Act locally

I had the privilege to spend sunny mid-October days in the Miami Valley of Ohio, to stand amid a country reaping a harvest under a blue sky and abundant sunshine.

Across the American heartland the amber waves sway loudly. The dry cornstalks stand stoic in every field, jangling one another in hard slaps as the nation’s air currents come to what meteorologists describe as wind creases that show up somewhere near Topeka, Kan., and Columbus, Ohio. It’s not by chance much of our grain comes from all the land in between. Besides fertile soil and ample acreage, the wind currents collide, drying the breadbasket ahead of harvest.

By day I watched the harvesters moving row by row over expansive fields. At night I lay in my bed listening to the grain dryers running nonstop. This is Underground Railroad territory, and one farmer told me his family moved into town to shelter escaping slaves in their cellar in the 1800s, one of many “stations” in the area.

Not far away is the town of Wilberforce, named for the British abolitionist. It was a principal stop along the Underground Railroad, nurtured by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which started in nearby Xenia, Ohio.

Out-of-the-way diversity and a heritage of civil rights, it turns out, can be traced to the Rust Belt, or Trump territory.

Today the town’s population is 85 percent black. Wilberforce University, founded in 1856, is the first college in the United States owned and operated by African-Americans. Out-of-the-way diversity and a heritage of civil rights, it turns out, can be traced to the Rust Belt, or Trump territory. Politics doesn’t tell you everything about American life.

The political sphere is like the hull covering a kernel of wheat protecting the fibers growing within. It allows them to become strong, but when a grain of wheat falls to the ground, it’s the germ within that sprouts and grows. It’s ironic that while our country has been consumed with the hull, the land itself has been giving up a mighty harvest to feed our nation, and the world.

Our country not only has layered government—local, state, and federal—but a layered and varied civic life apart from government. Look around your own community, and you will probably notice: It’s the Jaycees who are putting on the Christmas parade, the Chamber of Commerce cleaning up a stretch of highway, and the churches underwriting homeless shelters.

Our earliest forefathers came to this “desolate wilderness,” in the words of English separatist William Bradford, and saw “no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour.” And out of it built a towering economy and launched a vast army that not always but often has been used for good around the world. And they enshrined freedom in the founding documents of the land—freedom as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, and as easy to go unnoticed.

Using these ingredients our communities are stocked with volunteer organizations we take for granted, secular and religious, all varieties of nongovernment organizations at grassroots levels. When you have a flat tire, who changes it in Kazakhstan? In America, it might be the 18-year-old Eagle Scout who got a badge in mechanics; or the mechanic-turned-mayor who saw you on the side of the road; or AAA, the nonprofit that began in 1902 as a federation of motor clubs publishing road maps and promoting auto safety. Not because any government agency or police state told them to, but because they could do it themselves.

Recent election cycles largely pitted conservatives against liberals—those who favor less regulation of commerce and champion the rights and freedom of the individual, against those who seek increased government reach and collectivizing people via education, housing, healthcare, and other entitlements. Not so the Trump win, as populist movements tend to look for top-down, government solutions in an effort to promote individual welfare.

Many staked their support for Donald Trump on pro-life issues and control of the courts. A freer and less fettered economy drives the volunteer organizations driving those and other causes. Not taking local flourishing for granted is a good place to start healing strife, moving ahead, and reaping a harvest.