Kentucky’s rural-urban divide is artificial and benefits only elites, politicians | Opinion
The deep division which affects the United States feels much like a long sickness. Our collective temperature has spiked. Heated disagreement on everything from public safety, public health, human rights, and terrible inequality have driven us further apart, even when bleak tragedy could have brought us closer together.
Kentucky is no exception to this distressing trend. This division, between those on the political left and right, between the rural and urban regions of our state, threatens to kill all possibility of progress; such division separates friends, neighbors, and even family. Many now wonder what can be done to bind up these wounds, others still believe that we are too late to see a great healing that will move us toward a better day.
I have found myself wondering much the same thing, as I am sure many of you have as well. It makes sense that we have been wrestling with such anxieties; just in the past three years, we have endured a global pandemic, political unrest the likes of which has not been experienced in decades, and a reckoning over questions of great inequality in our nation. All of this has left many of us, in some form or another, frozen in fear. Fear breeds division.
The divide between those in rural and urban communities is felt all across the country, not only in our state, and it manifests in different ways. Someone in my home of Harlan County likely has a fairly different existence than someone in Lexington or Louisville, for instance. Nevertheless, these differences are often greatly exaggerated, and often for political purposes.
The concerns and the difficulties of a poor worker in eastern Kentucky are not so different from a poor worker in Louisville’s West End. The struggle of the urban poor is the same as the rural poor. Daily, it seems, we are all forced to pay more for the basic necessities of life, food, housing, healthcare, education. At the same time, the wages of workers across our state remain stuck at a level which only perpetuates poverty, rather than ensuring that the immense wealth of our country is shared in a way that creates a dignified and happy life for all people.
All the while, our political, social, and economic reality is continuously influenced by the very wealthy and elite, to the benefit of the wealthy and elite. Billions upon billions are spent every election cycle, while income and wealth inequality in the United States is worse than any other industrialized country in the world. And each time a change to our reality is offered, be it free universal healthcare, expanded affordable housing, actions to protect our environment, or provide clean drinking water, these solutions are condemned as “socialist” or “communist”, and such labels are often attached by those who could not even define the words they intend as insults.
Such tactics are simply another tool of creating fear. What is needed in Kentucky, and across the country, is a form of society where no person should fear another, and where no one, regardless of where they live or how much money they have, be afraid of sickness, hunger, or despair. We have the potential to disregard the division which is often forced upon us. There is no need for the workers and the poor of eastern Kentucky, or other rural places, to fear workers and the poor of Lexington or Louisville or other urban places. We all are in need of a new reality, one defined by true equality, and true freedom. In recognizing that we are engaged in the same struggle to achieve the same dignified life, by coming to see ourselves in one another, only then can we begin the work of creating a better reality for all people in our state.
TJ Hensley is a recent graduate of Georgetown College, and the host of the Appalachian Firesides Podcast on Apple and Spotify. His opinions are his own.
