The Omaha World-Herald recently featured a passage from Nebraska author Wright Morris’s book, “The Home Place” that strikes at the heart of living on the Plains:

“Anyone who was born and raised on the plains knows that the high false front on the Feed Store, and the white water tower, are not a question of vanity. It’s a problem of being. Of knowing you are there. On a good day, with a slanting sun, a man can walk to the edge of his town and see the light on the next town, ten miles away. In the sea of corn, that flash of light is like a sail.

“It reminds a man the place is still inhabited.”

Like Puritan minister John Winthrop’s famous comparison of early New England to a “city on a hill” that serves as an example to the rest of the world, communities on the Plains are not just groupings of people; they are statements of a destiny made manifest.  From Winthrop’s time onward many have believed that it is America’s destiny to be exceptional, to serve as an example of what free people can achieve.  So fundamental to our young nation’s psyche was this concept that it became known as Manifest Destiny, a belief that we were destined to transform this continent.

Right or wrong, we did whatever it took.  We spread across North America as conquerors, overcoming not only the Native Americans but often Nature herself with our ingenuity, self-reliance and faith in the future.  Each building that arose on the Plains was a symbol of the transformation of the Great American Dessert into an outpost of our civilization.

Those early buildings also stood as symbols of defiance in the face of both the flat, featureless land and the poverty of those first settlers who had lived in dwellings made from dirt and had burned buffalo dung for warmth.  For we had come here not just to survive; we had come here to prosper and grow.

As strangers in a strange land our communities, as Morris noted, reminded people of who they were.  They were the envoys of freedom, the vanguard of civilization.  They were the storied “huddled masses” not just yearning to be free, but actualizing that freedom with the sweat of their brows.  Though drawn from all backgrounds and often speaking different languages, these pioneers shared an unshakable belief in the potential not just of a new land, but the potential within themselves to build a better world.

Civilization on the Plains is slowly but surely receding.  While Nebraska’s population exploded from 28,841 in 1860 to 452,402 in 1880, rural populations have been dropping for nearly a century now.  Declining populations have severely impacted the health of rural communities, not just economically, but socially as well.

Because they were originally built by immigrants from many places all seeking to make their fortunes, rural communities were a microcosm of America itself – culturally diverse and economically vital.  And because they sought to establish a new and better world, they were proactive in creating a rich and nourishing cultural infrastructure, an infrastructure of education and the arts that allowed pioneer settlements to rise from merely surviving to enjoying the cultural richness of the societies they had left behind.

But over time out-migration and the aging of those who remain has caused the economic and social infrastructure of many rural communities to crumble, draining them of their vitality, creativity and hope in the process.

More and more residents of rural Nebraska must now work two or even three jobs to survive (leaving little time or energy for social and cultural activities).  We are slipping back into merely surviving and in the process betraying the fundamental hope that drove our pioneer ancestors to suffer and sacrifice for a better tomorrow.

We seem to have forgotten that as the beneficiaries of their labor and vision, we have a responsibility to keep their legacy alive.  The development of the Plains was not completed during the lives of the pioneers – the development of the Plains is an ongoing process, a process that unless actively pursued will fail.

We still stand today a city on a hill.  How we honor the efforts begun by our ancestors will demonstrate not only to the rest of the world but to our own selves what kind of people we are.  Because as the original pioneers knew only too well, when it comes to building better tomorrows, giving up is not an option.