Last week, my wife and I took our kids to rural central Ohio for a family vacation. That may sound strange, since most people vacation somewhere tropical, not the Midwest. But our family is a little odd, and leaf peeping has become something of a household tradition.
(For the uninitiated: if you don’t live somewhere that gets fall colors, you have to travel to see them. That’s a leaf-peeping trip.)
My wife and I have always loved rural America and have spent countless hours driving its rolling, tree-covered hills. We always knew we’d want to pass that appreciation on to our kids. And as you get older and start raising a family, these trips become equal parts enjoying the beauty of God’s creation and studying the cultural differences from one place to the next.
We live in Southern California, and given the state’s laws and direction, our time here is probably limited. So wherever we travel, my wife and I pay close attention to the culture around us. On the last night of this trip, as we drove back to our lodge, I told her the thing that struck me most about life in Holmes County, Ohio, compared to life in California: They don’t have as much money, but they’re not nearly as poor.
Let me explain, starting with the obvious. People in rural Ohio earn less than people in California. There are plenty of reasons for that, but plainly stated, many people see the income gap and conclude that life in Ohio must be worse, or California better. It’s a crude assumption, but in a culture fixated on the haves and have-nots, many treat it as the only measure that matters.
I’ve come to believe that wealth and poverty have far less to do with money than with attitude. In Ohio, and in much of America outside the big population centers, there is a different mentality about how to live. I’ve been to Ohio several times, but on this trip I couldn’t stop noticing how people carry themselves. Over several days, I didn’t see a single person in sweatpants or looking like they’d just rolled out of bed. Nobody was on speakerphone in public. I saw no litter and no homeless encampments, and every property looked well kept.
So how do we square the idea that lower-earning residents of rural Ohio are less poor than their higher-earning counterparts in Southern California? We start by recognizing that poverty is more a mindset than a dollar figure.
Yes, if you have so little money that you starve to death, that’s objectively worse. But starving to death, thankfully, is not something that happens to Americans simply for being poor. With that off the table, poverty has less to do with what’s in your bank account and more to do with the life you build and what you do with it.
In many ways, the people in rural central Ohio as in much of middle America have less money than the crowd who flies over them and yet they’re some of the wealthiest people in the country.
Get more of Jobob’s perspective on today’s most important stories on Turning Point Tonight, which airs Monday through Friday evenings on Real America’s Voice.
