October, 2021
Lincoln — The ink is still drying on Nebraska's redistricting effort, so it is not yet clear who has prevailed in what has become a decennial gerrymandering exercise.
During the process, there was a lot of huffing and puffing about rural areas losing out to urban areas, the apparent premise being that rural voters protect rural interests and urban voters do not. I'm not at all sure that this is a valid premise.
Rural voters over the past few decades have bought into a get-big-or-get-out agricultural policy and, sure enough, a lot of farmers got out, depopulating farm country, including small towns. That must be reflected in the redistricting maps, by law.
Meanwhile, urban voters have been the ones trying hardest to save rural hospitals and nursing homes, leading referenda efforts. The fight for conservation of rural lands is being led by people who live in urban zip codes. Of the seventeen Unicameral sponsors of the Farm-to-School bill, enacted in 2021 to facilitate farm to school markets, ten were urban senators, seven rural.
The comparatively poor response of rural Nebraskas to Covid vaccination efforts reflects the same depopulation pattern. It will marginalize rural Nebraska even more, and make it an undesirable place to move or to stay.* Below is a vaccination map from October 2, 2021.
In the next redistricting, will we see pleadings from rural areas for more protection? Protection from whom? Urban voters want a thriving rural Nebraska; do we in rural areas want one? We're not acting like it.
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* In 1923, Nebraska's greatest author, Willa Cather, observed that the generations following the pioneer generation were not up to the standards their forebears had set. It was a recurring theme of her novels. She was prescient.
