A new Great Depression

Everything is gone, wore out, or shot, just like me." These were the last words written by an Iowa farmer before he ended his life. It is a testament to the sadness that has overtaken our rural communities.\nSen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota wrote in Washington Monthly that the suicide rate among small farmers is three times the rate of the general population. Do me a favor and don't pass judgement. Don't fake sympathy so you'll feel better. Don't tell me about social Darwinism and how capitalism has casualties. Don't insist farmers are an ignorant bunch of country rubes and have no place in our civilized society.\nIt is difficult to describe the feeling that comes from having your entire way of life taken from you. The rural communities of the Midwest are dying out. The suburbs, with their faceless groups of white-bred, floppy-haired kids and soccer moms, with their fake tans and home gym equipment, with their second-income families and fat-free diets are spreading into the rural communities like a cancer. They buy up farm ground that has been taken over by the lawyers, the bankers and the businessmen, and set up shop and destroy every bit of personality the countryside had. I have seen farmers who were independent, hard-working and happy end up as nothing but convenience store clerks. The people taking over their farmland hold the same distaste for farmers as they do for blacks and Hispanics, the people who caused the ex-suburbanites to move out in the first place. \nSmall farmers can't compete with the corporate farms and are forced out of business. The sense of displacement among farmers has bred the worst kind of depression. Going into a destroyed farm town, as I do every time I go home, is like spending time on an American Indian reservation. Alcoholism and depression are rampant. Most of the farmers commute to work in factories. Factories are not places for people, period, but especially not for men and women who spent their lives using their brains and hands to manage their own businesses. Factories are dusty, dingy places where they make you hit time clocks and take orders. Men and women who once managed a small business and could fix just about anything in creative and useful ways are relegated to being nothing but robotic pawns. \nIt's hard to do when you're used to being independent. \nThe worst part about this is it is celebrated by most economists. Here's a quote in Washington Monthly from appropriately named Steven Blank, an economist at the University of California at Davis -- "The U.S. no longer needs agriculture and is rapidly outgrowing it." We're outgrowing our need to eat? \nOther countries that aren't as spoiled as the United States take precautions to protect their food producers. Sen. Dorgan attended the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle this year, and wrote about it in Washington Monthly, "The European representatives were talking about families and communities, while the Americans talked about markets." European rural communities are flourishing, while those in the United States rot. This is despite the fact that small farms are every bit as efficient as the corporations. \nI don't have the column space to delve into economics, but it's neither good for the consumer nor the farmer to have these policies in place. You think Microsoft is a monopoly? Eighty percent of the beef produced in this country comes from four producers. The American economy is top heavy, and will soon fold in on itself like an accordion. \nThe result of such policies is that the younger generation who never worked on the farms have nothing to identify with. They become rednecks, deer hunters, wannabe cowboys and the like because there's nothing left but the posturing. \nIt's true that one would have to be blind not to see this trend coming. I worked on one of the last family farms in our area for more than 10 years, and I could see it coming. Only about three of us farm hands were left at the time, and we worked in factories and as manual laborers; all of us have walked around displaced and fitting in nowhere. \nThe destruction of the farm life has hit me hard but not as hard as the old-timers. I was young enough to be able to change, but the old-timers weren't. What do you do when you're forced from your lifestyle and home in your 50s, 60s or 70s? According to the coddled, stupid, soft-handed laissez-faire economists, like George W., who walk around on ranches they've never worked a day on in their clean cowboy boots and khakis, these farmers were supposed to see the trend coming and start an Internet company or a line of fall fashions. \nI look around and I see strip malls and frozen yogurt shops where there was once personality. I see teenagers who have nothing to identify with. There is no work, no lifestyle that they can feel is a part of their culture and as a result they grab at anything they can. I think about what it must feel like to be those poor men and women who feel the only way out is to end their own lives rather than become faceless and degraded themselves -- and what I think is -- won't somebody help? Does anybody even open the letters I send to my congressman? What is the government's job if not to preserve the heart of our country? \nThe farmers have given so much. It is an indisputable historical truth that a nation can only go as far as its farmers can take it. It's the worst irony that farmers are being destroyed by the market and economy they worked to help create. \nWrite your congressmen, tell them to enact legislation that labels where products come from, and then buy the small farm products. Ask them to write laws that require supermarkets to buy a certain amount of their produce from family farms -- sort of like affirmative action for small farmers. This is the only way that we can survive in an economy where the consumer makes the decisions. Please.\n"Everything is gone, wore out, or shot, just like me" --- just like America.