Can Laura Kelly save rural Kansas? Not if it doesn’t want to be saved | Opinion

In her annual State of the State speech, Gov. Laura Kelly dedicated herself and the rest of her term in office to saving rural Kansas.

I wish her well, but she has her work cut out for her.

To succeed, she’ll have to drag rural Kansas, kicking and screaming, into the 20th Century. And no, that’s not a typo.

Few small and remote Kansas towns resemble the idyllic picture that Kelly sought to paint in her address to a joint session of the state House and Senate, when she said: “We pride ourselves on being salt-of-the-earth people who work hard but who always take time to look after our neighbors.”

The heart of the problem is that in too many rural Kansas towns, the definition of “our neighbors” is very narrow, with little to no room for immigrants, minorities, poor people, gay people, or other so-called undesirables.

This column is going to probably make some folks pretty angry and I won’t say it isn’t hard for me to write it.

But we all need to take off our nostalgia glasses and view the problems as they exist, or it won’t matter what Kelly and the Legislature say or do.

I’ve been out to rural Kansas a number of times in the past year. More often than not, it was to tell stories of vulnerable people there being run over roughshod by the local powers that be.

▪ There was Sterling in July, where the town’s homophobic library board fired the librarian and her assistant for putting pictures of rainbows in a display case — even though said rainbows had nothing to do with LGBTQ pride. They also withdrew the library’s traditional support for the town’s Independence Day celebration, because a pride float was allowed to be in the parade. The explanation was something, something, Target and Bud Light.

▪ There was Stafford in August, where the city mowed down a budding wildlife refuge that was being developed by a man who had been instrumental in rebuilding Greensburg into a model city for environmental efficiency, after it was leveled by a tornado in 2007. And I was back in Stafford again just before Christmas, when the city government helped facilitate an illegal scheme to force low-income renters out of the houses where they were living by shutting off their electricity.

▪ There was St. John in September, where a low-income couple bought an abandoned church to turn it into a low-cost home for themselves, and were hit by the city with criminal charges for sleeping there while renovating it after a well-connected local businessman complained.

▪ And there was Marion in August, where the local police chief seized computers, phones and records from the Marion County Record newspaper, which was investigating him and a local restaurateur he called “Honey.” The raid was a breathtaking abuse of power that led to the death of the paper’s 98-year-old co-owner, Joan Meyer, less than 24 hours after she told me “These are Hitler tactics and something has to be done.” Something has been done. A City Council member who was also unjustly targeted in the police goat-rope was voted out of office in November.

I know in my heart that there are good people in rural communities — I’ve met many of them in my travels.

But as a group, rural Kansans need to get over their habit of voting for a broken status quo that empowers the local power clique while hanging the vulnerable out to dry.

They need to embrace newcomers and new ideas. They need to embrace change. They need to actually become the people that Kelly says they are.

The alternative is the same depopulating death spiral we’ve been watching for decades, one failed recovery plan after another.