Republicans, ambitious governors, and creepy lawyers will do what they wish; it’s not my place to tell them what to do or say.

But Joe Biden is attempting to open a dialogue with the half of the country that didn’t want him and doesn’t trust him. The half that is threatening our democracy.

I hear so many lies and conspiracy theories from the far right, I can begin to understand why so many people felt safer with the devil they know rather than the devil they don’t.

The governor of South Dakota seems to actually believe that the votes that carried Biden got in Pennsylvania were mostly dead bodies.

And President Trump is not yet ready to accept the reality of his defeat.

But still, Biden’s speech Sunday night was powerful and seemed genuine, a tonic to a frazzled nation. Let’s give each other a chance. Okay, let’s talk.

That works both ways, as comedian Dave Chapelle expressed so eloquently on Saturday Night Live last night. Remember, Trump’s supporters were us four years ago.

Be humble.

Promises and pledges mean nothing to the people who live all around me in rural America. They all voted for Trump, just about everyone.

They’ve heard too many promises for too long. A lot of Black Americans feel the same way. They don’t believe the people making the promises any longer.

America will change when the beleaguered poor of all colors and working-class white women figure out what they are not enemies and join up with one another.

That will send the billionaires and lobbyists running for their lives.

Instead of making more promises to rural America, which is solidly behind the ideas of Trumpism, it might be time to speak through deeds and actions and not just words.

It’s easy to tell other people what to do, but the door is open for now; people are paying attention.

If it were me, which it will never be, I would begin by offering small-town America some concrete things:

One is broadband Internet. Communities without the Internet are seriously disadvantaged in almost every way: education, commerce. Farmers, like small business people, need to be online. The stakes are high for them, and getting left behind now threatens a lot more than their social lives.

Today, 39 percent of rural Americans, or 23 million people, lack broadband access.  In contrast, only 4 percent of urban Americans lack access to broadband Internet.

This and many other things help explain why they hate urban Americans and see themselves increasingly left out. They really can’t talk to us or listen.

There are not enough people in most rural areas to make installation profitable for private companies; the government needs to help with the high installation cost. This is a good place for the Biden administration to start, and Republicans would lose a lot of love if they blocked it.

It’s way past time for any American not to be able to get online when they wish.

Stopping The Opioid Epidemic. This is mostly a rural epidemic, and it is devastating farm and ranch families especially hard. Our government has done little or nothing to stop this raging plague. No presidential candidate in any debate said a word about it.

Remember the federal war on alcohol? That’s what it would take to stop this epidemic, some Eliott Ness with the FBI right behind.

According to the CDC, opioids – including prescription painkillers, heroin, and fentanyl – killed more than 42,000 people in 2016, more than any year on record, with overdose rates twice as high in rural are in urban areas.

Three in four farmers and farm workers (74 percent) are or have been directly affected by opioid abuse, either by knowing someone, having a family member addicted, having taken an illegal opioid, or having dealt with addiction themselves.

Eric Eyre, a reporter for the Charleston, West Virginia Gazette-Mail, found that in six years, seventeen hundred and twenty-eight West Virginians overdosed and died, drug wholesalers dumped seven hundred and eighty million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills into the state, about four hundred and thirty-three person.

You can read about it in Eyre’s new and stunning book, Death In Mud Lick.

Poverty, joblessness, and broken communities are rising everywhere in rural America. So is the suicide rate. “Suicide rates tend to be high in rural areas in part because there is greater access to firearms, high rates of drug and alcohol use and few health-care providers and emergency medical facilities,” says Julie Goldstein Grumet, Ph.D., director of prevention and practice at the Suicide Prevention Resource Center in Washington, D.C. “It’s a lethal triad.”

From 1999 to 2016, the rate of suicide among Americans ages 25 to 64 rose by 41 percent, researchers reported in JAMA Network Open. Rates among people living in rural counties were 25 percent higher than those in major metropolitan areas.

Several factors appear to drive suicide rates in rural communities, including poverty, low income, and underemployment, said researcher and author Danielle Steelesmith, a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center.

So is the devastation caused by global trade agreements that shattered downtowns and small businesses throughout rural communities and moved tens of millions of jobs overseas. There are few good jobs left, with almost no opportunities for young people.

Federal job re-training centers were promised to laid-off rural factory workers for years but never built. If they were, it would change our constipated political dynamic almost overnight.

It would tell the people who live in these still-shattered towns that government is capable of doing something, as it did after the Great Depression (when working-class people in rural areas were almost all Democrats).

Older people here still talk about Franklin Roosevelt as a hero.

Main Street, once the proud symbol of a prosperous heartland community, is most often a Ghost Street, boarded up and deserted.

Wal-Mart has killed off many of the small businesses that remained after the trade agreements. They mostly obliterate the community, not preserve it. The government has done nothing to control or restrict them.

In rural America, small businesses and small farms were the glue that held life together. Today, they are almost all gone; the government let them die.

A massive rural reclamation program like the Tennessee Value Authority or promised Opportunity Zones would enthrall rural people, unify the country and ease what is perhaps its greatest threat – bitterly disillusion working-class people without hope or connection to the rest of their own country.

They believe a dishonest demagogue rather than their own elected leaders. That is a formula for disaster, and we have come close enough.

Life expectancies in rural America are declining and sharply. Americans in rural areas face a higher risk of dying from the five leading causes of death in the United States – heart disease, cancer, lower respiratory disease, stroke, and unintentional injuries – compared with urban areas.

Hospitals and health care facilities are closing everywhere.

