Episode Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of Less People, I’m Jenny Russell. So, something that I’ve really noticed over the years is that rural areas often don’t have as much of a political divide like Democrats and Republicans as they do have a rural versus urban divide. I noticed in the 1980s when I was growing up in a rural area, a lot more of the population had at least one rural touch point. Potentially, they lived in a rural area, or they had a grandparent or a relative that lived out in a rural area of our state. And that has really changed in the past 30 or 40 years. Now, a lot of people that used to have those rural touchpoints have lived in their city for a generation now, and they have had no rural touchpoints. Maybe they have never been out to the rural areas.

It’s really interesting the definition that people have of when rural starts in our state the definition from the city urban crew, which in Kansas, which is where I’m located, is definitely on the eastern part of our state. They think rural Kansas starts about I 135 which would be parallel with Wichita Kansas and most of our other people who live in rural parts of the state definitely have a different definition of where the rural part of our state starts. But they also don’t come out very often or don’t have opportunities to come out. So we’re going to have to do even more as a rural community and rural part of our state to tell the story of where we live, to give experiences, that will allow for our urban counterparts to come out into our region, come out into the deeper depths of the state and actually experience what a rural area is. Like I said, if you’ve never been to one, you have less care as to the issues and the great parts of a rural area if you’ve never been here.

So some of the more successful things I’ve seen is to actually have a town celebration that falls on the exact same weekend every year. So as an example, Courtland Fun Day in Courtland, Kansas happens on, it’s always on the last Saturday of every July. It never changes. And people know that that is the date they need to take off from work. That is the day they need to invite their friends to come. That is the day that, that is the weekend that they don’t schedule anything. But growing up, my hometown, we had a town celebration and it was never on the same weekend. Sometimes it changed. Sometimes, like recently, last time it changed, it changed from June to the fall. That’s very hard to plan for if you are not living in the area and if you live somewhere else, especially in an urban area that’s four hours away. Kansas, like many rural states, it’s a big state. It takes five, six, seven hours to get across the state from east to west. And so if somebody is going to take the time, you need to make sure you’re making it worth their time to come. But those experiences are giving people who have maybe not left the metro area time. this year or have only traveled to bigger places, it’s giving them a chance to experience rural and to appreciate rural areas for what they have and what they do provide. So giving those experiences is super important.

Something else I’ve noticed in rural areas, we don’t always handle jobs the same. So instead of putting our jobs on a big job board like Monster or Indeed or somewhere like that, oftentimes I’ve had employers say, hey, Jack, who do you know who might be great for this position? And Jack will say, well, my cousin Jeremy might be great for this position. So they interview and they hire Jeremy. Great for vetting people and not offending people in a rural area. Terrible for being welcoming and trying to get people opportunities to move home or move back or move to a rural area. So it’s interesting how jobs are handled. I’d love to hear from you, our listeners. What is the funniest way you’ve heard a company or a business in your area hire for a position? Make sure you swipe up and give us your comments and give us a like on this episode. It helps us move up in the rankings. So not only do we hire a little bit differently in rural areas, we now work differently from when I was growing up.

So Fiber Internet and Fiber to Promise has been around our area for a good 15 years, 20 years. And we actually had fibered premise internet before Kansas City, before some of the metro areas did. And with COVID, before COVID, and especially with COVID, about 37% of jobs now have the ability to work from a remote area, a rural and remote area, or they can work most of their job from that area. Fiber internet has not only changed where we can work, but it’s also changed how we entertain ourselves, which used to be seen as two drawbacks of living in a rural area. And now those qualms and those fears and those questions have been solved by there are fiber to internet. I know not all rural areas have that. I am agreeing with the federal government on this, that it is a commodity. It is something like rural telephone. It needs to be accessible for all rural areas and all people to be competitive in the world. And so I hope that number increases for all rural areas across the United States.

The last point I wanted to make on this podcast was it’s interesting how people think, you know, we can’t move to a rural area because there’s no entertainment options. I’ll be so bored. But I know a lot of my city counterparts, a lot of people who do live in metro areas, they don’t actually get a go to a lot of the amenities that are there. They may not go to the water park more than once a year or every other year, every five years. They might not actually get a go to the movies or somewhere like that because everything costs a lot, you know, costs a lot to do. So we actually call that the reverse commute. We have a reverse commute here. We don’t have to drive every single day. We don’t have to, like one of my friends, he used to live in the Atlanta area. He had a two hour drive every single day, a two hour drive in traffic every get to his job. And then a two-hour drive back home. So four hours of driving. let’s make half your day. I mean, it’s a crazy amount of driving in a crazy amount of traffic. In rural areas, we don’t often have that long commute or that long stressful commute anyway. It’s not bumper-to-bumper traffic and then we can go places on the weekends. We can reverse commute. We can go have fun in a larger city during the weekends or on vacation and have a more peaceful life during the week. That’s not necessarily, it’s kind of the opposite of what you see in the metro areas. So I’d love to hear what you have to think about the rural versus urban divide more than the Democrat versus Republican divide. And we will see you on the next episode of Less People.