear that other investor-owned and municipally owned utilities were uninterested in wiring up sparsely populated regions. Credit unions, as we’ll soon explore, have seen an upsurge during the recent financial crisis.

We made it to Montana in May 1990. The West Kootenai area is exactly what you picture when you think of a rural logging community.

The people themselves were never given an opportunity to vote upon the Constitution. Professor Beard says " it is highly probable that not more than one-fourth or one-fifth of the adult white males took part in the election of delegates to the state conventions" that ratified the Constitution. He says that " if anything, this estimate is too high." He expresses the belief that not more than 160,000 voters " expressed an opinion, one way or the other, on the Constitution." The rest were either disfranchised because of their lack of sufficient property to entitle them to vote, or made silent by their dense ignorance as to what the elections were about. News did not travel rapidly in those days. Professor Beard declares that in many rural communities the elections were held before most of the voters knew that elections were to be held. He also declares that " It may very well be that a majority of those who voted were against the adoption of the Constitution as it stood.

We were impressed by how the Amish in Montana had chosen this more spiritual way. The church services impressed us too. First, there was something to be said about the environment. Since the community is small and rural, most Amish walk to the house church

Before the Industrial Revolution began, the world’s population was less than one billion, mostly consisting of rural farmers who did all their work using manual labor or domesticated animals. Now there are seven billion people, more than half of us live in cities, and we use machines to do the majority of our work. Before the Industrial Revolution, people’s work on the farm required a wide range of skills and activities, such as growing plants, tending animals, and doing carpentry. Now many of us work in factories or offices, and people’s jobs often require them to specialize in doing just a few things, such as adding numbers, putting the doors on cars, or staring at computer screens. Before the Industrial Revolution, scientific inventions had little effect on the daily life of the average person, people traveled little, and they ate only minimally processed food that was grown locally. Today, technology permeates everything we do, we think nothing of flying or driving hundreds or thousands of miles, and much of the world’s food is grown, processed, and cooked in factories far from where it is consumed. We have also changed the structure of our families and communities, the way we are governed, how we educate our children, how we entertain ourselves, how we get information, and how we perform vital functions like sleep and defecation. We have even industrialized exercise: more people get pleasure from watching professional athletes compete in televised sports than by participating in sports themselves.6

Living with naked faith in the naked word of God is neither fideistic sentimentality, nor an uncritical hermeneutic of scripture. It is the unfathomable spiritual depth of Palmer, a young woman who turns the grief over the death of her children into loving service to thousands. Naked faith is the commitment of Christians to say yes to God’s call to mission, even though it means sacrifice: pastoring bi-vocationally so that one can serve among the urban and rural poor, choosing to plant a new congregation in the inner city rather than a booming suburb. It means saying yes to God’s call even though one’s denomination has no systems to contain new monastic communities or to ordain those who are called to unpaid service in such communities. It means creating new paradigms of ministry to reach people the church has turned away. This kind of naked faith is at the heart of the new monasticism.

Organizations like REAL Enterprises—Rural Entrepreneurship through Action Learning

Under the auspices of the Program for Academic and Cultural Excellence in Rural Schools (PACERS), high school students in over 20 communities sought to rectify this situation. Their language arts and journalism classes started collecting news from not only their school but the surrounding region.

Rather than equating the terms 'local' and 'cosmopolitan' with geographical areas (rural and urban respectively), sociologist Wade Clark Roof suggests that these terms refer to character types who can be found in a diversity of settings in the United States. Locals are strongly oriented toward community or neighborhood, favor commitments to primary groups (family, neighborhood, fraternal and community organizations), tend to personalize their interpretations of social experience, and are more traditional in their beliefs and values. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, are oriented toward the world outside the residential community, prefer membership in professional or special interest organizations, and are more open to social change and more tolerant of diversity in belief than locals. While a disproportionate number of locals are found in smaller communities, studies indicate that other factors - such as length of residence in a community, age, and educational level - play an even stronger role in determining orientation.

those living in rural areas have higher levels of stress and fewer resources to cope with stress. For example,