rural issues

Democrats could find a growing problem for their party with a voter named Gretchen, sitting outside a brew pub in the rural northern Minnesota town of Aitkin.

"I'm kind of disillusioned, and I'm really confused," she said. "I'm a registered Democrat, but yet, I see all of this stuff that I kind of disagree with." Gretchen asked not to be identified with her last name because she fears sharing her politics could hurt her family's business.

Shortly after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, 28-year-old Josie Stanfield organized a Black Lives Matter protest in the Central Oregon town of Prineville, home to about 10,000 residents. Fewer than 1% are Black.

"The reason I did this was because I went to high school here, and I didn't have a good time in the community. I've always been targeted for being Black since high school," Stanfield said.

She remembers classmates throwing food at her or whispering the N-word in the hallways.

Updated at 4:06 p.m. ET

Sixth-grader Charlie Pierce says the hardest part of going back to school wasn't the masks or the temperature checks. It was not being able to hug the friends she hadn't seen in months.

"My friends kind of really wanted to hug me," Charlie says.

"We had talked about keeping our distance," her mom, Ami Pierce, adds, "because we are huggers by nature."

At the Bruneau-Grandview School District in rural southern Idaho, a couple of dozen teachers are crowded into the small library.

They're doing a refresher training for online teaching. In person-classes are scheduled to begin Monday, but with coronavirus cases continuing to rise in Idaho and other states, it's an open question for how long.

A farmer from Shandong province along China's east coast, Liu recalls how during Chinese Lunar New Year in January, he went out for a walk and came home to discover local officials preparing to demolish his home.

When he called the police on the demolishers, they arrested him instead, saying that the police would "assist the work of the local government."

"To demolish my home, about 100 security officers surrounded and subdued me, and detained me," Liu said on a recent visit to his village, Liushuanglou, near the city of Heze. He was released from detention the next day.