A protest, like the old days?

Nationally, this looks like a year of revolt, but most of that activism seems centered in cities and suburbs rather than rural places. But rural places have been hit hard by a sequence of events, not of especially recent making but certainly of recent exacerbation. In the Inlander:

Scarily real, agrees Read Smith, a Whitman County wheat farmer near St. John.

“We’re in a desperate cost/price squeeze right now. The fertilizers we use are petroleum-based, and the fuel we need to run everything is up and we’re being squeezed bad. The price we get for almost everything we produce is flat and has been for 30 years,” Smith says.

“So we’re living off equity, and Main Street is suffering. In Endicott there’s no café, no tavern, no drug store. There’s a food center and a bank and a post office and that’s it,” Smith says. “Go to many small communities in the 5th District and Main Street is empty. People are gone, the shops are closed, the schools are shrinking and the churches are suffering — and there doesn’t seem to be a real grasp that this is happening.”

So far, they’ve mostly been sitting there and taking it. But not entirely. The Inlander noted that last fall, “Democratic Sen. Patty Murray swung by the Harvester Restaurant in Spangle and found a standing-room-only crowd packing the place to discuss troubles in farm country.