Skip to main content

Open letter to our Governor

Governor Ricketts, 


Thank you for your leadership during this global pandemic, I will never know the hard decisions that come across your desk everyday.  I have been a supporter of yours since your campaign in 2014.  However, I feel that there have been moments during this crises that you are missing what is important to our state.  


Nebraska, is an agricultural state, which of course you know, but are you aware of how much farmers have been struggling the last few years.  The price of corn has not been great for awhile now, and many farmers are still recovering from the flooding of last year.  And now with the global pandemic, the market is at rock bottom. (I hope!)  All this stress is piling up on our farmers; physically, mentally, and financially.  And arguably rural Nebraska is the backbone of our great state. 


I can not speak for all farmers of course, but some folks out in rural Nebraska feel that you may have forgotten the situation out here.  We feel like this because it seems as though you might be more worried about our kids playing sports, and college football, than you are about our kids starting school at the scheduled time in the fall, or opening our state back up safely.


Sports for kids is extremely important, and for some, it is their safe space out of school.  And I am very aware of our kids physical and mental health. But are we really ready?  The county I live in currently has 9 official cases of COVID-19, but does that even seem possible?  I could be extremely wrong about this, but all the counties surrounding ours have rising numbers of cases, and we do not have anymore than last week.  Again, I am not an expert, but are we really testing as much as we should or can?  Could we bring some testing from the larger urban areas into the rural areas to see if some of these areas are actually as low as we think?  


I am just a farm wife, mother, and librarian but I feel that you have forgotten rural Nebraska, and sold us out.  We need testing out here, we need to know that you care about the workers on the frontline, we need to get the economy started safely, we need help in marketing our grain here and over seas. And we, the residents of Nebraska, need this before we worry about summer and fall sports.  

Sincerely yours, 

Rural Nebraska 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Where is my Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

Where is my Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Warning : Politics and religion will be discussed, if this will offend you, please stop reading now.  If you are still with me, grab a cup of coffee and let’s go. I don’t know about you, but I really do not like this presidential campaign.  There are very few candidates that I like, depending on the poll that you look at, I don’t like the top three.  Social media has been on fire with this lately, of course, with people campaigning for their favorite candidate and their ideas to save the world. And this is perfectly fine, even though I strongly disagree with most of them. The world to me seems so divisive, and angry.  Even though I’m a news junkie I occasionally think about living in a cave until November.  But this is not an option.  I was really feeling down, when I heard the news of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, and the fight over his vacant seat didn’t help.   I almost got lost ...

A spin around the garden with Big Beasty

Every time Farmer Brown is in the field for planting, harvesting, or any other task that needs to be done for crops, it is inevitable that I will have to learn something new.  Today it was running the big tiller, or as I like to call it “Big Beasty.”  If unfamiliar with a roto-tiller, it is a piece of gardening equipment that has blades that break up the earth to help with planting and weed control.  Big Beasty is big, and heavy, we are talking most of my weight and almost as tall as I am!  I have done my best to avoid learning how to start and run this tiller, but today was the day to learn.  F.B. had tilled the garden earlier in the Spring but due to heavy rains, the soil had crusted over.  I needed to take care of some weeds, replant a couple plants, and finally finish planting the rest of the garden since it is the middle of May already.  I tried our small tiller but realized it was not big enough to break through the thick crust of soil in th...

Thank You President Obama

In November 2008, a new first-time mom was watching election results.  She was horrified with the results, how could the country have betrayed her so, why would they vote this man into office, a man who wanted to change her country.  She was scared not only was she trying to figure out how to be a wife, and new mother but now the country she felt safe in was changing.  That new mother was me, I didn’t like President Obama winning the 2008 and 2012 elections, I felt that our country was going to hell in a hand basket, and frankly am too young to feel that way.  Shortly after the election we moved to a farm, and I was still scared about what the direction of the country was going with President Obama.  And I decided I wanted to find a way to help my family in case a major event occurred that disrupted life as we knew it.  Seems a little irrational doesn’t it?  Maybe, but people that I respected and trusted told me this was going to happen and immine...