Jennifer Vogt-Erickson: Area is united in fight to keep full-service hospital
Published 9:00 pm Monday, August 14, 2017
My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson
I’m a rural person deep at heart — descended from generations of Norwegian and German farmers who eventually settled in Minnesota and the Dakotas. The first time I resided inside city limits was in a college dorm room on the edge of pastoral Morris. Since then I’ve lived in places ranging from metropolitan to wilderness, but Albert Lea seemed like a familiar place from the first day I moved here as a newlywed exactly 12 years ago.
Twelve years is the longest either my husband or I have lived anywhere, and we’ve built our lives together here. After last fall’s election, though, I suddenly felt uprooted. To me, Donald Trump is the antithesis of many rural values I learned growing up — modesty, integrity, dedication to community, stewardship of the land, etc. Yet it’s indisputable that Trump would never have carried the Electoral College without the strength of his turnout in rural areas like Freeborn County.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson
I guess you could say I was having a rural identity crisis. Maybe my frame of reference is too embedded in the Populist and New Deal eras. My grandpa was a young boy when his father joined the Non-Partisan League to counter the power of bankers and railroads over small farmers. North Dakota came out of that movement nearly 100 years ago with a socialized bank which still operates today, the only one of its kind in the 50 states.
As a young man, my grandpa developed an abiding reverence for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal programs that helped him and many other farmers hang on to the dried out plains through the devastating Great Depression. He was proud of his rural electric cooperative, joined his co-op oil association, and belonged to Farmers Union.
One of the most important ideas my grandfather and great-grandfather passed down to me is that when people are united, they are stronger than any other entity. Government is the people, and it should serve the needs of the people. These men knew tools, and they understood government is one of the best tools to solve problems that are bigger than ourselves. Alongside member cooperatives and unions, government gives people leverage against corporations that can otherwise wield crushing power over individuals, including small farmers.
Thus, it’s deeply ironic to me how the majority of farmers and rural residents are presently politically aligned with price makers and other corporate agriculture interests headquartered in big cities. They vote decisively for representatives who support policies that increase inequality of wealth, which amasses mainly in metropolitan areas, hollowing out rural communities.
I was kind of used to that, but Trump is something else entirely. I’m still at a loss to see what people prefer in Trump, especially those who once supported Obama, other than that he’s a vessel for their cynicism over our badly broken political system. Money has distorted the entire process, even at the state representative level, and our elections have become auctions. The only people truly having their economic interests represented are in the top 0.1 percent of income.
I won’t claim that Democrats are much better than Republicans, especially in nominating a corporate-friendly presidential candidate, so maybe it makes sense to vote for a dissembling, grandstanding man whose hair resembles a lit match. It’s understandable, albeit rash, to want to burn this theater of purchased politicians down.
Trump is everything my grandfather would have given a dismissive snort to, but he died a generation ago — before our political and media landscapes changed dramatically with Fox News, internet, war trudging well into a second decade, fallout from the mortgage crisis and Citizens United. I can’t say where he would have stood now, and that added to my dislocation.
But something happened that snapped me out of my unmoored disillusionment. And that, of course, is Mayo’s announcement to pull inpatient services from our hospital. Suddenly there is unity in our community where there had been ugly partisan divisions. We are in overwhelming agreement that we want to keep a full-service hospital.
Here it is, a powerful entity that raises our insurance costs with its higher prices and then decides to move vital healthcare resources from our community toward its flagship without our consent. It does it for its own best interests, not ours. As individuals, we are powerless to stop this move. Together, and only together, we have a chance. We also need legal help, an objective press and support from our elected officials. (Ahem, Senators Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar?)
Hundreds of people have given a dismissive snort to Mayo’s narrative of “inevitability” and have stepped forward to fight for our hospital. This is the dedication to community that I have always been proud of in rural areas, and it’s reinvigorating to see it smash through our partisan divisions now.
Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.