My wife and I took a leisurely drive through some of the small hamlets just north of our little farm. The day was sunny and mild, and the car seemed to pilot itself, looping back and forth on the curves and switchbacks, through the fields of strawberries and tobacco, past the Black Angus, cropping grass with the placid patience of monks who have nowhere to go except to Compline. Great beauty surrounded us on the drive, but so did extended swaths of rusted poverty and squalor. The weathered gray boards of barns stood guard next to the peeling-painted houses with their spare-tire planters and last year’s Christmas lights draped along…