Yesterday, we ran an opinion piece by Salena Zito about — broadly — the evolution of the Rust Belt and the comparisons of the silence then to the ruckus now regarding the jobs being lost by government workers.

If you haven’t read it, we would highly recommend it, however, this section particularly stood out to us:

“The people here, it seems, were expendable to the elite. They had no college education, did not live in the right ZIP codes, and besides, someone overseas could do what they do.

Had the Mahoning Valley been hit by a rocket, the region would have looked no less hollowed out only a few years later.”

This experience is emblematic of rural America.

It is many of our towns that house toxic or dangerous industries.

It is many of our sons and daughters that risk injury and trauma, or die overseas fighting for America.

A few weeks ago, we published an Our View regarding the urgent need to build local resources and resiliency in the face of an unreliable federal government. In that editorial, we warned of the potential ripple effect that could be coming our way if and when Medicaid and Medicare were cut.

“But, data shows that in Clinton County, just over 30% of residents are on one of these programs. In Centre County, 20% of their residents are on one of these plans — a lower percentage, but consider their higher population count: nearly 160,000 compared to Clinton County’s nearly 40,000,” we wrote in that editorial.

The first step towards this future was taken by the U.S. House of Representatives late Tuesday night, with the House eyeing “$880 billion in cuts over the decade to the committee that handles health care spending, including Medicaid, for example, or $230 billion to the agriculture committee that funds food stamps,” according to AP reporting on the preliminary budget bill.

Note the word preliminary.

We don’t know where this will end up yet, and we won’t for several months while the proposed budget works its way through endless committees and meetings before being recombined into a final bill. It is even admittedly possible that legislators will find a way to manage to implement the prescribed cuts without harming Medicaid and SNAP.

To complete the data from earlier, by the way, as of 2022, there were 5,637 SNAP recipients in Clinton County, or 15% of the total population.

We are a poor, rural community. We may be rich in many ways — the strength of that community and the ways in which we support one another, the wealth of natural resources like parks, hiking and hunting that surrounds us, and so forth — but materially?

Materially, we have been abandoned for years. We are in the bottom third of poorest counties in Pennsylvania, with a 13.1% poverty rate. The city of Lock Haven, taken by itself, has a 25% poverty rate.

We may not be the community Zito wrote about in Ohio, but we certainly rhyme with them.

And, while our quality of life may not be great by some standards, it’s been fine. It’s been…life. We have been propped up by federal systems like Medicaid, allowing our citizens to access healthcare they otherwise would never be able to afford.

Now, with severe cuts to these safety nets taking another step towards reality, we reiterate our previous sentiment:

If we are to be abandoned, then we must find ways to stand on our own — locally and regionally — or be faced with community-wide suffering.

What do you expect will happen when the 15% of residents who rely on SNAP see their benefits reduced or removed? How will they eat?

What do you expect will happen when the 30% of residents who rely on Medicaid or Medicare see their healthcare coverage reduced or removed? How will they afford insurance — and what impact will that have on our small, local businesses?

It has been unwise to rely so heavily on the federal government this long, and we must come up with solutions to ensure our survival in its absence or diminishment.

The people in the Mahoning Valley may have been viewed as expendable.

The people here may be viewed as expendable.

But we know the truth: we are not expendable.

We have lives worth living and culture and heritage worth preserving. We have value, and it’s past time we figured out, as a community, how to make sure that value endures in the face of adversity.

We can’t trust someone else to do it for us anymore.