"I also explain that Nebraska needs progressives. ... in Nebraska there are only a few of us and every one of us is essential. We don’t have an easy job and we are not appreciated, but if we leave, who will voice our agenda?"

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Nebraska’s Lonely Progressives
By Mary Pipher, December 26, 2014

WHEN I travel to the East or West Coasts, people sometimes ask me, “Why do you live in Nebraska?” Or even, “Have you considered moving?” Outsiders often believe Nebraska is a nondescript state with little to recommend it in culture, politics or landscape. But I reply that Nebraska is my home and that I love its people and its geography. To me there is nothing more beautiful than the muddy Platte River or the vast undulating Sand Hills. Of course, our state can be blistering in the summer, arctic in the winter. It’s a windswept, spare place designed to toughen up its inhabitants.

I also explain that Nebraska needs progressives. Boston and San Francisco have plenty of people to work for our causes, but in Nebraska there are only a few of us and every one of us is essential. We don’t have an easy job and we are not appreciated, but if we leave, who will voice our agenda?

Nebraska today is as red as a state can be. With the exception of Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide in 1964, our state has not supported a Democrat for president since 1936. In 2004, George W. Bush carried every county but one. Our governor, senators and House members all are Republicans. These politicians compete with one another to be the easiest on guns and the toughest on immigrants. None of them acknowledge human-made climate change.

It hasn’t always been this way. In the early 1900s, our state engendered a strong populist movement. William Jennings Bryan was from Lincoln, and Senator George W. Norris lived in my hometown, Beaver City. Originally a Republican agrarian populist, Norris was a supporter of the New Deal and became an independent.

But that was a long time ago.

Today pockets of progressives live in Lincoln and Omaha, and we have a handful of statewide groups. I am part of a group that has been meeting for five years. We originally came together to stop the Keystone XL pipeline from crossing our Sand Hills and Ogallala Aquifer, a cause that has brought together farmers, ranchers, urbanites, Republicans and Democrats, students and senior citizens. We are still fighting the tar sands pipeline, but we have expanded our mission to clean energy, environmental justice and the local food movement.

The old-timers in our group are the royalty of lost causes. Many of us have fought for decades for improvements in our schools and university, affordable health care, the abolition of the death penalty, immigration reform and workers’ rights. We have lost almost every battle. However, we have kept the Keystone XL pipeline out of our state and country for five years.

We are generally a resilient bunch. We know how to lose and keep working. Twelve to 15 of us meet once a month to report on our activities and to plan actions for the next month. We celebrate small victories and manage to keep one another cheerful and hopeful. We believe, to quote the Nebraska Farmers Union president, John K. Hansen, that “activism is not like planting corn and walking away, rather it’s like milking cows, something you do over and over again all year long.”

However, this last election was difficult for us. The best Democrats in anyone’s memory ran for governor and the United States Senate. Chuck Hassebrook, our gubernatorial candidate, had been the director of the Center for Rural Affairs, a respected nonprofit committed to small farmers, environmental stewardship and social and economic justice. Our Senate candidate, Dave Domina, born on a ranch in the Sand Hills, is the best trial lawyer in our state. His firm has represented landowners pro bono in their lawsuit against the pipeline company TransCanada and the state of Nebraska to stop Keystone XL. Both were trounced.

The evening after this dismal election, we met for our usual potluck. At first, a few of us tried to point out slivers of silver linings, but then one of our members said flatly, “We are doomed.” What followed was a sad discussion of our broken political system, big money in politics, Fox News and four more years of inaction on environmental issues. This was the first meeting in my memory in which I felt worse at the end instead of better.

Recently I hosted our holiday party. About 25 people came. I bought prosecco and made a big pot of lentil soup. We toasted one another as we shared the year’s victories. We had helped the climate marchers cross Nebraska in August. We’d been active in pushing for the closure of a North Omaha coal-fired electric plant, which will shut down in 2016 rather than try to meet new emissions standards. We had succeeded in lobbying many of our public power districts to include more wind, solar and geothermal energy in their portfolios, and we had elected an environmentalist to the board of Nebraska Public Power District. We had written op-eds and speeches to inform our citizens about environmental issues. And, to cap off the toasts, two of our youngest members announced that they were running for office in the next election, one for a City Council seat, the other for the State Legislature.

By the end of the evening, warmed by the fire and sparkling wine, we all felt better. We felt ready to go out in the cold and once again face the frosty climate that is Nebraska politics for progressives.
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