Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [39]
As a result, while public schools account for two-thirds of Ravalli County local government spending, that spending as a percentage of personal income stands last among 24 rural western U.S. counties comparable to Ravalli County, and personal income itself is low in Ravalli County. Even by the low school-funding standards of the state of Montana, Ravalli County school funding stands out as low. Most Ravalli County school districts keep their spending down to the absolute minimum required by Montana state law. The average salaries of Montana schoolteachers rank among the lowest in the U.S., and especially in Ravalli County those low salaries plus soaring land prices make it hard for teachers to afford housing.
Montana-born children are leaving the state because many of them aspire to non-Montana lifestyles, and because those who do aspire to Montana lifestyles can’t find jobs within the state. For instance, in the years since Steve Powell graduated from Hamilton High School, 70% of his classmates have left the Bitterroot Valley. Without exception, all of my friends who chose to live in Montana discussed, as a painful subject, whether their children had remained or would come back. All eight of Allen and Jackie Bjergo’s children, and six of Jill and John Eliel’s eight children, are now living outside Montana.
To quote Emil Erhardt again, “We in the Bitterroot Valley export children. Outside influences, like TV, have now made our children aware of what’s available outside the valley, and what’s unavailable inside it. People bring their children here because of the outdoors, and because it’s a great place to bring up kids, but then their children don’t want the outdoors.” I recall my own sons, who love coming to Montana to fish for two weeks in the summer but are accustomed to the urban life of Los Angeles for the rest of the year, expressing shock as they came out of a Hamilton fast-food restaurant and realized how few urban recreational opportunities were available to the local teenagers who had just waited on them. Hamilton has the grand total of two movie theatres, and the nearest mall is 50 miles away in Missoula. A similar shock grows on many of those Hamilton teenagers themselves, when they travel outside Montana and realize what they are missing back at home.
Like rural western Americans in general, Montanans tend to be conservative, and suspicious of governmental regulation. That attitude arose historically because early settlers were living at low population density on a frontier far from government centers, had to be self-sufficient, and couldn’t look to government to solve their problems. Montanans especially bristle at the geographically and psychologically remote federal government in Washington, D.C., telling them what to do. (But they don’t bristle at the federal government’s money, of which Montana receives and accepts about a dollar-and-a-half for every dollar sent from Montana to Washington.) In the view of Montanans, the American urban majority that runs the federal government has no comprehension of conditions in Montana. In the view of federal government managers, Montana’s environment is a treasure belonging to all Americans and is not there just for the private benefit of Montanans.
Even by Montana standards, the Bitterroot Valley is especially conservative and anti-government. That may be due to many early Bitterroot settlers having come from Confederate states, and to a further influx of bitter right-wing conservatives from Los Angeles after that city’s race riots. As Chris Miller said, “Liberals and Democrats living here weep as they read the results after each election, because the outcomes are so conservative.” Extreme proponents of right-wing conservativism in the Bitterroot are members of the so-called militias,