Who wants to be Tennessee?

 

The vegetation in the Tennessee mountains is less lush even though, geologically, they are part of the same mountain chain. The roads are gravelly and crumbling. Even the paint on the road signs is fading and the lettering indistinct. The state is just shabbier than North Carolina, and rather depressing.

 

Now, Tennessee is still a fast-growing state. It's not a benighted, provincial backwater like Mississippi that's an afterthought to the rest of the country. But most of the in-migrants are moving to Nashville, a liberal outlier, and the rest of the state is largely dilapidated and left-behind.

 

I'm concerned this is what will become of North Carolina. Raleigh and Charlotte are, respectively, the fourth- and eleventh-fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. Raleigh was one of the leading job-creating cities in the country between 2019-2021, along with other Sun Belt powerhouses including Nashville. Our two largest cities will almost certainly continue to thrive. 

 

But the rest of our state us far less prosperous--and also far more dependent upon public services. Cuts to rural economic development, mental health, and the draining away of rural education funding by school vouchers are helping to send rural North Carolina deeper into decline. The GOP has deliberately gutted the scaffolding of support for rural North Carolina at a time when our state increasingly faces crushing geographical inequality.

 

Is this what we want? To be a state with a couple of robust cities and millions of people living in hopeless neglect?

 

Do we want to be Tennesse?

 

I hope not. Esse quam videri.