I think my politics are pretty obvious, even though I don’t like to write  about politics the on the blog, it’s not what the blog is about. But living in rural America, my soul bleeds for what the economists, politicians, trade agreements and bureaucrats have done to this word.

Rural America has been hallowed out, its Main Streets ravaged by box stores, it’s factories and farms dying or gone, it’s very heart and culture sucked away by rich cities and urban planners.

These towns and cities have been ravaged and abandoned for so long, there is very little memory of security and prosperity. Rural America’s children have migrated to cities to work in jobs they hate for people who care nothing about them.

People here don’t follow their callings anymore, they have jobs, they earn what they can when their can. Many thousands of the rural  young die from opioids every year while the rich get tax cuts they don’t need. The giant agri-farms keep their cows and pigs and chickens on concrete their whole lives and kill them the minute they can’t produce what they used to produce.

The family dairy farms are almost ground, the survivors handing on by their fingernails.

As a kind of hybrid artist – a writer and photographer, I am drawn to this landscape – poverty and loss against a beautiful backdrop, and also against despair and disconnection. Donald Trump is no surprise to me or anybody who lives here, he was long over due. If not him, someone else would have noticed the hollowing out of the country and exploited it.

The people up here are so desperate for someone to notice and care. They would have elected Daffy Duck if he made the right noises. I first saw this red farm truck abandoned off the side of a busy road a year ago. It still sits there, and will probably be sitting there in 50 years.

The rural landscape is barren sometimes, set against the beauty of mother nature. A contradiction always. It is not pretty, but it s beautiful in its own way – abandoned farmhouses, trucks, cars, tractors, the detritus of a once vibrant and prosperous world.

Real farms were never the picture postcards they sell in Vermont, they are filled with junk and used things that might be pillaged for parts down the road. No farmer buys anything new. Now most of the farmers are gone, but they have left behind symbols and monuments to their rich and powerful family culture.

I want to capture some of those images in photos before they are all gone.