With small towns shrinking and services eroding, many Dakotans retain an appalling innocence about what it means to be rural in contemporary America. The year we lost our J.C. Penney store, young people were quoted in the town’s weekly newspaper as saying they’d like to see a McDonald’s or a K Mart open in its place. Somehow they have not grasped that in modern American capitalism, which they defend vociferously in the annual American Legion Auxiliary essay contest, the market is everything. Since there is no market here, nothing that counts demographically, we don’t exist.
Kathleen Norris
Dakota
