Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/USA Today Network: Election showed we're more divided than ever. Fix can be found in farm fields.
Looking back now, I can recognize it as our country’s deepest divisions brewing — there in the hills of southern Wisconsin, as my dad drove his pickup past the farms disappearing around us.
Some independent family farms like ours were going under, or simply falling idle, their once proud barns fading with nobody to keep them up. Others were selling to bigger operations. Some were bought by hobbyists from Chicago escaping urban life to bird-watch as much as grow food.
These were the “hippie farms,” which when I was a kid looked more like an art fair than a farm to a third-generation farmer like my dad. “I don’t know what they’re doin’ over there,” he’d say.
It was mainly a good-natured gap between those with rural roots and urban sensibilities then, but it predated a more bitter divide between rural and urban voters we see today.