Biden administration must include rural poor in his policies

As Inauguration Day approaches, our president-elect is quite aware that he will begin his term of office in a bitterly divided time in our history. Even as the unforgettable year of 2020 came to a close, President Donald Trump was still desperately clinging to the claim that he won an election already certified by all the states and after the ballots had been cast by the Electoral College. The divisions Joe Biden inherits are partisan, ideological, racial, economic, generational, religious, geographic, issue-based, identity-based and involve crossover in these and other categories.

A close look at the electoral maps reveals much more complexity than the mere labels of red and blue, even though the Electoral College system depends almost exclusively on the party vote of each state. Within states of either hue, there are red districts and blue districts, which largely represent the urban-rural divide of the country. This demographic division is but one characterization of our factions, which often seem to exist in separate worlds even in the midst of a pandemic with global reach.

Since the moment of his election, Joe Biden has insisted that he will be a president for all Americans, not only his fellow Democrats. While this would have traditionally been too obvious to state, it is now critical for the nation to hear. From the perspective of Catholic social teaching, one area in which the new president might begin to address the divide and promote the common good would be a genuine engagement in the issues of rural poverty. Poverty in the United States is clearly not limited to heavily concentrated urban populations. With the challenge of large distances and the relative lack of services in many rural and less populated areas of the nation, the experience of poverty can even be more desperate there.

Most of the dioceses in the United States, despite their urban centers, contain some expanses of rural America. My own Diocese of Lexington includes 40 counties of one of the historically poorest regions of the nation, Appalachia. While cultural and geographic riches abound in this part of the country, the poverty rate can be up to 41% in the region. The residents of economically impoverished rural areas see themselves quite differently than their counterparts in urban areas. They are also tired of hearing promises from candidates and elected officials who want their votes but rarely if ever deliver on their promises.

The decline of the coal industry, once a major employer in the region, as well as the loss of other manufacturing jobs resulting from free trade policies has had a major impact. As the 2015 "People's Pastoral" letter of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia states well, the most common jobs in many parts of Appalachia are minimum wage service jobs that provide little job security, insufficient income and no opportunities for workers to organize.

Unemployment and underemployment can easily result in dependency on the welfare system, along with the departure of the young from the region in search of better opportunities. Decreased populations lead to the closure of businesses, which then contributes to increased food insecurity. Cheap and unhealthy food is readily available in places of rural poverty, but grocery stores with healthy options can be few and far between.

The health care issues created by food insecurity are compounded by the mental health issues associated with joblessness and chronic poverty, too often leading to alcohol and drug addiction, which in turn increase the incidents of domestic violence, homelessness and imprisonment that are often experienced in a cyclic way.