From the Editor: Somebody please try something for a small town

The big flap a couple of weeks ago was over Jason Aldean’s country song, “Try That In A Small Town.” Aldean sings about a gun-toting rural population that won’t stand for the kind of crime that afflicts big cities.

A random punch on a sidewalk? A car-jacking? A liquor store robbery? “Well try that in a small town,” Aldean sings. “See how far you make it down the road. ‘Round here, we take care of our own.”

Aside from the vigilante tone, part of the controversy is over race, as though Aldean is defining “urban” the way the recording industry does. That is to say, Black. It doesn’t help that his video was filmed at the site of a notorious 1927 lynching.

The first thought here was, “Where has this guy been?” More than 20 years of reporting in towns of 20,000 or fewer residents makes me doubt that small-town armed robberies and random violence require big-city intervention. Our homegrown criminals are every bit as bad, thank you very much.

As for race, crime has always been an equal opportunity employer.

But a combination of YouTube lectures and newspaper stories that coincided with the Aldean fracas led to a deeper question about the small towns Aldean tries to represent.

It’s a question about the economic health of rural America.

In the last few weeks:

—A story by David J. Mitchell in the Advocate quoted LSU research as finding that three quarters of Louisiana saw more deaths than births over the last three years. The exceptions are big cities, what Mitchell describes as “prime suburbs,” and a couple of outliers, the areas around Fort Polk and Louisiana Tech.

The implication is that rural Louisiana is getting older and that younger people are going elsewhere, or at least not having as many children while they’re here.

The biggest loser on the Gulf Coast from “natural decrease” — when the number of deaths exceeds the number of births — is St. Mary.
COVID plays a role, of course. During 2020 and 2021, the pandemic toll was equal to more than 25% of the deaths you’d expect in two normal years. But even before COVID, in the 2010-20 period, St. Mary lost 9.6% of its population.

Mitchell points to a local consequence: the end of obstetrical services at Ochsner St. Mary, blamed on trends toward an aging population with fewer women of child-bearing age.

Since that story came out, the hospital board that owns the Morgan City hospital and leases it to Ochsner Health has withdrawn two tax propositions from the Oct. 14 ballot.

The proposition would have made $2 million a year and $700,000 from a tax no longer collected available to bring labor and delivery back to Ochsner St. Mary.

But no agreement with Ochsner has been reached.

—America’s wealth is increasingly concentrated in urban areas.

A Brookings Institute analysis breaks down the vote for Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The analysis isn’t about who makes the better president or who has the better policies. It uses the Biden-vs.-Trump vote as a proxy for comparing urban and rural America.

And it makes a very good proxy.

Trump carried almost 2,500 counties in 2020. Biden won only 509. Yet Biden won by nearly 7 million votes.

Here’s the zinger: Brookings says those 509 Biden counties account for 70% of the nation’s gross domestic product, which is to say 70% of the U.S. economy.

—Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor, is a very liberal economist who goes to pains to give the capitalist point of view in his UC-Berkeley lectures on YouTube.

Mostly, you hear jobs divided into two categories: manufacturing and services. Reich breaks out another category: symbolic analytical services, “tasks such as problem-solving, problem-identification, and strategic brokerage services.”

Those symbolic-analytic services are overwhelmingly creatures of urban areas, Reich says. And that’s where the biggest income growth has been for more than 30 years.

The portrait of small-town America that emerges isn’t encouraging. Like largely rural counties across the country, St. Mary is moving into a different world that we can’t really see yet.

There have been some economic wins. The Kumho tire distribution center coming to Franklin is forecast to create 200 jobs. The First Solar factory coming to Iberia Parish offers the prospect of 700 jobs, some of which will no doubt be filled by St. Mary people.

Otherwise, my observation is that our economic future could be bound up somehow with the community college campuses and hospitals in Morgan City and Franklin.

Lafayette to the west and Houma-Thibodaux to the east have been, like St. Mary, historically dependent on the energy industry. But unlike St. Mary, where the population fluctuates with the price of oil and gas, Lafayette and Houma-Thibodaux seem to have reached a critical mass of diversification.

They have the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Nicholls State, and they have vibrant, competitive hospital systems. The St. Mary health care operations and the South Louisiana Community College campuses are on a smaller scale, but they’re not nothing.

You have to start somewhere. And here we are.

Bill Decker is managing editor of the Morgan City Review.