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At Leo’s next campaign meeting, North Dakota State University in Fargo, he found an opposing view.
The select group that met with Leo after his public appearance was larger and more diverse than in St Paul. There were militia leaders, but there were more agriculture specialists.
The spokesperson was Cynthia Lausanne, Fargo’s Mayor. She began, “We’re in a tight spot Commissioner Torres. We want you to take immediate action. We want a different shipping route. We have to have a different shipping route for our crops, or so help me, we’ll be sending it all North to Canada!”
Leo: “I report back to the Center as often as I can get somebody to listen to me, and I’ll report whatever the problem is here. But haven’t you reported it already?”
Lausanne: “Of course we have, they just don’t believe us. We have always shipped through the Twin Cities, because that’s where the trains go from here. But those guys have lost their minds! Our crops aren’t getting through because some nut job in St Paul won’t let people do the work!”
Leo: “I just came from St Paul. They told me that everything is going smoothly and that their mandated twenty-hour-work-week gets everything done.”
Lausanne: “I can believe they said that, but it isn’t true. The delays in the Twin Cities are holding things up for us. We produce a lot of wheat here, in some crops -- barley, sunflowers, and flax.—we’re the top producers in the nation. They could be making a lot of food from our oats and rye, too, not to mention the sheep, cattle, and poultry we could be shipping if we had open supply lines. As it stands, the only really good customers we’re developing are from up North.”
Leo: “Maybe the militia in St Paul has gone a little overboard in trying to hurry the revolution along.”
Lausanne: “You could put it nicely if you wanted to, but the truth is that they’re just nuts. Anybody with half a brain knows that we’re in a transitional stage and that we have to hurry to get production and distribution up if we’re ever going to have decent lives as a people.”
Leo: “I’ll pass it along as fast as I can. I’m not sure what they’re going to do about it.”
Lausanne: “I know what they ought to do, they ought to mobilize the other militias around there and overthrow those idiots.”
Leo: “Actually, people at the Center are pretty proud that violence seems to be mostly behind us. They will probably want to send out a diplomatic team or something like that, somebody to iron out the difficulties.”
Lausanne: “Whatever they do, they’d better do it pretty fast unless they want to see all our foodstuffs going to Canada where things are more rational. Now, we’ve been thinking these problems through for some time, and we know what needs to be done in a much more general sense. There are some broad ideas that you need to hear if you’re really going to develop some kind of ongoing government.”
Leo: “Yes, fill me in. That’s the only good thing about this whole campaign tour – listening and learning."
Lausanne: “Any new government has to give special weight to the rural areas. There has to be at least a bicameral legislature with a Senate based on geographic areas, even if there’s also a House of Representatives based on population. This was true before everything collapsed, but it’s still true now. Agricultural areas must be represented equal to or above urban population centers.
‘I’ll give you an obvious reason and another reason you might not have thought of.”
“Actually,” Leo thought to himself, “I hadn’t thought of any reason at all.”
Lausanne: “Everybody in this room, almost everybody, is engaged in producing the basic foodstuffs that are the rock-hard basis for any future society. We’re not a big town, we have about 125,000 people. We’re the biggest in all of North Dakota, though, and North Dakota could feed this nation! You can’t afford to have a bunch of city-people lording it over us. Without us, they would starve to death. That’s the obvious reason that rural areas have to have strong representation in any new government.
‘A good example is those screwballs in the Twin Cities. They get some idealistic notion that things should go a certain way, and they hold up real food for real people. That’s not right and it could never be right!
‘Now, here’s the reason you might not have thought of. I mentioned to you that we have about 125,000 people in Fargo. That’s the same number, more or less, that we had before the old capitalist civilization collapsed. While the world population plummeted by at least half, and probably a lot more than that, people in North Dakota made it through. The reason was because we could feed ourselves.
‘What that means for any new government you create is that some places, places like North Dakota, have had a continuing civilization right through the big collapse and the bad times. Sure, we had to do without some things, maybe a lot of things, but we made it through. We fed ourselves and we survived. None of the big urban areas can say that. They had starvation, they had savage murder gangs, they had birth defects, they had suffocation and diseases that haven’t even been named yet from the poisons in the air and water. Civilization in rural areas such as ours had a continuous civilized experience, and that’s what you need in any new government you create.
‘So the rural areas, the food-producing areas, have to have representation equal to or superior to the urban areas irrespective of population numbers. QED.”
Leo: “I think the guiding principle they’re thinking about, as it was explained to me, is that every person in society should have political say-so over everything in proportion to how it will affect them personally. Does that measure up to what you’re saying?”
Lausanne: “Absolutely not. Food producers have to have more.”
Leo: “It’s over my pay grade, as they say, but I’ll pass it on.”
Lausanne: “If you’re going to be a delegate to a world council, as you say you want to be, nothing is over your pay grade. You need to think it through and you need to get it done! In the meantime, get rid of that bottleneck in the Twin Cities!”
Leo, as forcefully as he could, said “Right!”