Cities see this as much as rural areas, especially cities like San Francisco. It's absurd to frame this as a "coastal elite" vs rural problem. Politically, it'

Cities see this as much as rural areas, especially cities like San Francisco. It's absurd to frame this as a "coastal elite" vs rural problem. Politically, it's nearly the opposite, where conservatives use the outcome of the epidemic as evidence that cities are dangerous hellholes, and actively fight solutions to minimize harm (monitored usage sites, needle exchanges, etc). In terms of generally ignoring solutions to the problem, politicians as a whole seem to be the problem, rather than it being a city vs rural thing. Most likely liberals don't care about rural areas because they aren't winning those voters, and conservatives need the epidemic to harm cities so they can use it as fodder, so they won't help the rural areas, especially since they're going to win those areas anyway. Also, it's kind of wild to blame the dust bowl on politicians and the coastal elite when it was primarily farming practices to blame. Why are coastal cities to blame for ignoring a problem that doesn't directly affect them when the affected areas are actively causing the problem, and not solving their problem locally? In the end it was the politicians who solved that problem.