By RUSSELL FOX
Insight Kansas
I recently read the manuscript of a soon-to-be-published scholarly book looking at one of Kansas’s major cities. It was filled with sharp observations and smart ideas; when it’s published, I’ll buy copies of it for all my local representatives, in hopes that they’ll read it and learn something. But there’s one point in the manuscript that I can’t get out of my head.
When the author–who, like me, is not a Kansas native–arrived in the Sunflower state, they were struck by how the city they were moving to seemed to sprout out of the ground without warning. Flying into a Kansas airport, the book suggests, you look around, seeing nothing but farmland, and then suddenly a city is there, seemingly at random. The point being that Kansas’s urban areas--with Kansas City’s agglomeration of Overland Park and Olathe, Leavenworth and Lenexa, being the sole exception–are stand-alone entities, the product of geographic happenstance or boundary-line-drawing rooted decades, or even centuries, in the past.
Cities everywhere are both products and providers of connectivity; making connections and pursuing opportunities is why people congregate together, why businesses and investment capital flow to urban areas. So when you see a solitary city or town standing in an otherwise entirely rural space, there is the temptation to wonder how “real” a place it actually is.
Given that global trade and internet communication means that no city or town, no matter how small, is truly disconnected any longer, this kind of wondering is more a matter of perception than reality. Unless, of course, the perception becomes a self-imposed trap, and thus accidentally, or perhaps preemptively, sets the terms for the real-world decisions that follow.
That kind of self-referential trapping is not unusual in Kansas, I fear. There are positive aspects to it, of course; it can encourage people to focus on their local resources, adding to the culture of our state by supporting and celebrating the creativity that can be found in local places. But too often this dynamic takes a negative tone, whether it be a defiant pride in disconnection, or a hopelessness that dismisses new connections and possibilities before they’ve even been tried.
Look at Kansas politics through this frame, and you can see examples everywhere. State policies that could be easily adapted to Kansas’s population–like Medicaid expansion, legal medical marijuana, and more–face opposition from political interests that mostly offer a simple “it won’t work here” rather than any serious policy argument. Counties with farmers looking to bring in additional income and companies happy to pay them to install solar arrays face onerous regulations instead, because otherwise “people will complain.” Cities trying to manage their slow growth by establishing more reliable revenue streams, reconsidering the costs of an overbuilt infrastructure, free parking, and mill levies that haven’t been touched in decades, shy away from moving forward, fearing that Kansans are “too cheap” to ever pay for improving public goods.
Obviously such perceptions don’t explain everything about these disputes; political disagreements, backed by powerful partisan interests, are real, and simple boosterism won’t change that. But pushing back against the idea that certain things just “can’t happen in Kansas” is nonetheless important, I think, because that’s a perception rooted in an assumption based on Kansas’s spatiality, its supposed disconnectedness, and not on our common resources and will.
The fact that there are, and always have been, many throughout Kansas’s cities and towns willing to do that kind of pushing back is evidence enough that the political powers that be aren’t the whole story. That’s my hopeful perception, at least.
Dr. Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita, KS.