An unfashionable minority

Living in Bloomington, it's easy to forget what the rest of Indiana is like. The city's arts, sports, bars and even classes make it a stimulating, seductive place to live.\nIt's not that we are narrow-minded or uncaring. Campus activists passionately and rightly work to balance the scales of social justice by fighting racial discrimination, breaking the silence repressing gays and lesbians and leading efforts to combat global poverty and disease.\nAll worthy causes. But the lack of connection between the energy spent on worldwide troubles and the apathy toward problems more than a few blocks from the Sample Gates puzzles me.\nThere is local activism, from Middle Way House to historic preservationists. In general, these groups do good work. But few of these efforts are student-run, and almost none are unique to Bloomington. Evansville, Fort Wayne, Vincennes and dozens of other Hoosier cities have similar groups. A town otherwise so distinguished has merely an average commitment to solving local problems.\nThis is especially troubling considering the mission of IU. As a public research university, IU receives money from the state (though less each year) to apply the new knowledge it creates to the problems facing Indiana. Faculty members fulfill this mandate both on the University's time and their own. \nLittle of this spirit is passed to the student body, which seems more concerned with problems in Myanmar than Madison. The quandaries of exotic lands are more alluring than the mundane difficulties of home.\nWhat problems does Indiana have? They're easy to see along the backroads of Southern Indiana. I live in Evansville, and when I drive between campus and home I pass through many small communities whose best days are long past. Some, like Plainville (it's real name), are almost on life support. One of the largest developments in the hamlet is a federally-funded home for the elderly. My family probably owns more books than its storefront library. In Plainville, like in other small towns, retail development is limited to a gas station; buying groceries may mean a half-hour drive over curving, hilly, dangerous two-lane roads. \nEvery town has two things: a church and a liquor store. There is an almost poetic tension between the promise of a better life after death and the more immediate escape from worldly troubles. There is a more depressing contradiction between the social world of a church, where people gather, and the isolation of a liquor store, where customers walk in with money and leave with false hopes. Committed students can change lives, even save them, in these towns.\nOsha Gray Davidson, in his revealing book about Iowan rural poverty "Broken Heartland," calls places like Southern Indiana America's "rural ghetto." Here, the misery is almost all economic: Modern farm tools are so productive and Southern Indiana so hilly that the twentieth century has seen the area's economic base limited to manufacturing. \n Now those jobs are leaving, too. Designed to teach future factory workers, the state's educational system fails to nurture the people who make up what Richard Florida calls the "Creative Class," innovative knowledge workers who create progress and wealth. As a result, IU's Indiana Business Research Center projects that the populations of most Indiana metropolitan areas will hardly grow between 2000 and 2040. Anderson's population will actually decline from about 133,000 to 121,000, of which nearly a fourth will be people over the age of 65.\nThe tragedy of rural American life has gone mainly unmentioned, even as some of us have waxed rhapsodic over, say, the exportation of McDonald's to Asia. Why are we more concerned with the loss of "authentic" cultures in Thailand or Indonesia than with those of rural America? And why does lack of Third World development grab more headlines than Hoosier stagnation?\nMaybe it's just not fashionable to care about hicks and rednecks.