The Yonder 40 is an index, we said, to benchmark the rural economy. We didn't say buy all the stocks and ensure the prosperity of the Mississippi Delta or restore small businesses to the Rural Populist's hometown. We didn't say if the index went up, every person with callouses on their hands should shout with joy, nor if it went down that every caring person should weep for the poor farmer. It's an index for people with open eyes, open minds, and enough grasp of history to know that human beings have been vacating rural areas and moving to cities for nigh on 10,000 years now. Whether the index rise or falls will have no effect in determining where Sam Walton will spend eternity. It just measures what is, with Wal-Mart getting a mere one-fortieth of what other index creators generously grant it. This writer knows something about indexes, having spent a good portion of his career creating them and the exchange-traded funds that are now the rage for the Wall Street crowd. But I've also done my share of manure shoveling, milking cows by hand, castrating hogs, stacking hay with horses, thrashing wheat, hoeing corn, cutting and sacking cabbage, skinning rabbits, squirrels, and groundhogs for the cooking pot, trapping muskrats and raccoons and selling their hides, killing, butchering, and salting down hogs at Thanksgiving, starting farm machinery with a crank, and a whole host of other romantic rural activities, including parking with my girlfriends on deserted rural roads and watching the stars. As interesting as all these things are, and despite my fond memories of them, none of them proved to be economically viable at the scale on which I operated. And for the record, this was true even before Sam and Christy Walton had opened more than a handful of Walton's 5 and 10's down in the Ozarks. There's sure plenty about Wal-Mart to be upset about from the perspective of those who love rural America, but not every small business that Sam drove out of business was operated by a saint who acted only in the best interests of his customers. And while I'm not a political scientist, I have noticed that reformists who try to raise armies based on single issues like corporate giantism generally have about as much luck as I did with 63 Yorkshire pigs down in the Great Smokies trying to compete with with those farmers in Indiana with 5000. This too, I should point out, was at a time when Smithfield was buying hogs to make bacon instead of raising them to make bacon. As a journalist who covered the Appalachian south during the sixties and seventies, I also know something about populist movements, unionizing crusades, environmentalists, politicians, and regional agencies like the TVA bequeathed to us by the Senator George Norris's and David Lillienthal's, those wonderful Democratic progressives from Nebraska and Wisconsin who believed there could be nothing better for the small farmers of TN than three wise men on the TVA board who could build dams and nuclear plants wherever they wished and stripmine every hollow with a lump of coal, the people and their elected representatives be damned. Just one political aside for those who would capitalize on the misery of the poor and downtrodden to lead rural political movements. West Virginia is the nation's most unionized state, has one of the longest records of citizen action to right wrongs against the small farmer and the working man, has more pictures on the living room walls of FDR and JFK and John L. Lewis than any other state, and ranks in many socioeconomic measures with our nation's reservations. Guess who won the last two presidential elections in WVA? That's right, our current president, who managed somehow to get the good citizens there to vote against their own economic welfare in the name of Jesus, the right to bear arms, babies in the womb, and Osama bin Laden. Just one economic fact for the Rural Populist: Wal-Mart stock this century has underperformed not only the Dow Jones, the S&P 500, and the Wilshire 5000 but the discount retail sector of the S&P indices as well. Using the RP's logic, the last seven years should have been the bountiful ones for rural America. Whatever it takes policy wise to get things moving in the right direction for rural America, I seriously doubt that critiques of the Yonder 40, or defense of it as well, will amount to more than spitting on a forest fire. Ditto for making Sam Walton or any other leader of big business the AntiChrist of rural America. Let's start with what is, urge all the like-minded to join hands, hearts and minds, and trudge ahead with a vision more enduring than hoping some liberal Democrats, progressive Republicans or new rainbow coalitions will appear with the answers to our problems.