As of today, the Iowa caucuses are 45 days away-a mere month and a half, broken up by the biggest holidays of the year.
As someone who works in Iowa for a political campaign, this is terrifying. Forty-five days, 10 of which no one will listen to your candidate because they're either watching football or "A Charlie Brown Christmas." As someone who came here five and a half months ago, it's shocking how fast time has passed. I am literally racing against the clock here, and the thing about Father Time is that he never gets tired and slows down.
For me, this urgency has not only made me incredibly tense about my job, it's also led me to think about my plans after the caucus. I will return to Duke, perhaps study abroad over the summer, finish my degree and move on to even higher education. I've thought about eventually moving back to wholesome South Carolina to my hometown, staying in the slightly more tarnished Durham or disappearing into the buzz of the Northeast and its many Babylons. But while driving through the hills and fields of Iowa, I have never considered coming back to this place, or moving to anywhere like it.
So I will exit Duke with one of the best educations in the world, probably accumulate more, and then settle down next to a million other internal migrants like me. Here in these counties in rural Iowa, Ivy League educations are unusual and the population has declined since 1890.
It seems a bit selfish not to consider a place like this. After all, a lot of people live in places like it: rural, small and shrinking. According to the census bureau, 21 percent of America's population lived in rural areas in 2000, down from almost 25 percent in 1990. Comparing the absolute numbers, that comes to a 2-million-person drop in population. There are many reasons this is happening, but the obvious result is that people are leaving rural areas. People like us are not moving to places in rural America that might need our expertise and our ambitions.
That's not to say rural Iowa-or rural America-can't take care of itself. Many of the communities do quite well despite the population decline. Thousands of highly educated professionals do move back to rural areas. By no means is rural America an empty intellectual wasteland.
But on the whole the picture is not satisfying. There is a disdain that sometimes borders on negligence about the way that many well-to-do East Coast Americans view rural America, whether it's 20 miles away or 2,000. The classic way of rural life is being squeezed out by agribusiness and the sheer dollars and cents of our American economy. The ability of someone to leave rural Iowa and come back to buy a farm or a house has been greatly diminished by rising property values. And all too often, the political forces that could help preserve the quality of life of rural Americans abandon them as "Red-State Voters" who aren't as important as suburban Pennsylvanians or corporate donors.
So what do I propose? I propose that people return and relocate to communities in rural areas where they're needed the most. I'm not talking about the several-week, volunteer junkets that rich Americans are apt to go to fulfill a sense of civic duty. Those do good work but they are not enough. And I'm not talking about witlessly preserving a way of life whose time passed with the end of the 19th century.
I am talking about making sure that there are services that are as equal as we can make them in urban, suburban or rural areas. The market hasn't done it and the government's efforts aren't enough. It takes the decisions of committed future bankers, doctors, lawyers and engineers like us to keep some sense of national community alive, even if it means spurning a hedge fund or a corner office.
I hope that some of us, at least, are up to the challenge.
Frank Holleman is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Monday.
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