I wasn’t really allowed pity parties as a kid. Oh, I tried, and my folks would indulge me for about 2.5 minutes and then, to paraphrase my father, it was time to stop crying and start trying.
Much later, I remember when The Shawshank Redemption came out, and I heard the character Andy Dufresne’s philosophy, “get busy living, or get busy dying,” I thought they’d summed up my dad’s advice pretty succinctly. There is a time to cry, but there’s also a time to dry the eyes and steel your resolve and get back to your goals. There is no quit.
Now—this very moment right now—is our country’s time to learn, adapt, thrive and survive. No place more so than in our rural communities who’ve for years cried out for the opportunities that are now at their doorsteps. Yes, this pandemic has been gut-wrenching in the loss of nearly 200,000 lives and economic hardships. But it is also bringing us opportunities that we would never have gotten if there had not been a major disruption to the way we live, work and learn.
Let’s take for example the tried and true complaint of nearly every small community in this country, “We want people to move back to rural America and raise their families and help keep our communities growing.” Well, we just underwent the biggest labor force disruption in the history of office work in this country. You’ve got thousands right now who are now working from home on a semi-permanent basis, and now that their companies have figured out that they can actually do their jobs remotely and not be supervised in a traditional office setting of the 1950s that could easily turn into a permanent basis.
The only thing stopping them is infrastructure and appropriate housing. Look around your little towns. If you had an influx of let’s say 10 professionals and their families coming to the community to work from home offices with salaries of $80,000 a year or more, do you have opportunities to develop housing that would meet their needs and wants? Do you have fast enough internet capabilities for them to Zoom their meetings with clients? If your answers are “no,” then you need to get busy.
Now, let’s look at another complaint, “We’re exporting our young people to the cities and losing the brightest minds.” Well, now, isn’t this the right moment to showcase the opportunities we have in our community colleges and trade schools closer to home? If the virus has caused us to turn to remote classwork, and there are concerns about crowded dorms and crowded cities, why not take a year and continue coursework at an affordable option closer to home and family? Secondary education is invaluable to your marketability as a future employee, no question. But maybe this is the time for our rural institutions to step up their self-promotion game as a way to train the next generation of rural employees. Maybe this is the moment families start having conversations about just how much they’re willing to invest in that secondary education and where they’d like to invest those dollars.
Here’s a favorite of many and I myself have said it a time or two, “Just watch the shelves go empty and see how quickly those city people learn real scarcity.” Well, now the shelves got pretty bare at times during this pandemic. Selection was pretty touch-and-go in some markets because the larger system wasn’t set up to feed Americans in their home kitchens and not in restaurants and institutions. But you know what happened? Farmers markets found a way to operate during the pandemic safely and within local health regulations. Facebook groups cropped up to allow farmers to sell their production out the door to consumers. Those consumers got a taste of local meats, produce, cheeses and more and even after the grocery stores filled back up, they stuck around for more.
Look around you at the new tools we’ve been forced into learning and ask yourselves, how might we continue using them for good after the pandemic?
We’ve “Zoomed” our recent Sorghum U/Wheat U and Cattle U events, and cooperative Extension and various agricultural input companies have followed suit. And while in-person trade shows and educational seminars will always be great for demonstrations and networking, and heaven knows I want to return back to those events, we’ve seen anecdotally that these virtual meetings are serving an underserved audience. No longer do you have to take a day off from your off-farm job or your farming activities, drive an hour, spend money on a tank of fuel and maybe spring for a hotel room just to hear a couple of speakers. Now, those speakers are coming to your living room, on your time.
Think about all of the extra moments we’ve spent with our parents and grandparents over virtual platforms. Sharing moments of our children’s every day lives through a screen with the click of a button. Gathering across the miles over a screen isn’t a replacement for a hug, but how many of us have had more face time with family across the country in the last seven months than we had in the last seven years? Without the pandemic, would we have spent the time to learn new tools like that in order to overcome distancing guidelines?
Right now is the time to pick ourselves up and dust off and get busy figuring out new and creative ways to turn tragedy into opportunity. Together we can overcome anything, we just have to choose to figure out a way.
We’ve had our time to cry. Now it’s our time to try.
Jennifer M. Latzke can be reached at 620-227-1807 or [email protected].