In his new book Dying Of Whiteness, Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University, writes that the heartland is dying in part because politicians have persuaded the white non- a college-educated working class that programs like universal health care, gun control, massive tax cuts that reward the wealthy,  threaten them and their identity.

I know many people in my town who desperately need health care and have none nearby; their community hospital closed some years ago, it’s once beautiful hulk is rotting away upon a hillside. Nothing has replaced it. The local health center is struggling because so few of their patients are insured.

There are constant rumors of its closing.

Almost everyone in rural America (this is a neat hat trick by Republicans)  opposes the Affordable Care Act as something that takes their rights away rather than protects them. It is heartbreaking to see all of their hospitals close, and health care soars far beyond their means. They have lost any understanding of their own interests.

Socialism has become the great bugaboo of Trumpism, how odd because Democrat Socialism (Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands) would radically improve, not diminish his supporters’ lives. He has persuaded them otherwise.

The politicians they trust claim helping the poor will lead to socialism, communism, the loss of important freedoms,  and higher taxes. They believe gun control – which is the leading cause of white male suicide in rural communities – would threaten “white man’s privilege” and take away their political power.

The belief is that guns protect them from dangerous socialists.

Trump administration policies have often been based on white identity. Donald Trump gained considerable traction in his first campaign by playing to anxieties about white victimhood about mostly imagined threats by refugees “Mexicans and welfare queens.”

These policies have also bred suspicion between the poor whites and the poor people of other colors. Rather than link up, they fight each other, not the people who are oppressing them.

Rural America desperately needs a health care program – small rural hospitals, the only health care available, are closing by the thousands. Many counted on their states expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which would have increased the number of insured patients, and at least get some payment from millions of the rural uninsured.

But states like Missouri and Texas, and South Dakota refused to join.

The lack of insured patients has wreaked havoc on small and rural small patients for some years, especially in states that didn’t expand Medicaid.

The Covid-19 has dramatically decreased the number of small rural hospitals just when they are needed the most. Even the famed Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, serves and employs many rural residents –  laid off or cut pay fr 30,000 employees nationwide.

Massive job losses caused by Covid-19 have caused more than 27 million people to lose their employer-based coverage; the industrial Midwest, part of heartland America, is especially hard hit.

America’s political dynamic is that powerful corporate interests have managed to persuade rural Americans that the very programs that would help restore their jobs and communities are part of a Communist or Marxist plot to take their freedoms from them.

This is what Jonathan Metzl means when he talks about how the politics of racial resistance are literally killing the heartland. Trump is the Grand Moster of racial resentment.

The far-right has been working and lobbying hard for the smaller government for years. Smaller government means less regulation for big corporations.

Trump was a master at this sleight of hand, this delusion.

His great tax cut was a boon to the rich, say economists, but did nothing for the middle class or his often very needy followers. Yet he managed to persuade almost all of rural America that their troubles were coming from “radical left socialists.”

Before Donald Trump could implement all of his agenda, reporters, sociologists, and economists warned that his proposals would most hurt the working-class white population who have formed the core of his base.

I’ve asked scores of Trump supporters online what they think socialism is, not one could tell me.

Part of the problem is that these beleaguered Americans have only heard from one side of the political spectrum – Republicans and corporate-sponsored lobbyists and politicians, backed by people like the Koch Brothers.

The Democratic Party has ignored rural people for years in favor of the affluent urban elites and the global trade economy. Yet they are stunned by the hostility rural people have for them. What, exactly, did they expect?

The truth is the Democrats have done a horrible, almost criminal job of failing to speak or listen to the very people they desperately need to talk to and listen t0.

Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who knows something about connecting to voters, says the secret is “engagement.” You can’t just talk to them every four years; you have to talk to them every day.

Why would these people know these things – these truths – when almost all of their information is coming from one side?  Trump talks to rural America all day, every day, in his tweets, his rallies, and his outrageous lies and rants.

There isn’t a day when he isn’t communicating with white working-class America.

One part of Joe Biden’s Unity Agenda – and the agenda of the Democratic Party –  might be to talk to these people as well as listen. To do what he’s good at, visit them, and press the flesh and empathize with their problems.

U.S. Senator Amy Klochubar is a white urban liberal; she wins elections in rural areas all the time. That is because she speaks with them and understands their troubles.

I can’t say it’s easy, but it isn’t brain surgery either.

The GOP has been doing it for years. Even Tucker Carlson of Fox News told Donald Trump that the people who voted for him would suffer if the Affordable Care Act were repealed.

“Yeah, O.K., I know that,” he responded. And then filed suit to abolish the ACA. He didn’t lose a rural vote.

It is important for all Americans, Democrats, and liberals, for sure, to understand this shocking dichotomy – more than 70 million people voting for the very worst things that can happen to them.

Maybe Joe Biden would like to visit rural people once in a while.

The new logic of campaigning is for candidates to only go to places they know they can win. It seems strange to me that they would ignore places that oppose them, and then be shocked when they get no votes.

It’s still somewhat beyond me, but I sure hope someone in Joe Biden’s new regime is thinking about it. They ran a brilliant campaign. Perhaps they can run another one.

I see almost every day that rural America, once the proud beating heart of America, is now too often a hopeless, neglected,  and devastated wasteland.

It’s no surprise to anyone living here that the country is splitting into two parts, each one increasingly estranged from the other.

The good news is that Biden seems to know this. He has begun a dialogue with the very people who most passionately oppose him.

I’m looking forward to seeing what it is he has in mind to do about it. In many ways, our country depends on it. I like to think it would matter to all those people around me who voted for Donald Trump.