Dear Editor,

There are a lot of young and old people who know nothing but a concrete existence. They live in cities, work in cities, their entertainment is in cities and their entire life is surrounded by concrete.

They gather in downtown bars or coffee shops to solve the problems of the world. They love to talk politics for hours on end and you’ll not find the lion’s share registering as anything but democratic. They ride the train or bus to work and they breathe combustion fumes all day.

Chances are most are college graduates and they often work in the high-rise office buildings. Weekend clothing often has the knees torn – not from hard work mind you — just the style.

As they walk along, they pass city trees, flowers and birds they can’t name. The alarming part of this is that there are so many of these “People of the Concrete” that they control the very lives of all those not living there.

Their entire existence comes from those not living in concrete. Their concrete aggregate, steel reinforcement and windows to the world are taken from outside their borders.

Their garbage piles go outside their borders and their sewage is flushed into local bodies of water, eventually often polluting pristine countryside waters. Even their electricity is generated beyond their borders, with fuel taken from the countryside. Their total existence relies on gleaning necessities, like the very food they eat, from outside their concrete boundaries.

By contrast, those of the countryside are much different. They drive their trucks to work and, very often, even change their own oil. That truck often hauls “two-by-fours” and plywood home for a project they’re doing themselves – like an addition their wife wants – and they’ve been with her for years.

She’s the center of their universe and they probably met in high school. They know the names of trees and bushes that grow around the house and on the hillside. They know all the names of the birds that visit their feeder. Within seconds they can tell you if it’s a beaver or muskrat on a pond. They know, on sight, an opossum from a racoon. These people are responsible for the very existence of “The People of the Concrete,” supplying all their needs and accepting their refuse.

Needless to say, the “People of the Concrete” control everyone’s life. There are so many of them that they’ve built upward — not outward — to house their multitude of inhabitants. Their wages exceed those in the countryside, they have educational benefits not found beyond their borders, all of their infrastructure comes from the countryside and their very lifeblood of nourishment.

Their sheer masses elect state and national leaders, which are also “People of the Concrete”, although those leaders often maintain countryside homes in gated communities, where nothing undesirable spills over on them. Their vacation homes are often ocean-front properties, scattered amongst the narrow beach access openings for the countryside renters.

Someday maybe countryside dwellers will wake up to their antics. If elections were based on land mass to population, they’d have no chance in seizing control, polluting or depleting the countryside of natural resources.

A simple look at the 2021 governor race map in Virginia will show how the few “blue” counties – of high population density – were, once again, attempting to seize control of the multitude of “red” counties. It never stops!

Dennis Corey,

Youngsville