Urbanites, their Rural Sustainers, the Popular Vote and the Electoral College approach to Democracy
Preamble
Let me first say that I have lived and worked extensively in both Rural and Urban settings over my 70 plus years on this earth. I have voted both left and right during my life, always considering the merits of the arguments of the day. I don’t have an ideological preference based on party for the purpose of this post.
As the World turns
The Physical Reality of the USA is that the bulk of the population (over 80%) is concentrated in a small aggregated Urban chunk of the country’s geographical footprint (about 3%).
Living Urban allows the citizenry to delegate and offload the intense and time consuming human requirement to be self-sufficient competent universal problem solvers. In such a concentrated social setting, the economies of scale and commerce allow for narrow verticals for everything imaginable. No need to grow or hunt for your food, figure out how to store it, worry about massive energy needs, how to personally mitigate / resolve issues or anything like MacGyver would have to do just to get by. It’s all readily available, from niche skills like sewing on buttons to commuting home on the ‘A’ train. If you don’t like the service, simply tweet a complaint to the Urban bureaucracy in charge to get it fixed. Done- Next!
Rarely does an Urbanite give a second thought about whether the toilet will flush, or how the condo is actually heated and cooled, where the gas and electricity comes from, how the food gets to the supermarket, or what the myriad of mandatory resource requirements are, constantly inbound in the flux to maintain the City’s heartbeat.
Urban concentrations require gargantuan feeder systems, drawing food supplies and raw materials from across vast expanses of the (so called rural) country’s infrastructure in order to thrive and survive. They rarely think about or appreciate those massive inbound external energy grids, highways, water systems, hydro dams, railroads, communication networks, feeder farmlands and so on that are absolutely vital to their very concentrated and fragile existence.
They need to give their heads a shake if they think they can survive without their Rural Cousins cooperative support. If the country’s extensive flyover geography for the various feeder chains decided to pull up the inbound drawbridge even for a few weeks, it would classify as a category 5 crisis for the concrete jungles.
Be thankful the broader democratic system understands that without the whole geographical land base democratically agreeing to insert the country’s lifeblood intravenous machines into the Cities’ arteries, there can be no show. Urbanites, by their chosen path, are typically not “MacGyver ready” for their selfish survival without the full cooperation of the other 97% of the physical rural land base delivering the goods and services to their doors.
The Popular Vote meme, by its dominant 80%+ Urban weighting on a pinpoint strip of the total geography will always reflect an urban bias, and can easily drown out the 97% physical geographical resource base of the Country’s rural vote to their own detriment and folly.
Hence, we get to the Electoral College. The basic democratic process compromised as implemented understands that it needs to balance the voices of the comparatively few rural sustainers doing the heavy lifting against the overwhelming popular consensus of the demanding urban dwellers for the leader. It’s not perfect because it’s a compromise and always remember, despite the seemingly marked differences of voting opinion you still need each other to make the Country work.
If you are on the losing side of this particular chapter, you need to try and understand why you lost the high ground after two successful wins, not how you can try and make it the winner’s fault by spinning it as their deplorable stupidity. Get to work and do some convincing with those who did the ousting, else you will surely lose again. Don’t you see that whining and backbiting makes you look worse and convinces “the deplorable” tide that they were probably right?
-the old man
country living c/w deer, raccoons, rabbits, squirrels and a blue heeler
