Pizza and the Internet

Growing up near Rapid City, it was uncommon for me to feel disconnected from the privileges of city life. Most of my friends were city kids. I went to movies in town. I even went to the only Catholic school in western South Dakota--for us a twenty minute drive that, for most other rural folk, would have been unthinkable. Some disadvantages that I can think of were merely economic; though farm and ranch people sit on incredible amounts of wealth, liquid assets and cash are usually pretty thin.

Others were strictly geographic. As a child, I would go to friends' birthday parties and the like, and it was always a thrill for me to have the pizza guy show up at the door after nothing but a phone call. When I would have friends on the farm, if there was pizza, it involved a lengthy trip to the joint--there is no such thing as rural pizza delivery. I've long speculated that this is the reason my parents always bought from the Schwan man. Ice cold goods delivered straight to your door! Though perhaps not appealing to the town family, it was a bi-weekly ritual that continues to this day. It's just too bad their Silver Mint Bars no longer come wrapped in silver-colored wrappers.

It is probably trivial to complain about pizza delivery. As far as disadvantages go, it's pretty pathetic. But the other disadvantage that I remember from my youth is one that stands in a chain of rural disadvantages: the wired disadvantages, the disadvantages of being off the grid. At the turn of the century, cities and towns quickly became electrified as local power plants operating on D.C. started to pop up. Lines connecting small towns cropped up and into these nearby farms could occasionally tap. But most rural people were well behind the curve, though. Rural electrification didn't really take off until 1933, when the New Deal appropriated substantial funds to bring electricity to the countryside. Much the same was the case with the telephone, though the infrastructure for electricity perhaps made that transition easier. Speaking historically, these were significant disadvantages. Electricity didn't come to my ranch until the late '40s. That's 40 summers of frequent trips to town for groceries or at least ice. 40 years of batter powered radios or no radio at all. 40 years of trips to town (or of delivery boys out of it) for the news quickly delivered by newspaper in town.

My mother recently said that these sorts of disadvantages are simply part of the territory; if you choose to live out here, this is what you get. Okay, sure. But two qualifications: no one, strictly speaking, gets to choose where they're born and raised; and urban residents need to consider the debt owed to rural people in general. I'll have more to say on the second one throughout the summer, I think. I'll let sleeping dogs lie for now.

Rural broadband is tricky, though. When President Obama mentioned it in his inaugural address, my first reaction was that he didn't know what he was talking about. The cost of such a vast project was unthinkable; we'd looked into it, and it ran several thousand dollars for an ethernet line to our home. Multiply that by several million and we have a huge, expensive project that, frankly, most people don't care about. I've heard whispers of it since then, but know little of its present likelihood. Given the federal economic situation, or at least the rhetoric around it, it seems unlikely to go forward any time soon. It would require something the scale of the New Deal all over again--and, for the time being, the time for new deals has passed.

Rural peoples are good at masking these disadvantages, though. Even if some technology could be beneficial, its practical unattainability makes it instead "superfluous"; "We're probably better off without it." Though we just got internet at home this last summer when my dad ran for county commissioner, we do have it now. It may not be broadband, but I'm not going to split hairs here. Things are changing; this is good.

But geographic disadvantages are deeper than we can see, sometimes. "Out of sight, out of mind" all too often characterizes implicit urban attitudes toward agriculture; all too many people don't care where food comes from, or how it is raised. As problematic as the "organic" movement can be, it does at least have the consequence of shedding some public attention on agriculture. This too is good, but in itself the organic movement is not and cannot be a solution to this geographic form of discrimination, if I can call it that. I guess that's in part what this blog is for, though: bringing the rural into the consciousness of the urban.