Rural Americans and the Federal Government

From the support the Tea Party gets from rural areas, you would think the federal government has done nothing but take money from rural folks and give it to poor minorities in the cities.  However, rural areas have long been been beneficiaries of government programs, and not just farm programs.  One example got mentioned today in an NPR interview with Simon Winchester, the author of The Men Who United The States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible:

There's an irony I want to mention ... I write about the bringing of electricity to rural America and the role that the government played in the 1930s with the Rural Electrification Administration and very moving stories of farmers who never had electricity finally getting it. The first place in America to get electricity courtesy of FDR was out in the sticks, in Western Ohio — the 8th Congressional District, which is the district today represented by John Boehner. John Boehner — I don't want to get into a political fight here — is an archetype of "against big government," and yet the district he represents benefited hugely from big and wise government in the 1930s.

That's right, he's talking about my county and my rural electric co-op:

The earliest of millions of electric cooperative poles installed with funds from the federal Rural Electrification Administration was set by Miami Rural Electric Cooperative (now Pioneer Rural Electric Cooperative) in Piqua, Ohio, on November 14 (1935).

There are a number of other examples, but for some reason, rural Americans prefer the myth of self-reliance to the reality of communal support.  I am afraid that idiots like Jim Jordan, Tim Huelskamp and Steve King might cause the non-rural majority of the country to take actions to remind rural areas of how dependent they really are on the rest of the country.  That would not be a good thing.