Turn Kansas Green!
What to do with the "red" states? Steve Ongerth says we should "turn the 'red' states deep green".
...we must set our sites on the deepest of the so-called "red" states in America's heartland. This ever increasingly fearful and hysterical bastion of religious fundamentalism is well described, in microcosmic fashion by Thomas Frank in "What's The Matter With Kansas?" Essentially religious fundamentalism has taken root and gained strength because the followers of the fundamentalist leaders have been ripe for manipulation. The typical followers of religious fundamentalists are not necessarily inherently right-wing zealots. Most of them are struggling farmers and low-wage workers whose economic prosperity has been devastated by the very same Republicans they so blindly and loyally follow. Why? Because the Democrats, since 1973, haven't even really *pretended* to fight for the interests of the working class or small farmer in America. The Republicans don't either. Instead they choose to campaign on issues that appeal to the prejudices of the inhabitants these rural states, because at least they can somehow show a difference between them and the Democratic leadership who tend to be upper-middle class and not at all sympathetic to workers, unions, and small farmers. The same could be said of business union bureaucrats (though Thomas Frank doesn't discuss them in "What's the Matter With Kansas?", the criticism fits them equally well).If you want to read more about this, there are lots of links at the end of Ongerth's article. And, by the way, if Thomas Frank's book wasn't already a huge hit before the election, it certainly is now. If Rove read Frank's book and planned the Bush campaign accordingly, it would not have looked any different.
Yet there is no reason why these rural working class Americans must be Christian fundamentalists. 100 years ago, the ancestors of these current fundamentalists were largely left-wing populists, Wobblies, and even socialists. Some of them were deeply religious. Many had "backwards" views about some issues, but such things can be unlearned over time. They turned to the far left because there was a vibrant left wing workers' and farmers' movement (in fact there were several) which spoke to their immediate economic and material needs (unlike today).
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Fortunately there is a golden opportunity staring us squarely in the face. America is addicted to foreign oil and has a fossil fuel addiction. But renewable energy offers a healthy alternative to this problem if we could only develop the resources. The development of those resources would require manufacturing the equipment needed to produce them, and that would create jobs. These would not be low-end Walmart or McDonalds jobs, but good paying, highly skilled jobs. There would need to be many of them. These could even be union jobs (and I think they should). It is also an amazing coincidence that some of the reddest states are the plains states where wind energy has enormous potential. In the current issue of the magazine Solar Today (www.solartoday.com) Thomas Starrs, the chair of the American SOlar Energy Society (ASES) notes that 'the United States has been called "The Saudi Arabia" of wind energy because of the vast untapped potential of wind energy resources across much of the North and Midwest.' States that not only voted for Bush, but *heavily* for Bush including Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming, as well as weaker Bush States, such as Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, and New Mexico are all ripe for wind energy systems.
