Every One Comes from Somewhere

So much to say, so little sleep.

To be fair, relatively speaking, I’m very well rested.  Four years ago I did not sleep the night before the election, save for a few hours in the morning after I’d voted (I worked a late schedule back then).  The returns and their ominous portent came in while I was teaching a class, and then I didn’t sleep all of election night.

In comparison, this year it snowed the night before the election, I slept well, I woke up to a winter wonderland, and then on election night I had the first video chat with my sister in Germany in months.  It was 2 am her time, and I hate watching the news or constantly looking at updates on news sites, so I talked to her, she would announce when they called states, and I would check The New York Times every twenty minutes or so.  We were slightly worried for some time, but by the time I went to bed at 2, I had hope.  I was thinking about Harry Truman defeating Dewey, and managed to get 5 and a half hours.  So, physically, I’m doing really damn well.

I was going to write this earlier when I had more energy (I jumped around and shouted when I learned about Michigan, and ran outside to stare up at the Milky Way and thank the galaxy), but then I ate dinner, read some Jack London, and watched Northern Exposure, which I've been watching slowly, sometimes day after day, sometimes a couple weeks apart.  I know I keep mentioning this show (it’ SO GOOD), but I’m watching it in order, one episode per day, and it keeps syncing.  I don’t plan ahead or read the episode summaries, but Halloween happened to be an episode about the devil, and today’s revolved around politics in a small town, and how some people simply just can’t trust government intruding in their lives at any level, always afraid of the slippery slope of the machine, while others believe it can be an instrument for goodness.  Then I got into reading four different Atlantic articles analyzing the election results.

What precipitated all this introspection on politics was before all of that, I was watching my old friend’s political show, where she and her co-host discuss politics with highly regarded members of the intelligentsia.  While they seemed cautiously hopeful about the results of the presidential race, there was a lot of analysis about what the close results and congressional elections indicate about our collective polity.  How could so many people continue to support our current president after all he’s done?

My own opinion is that the reasons for why the election has turned out the way it has are pretty similar to the reasons why I’m sitting in this chair typing at this moment: infinite.  And I don’t mean that as a hokey way to avoid the serious question.  There are honestly many different factors that created the circumstances leading to my being here and choosing to write this at this moment.  So when you apply that to a national election where hundreds of millions of people make decisions based on any number of factors (the candidates, their parties, their policy positions, the voters’ life experiences and how they perceive the alternatives), it’s kind of like predicting economics: there are just so many inputs to sort it all out.  When we get into the social sciences, we want to apply our reasoning powers in the service of finding explanations which may improve quality of life, and it isn’t hopeless.  Much of the work people have done has greatly improved life on this planet.  But even with a hard science like physics, there are just so many unexplained mysteries which defy logic, or at least our current understanding of logic, that it’s understandable we haven’t quite figured out how this experiment in representative democracy is supposed to work out.

Anyway, she made some excellent points that made me question my recent actions.  I don't know how large a proportion of conservative/swing voters voted because of this explanation, but it is definitely part of it: nobody likes feeling that others perceive them as stupid.  I know that I don’t.  I’m not afraid that I am, but I’ve played the fool many a time.  On top of that, even the greatest geniuses have their blind spots.  There are multiple forms of intelligence, after all.  Also, there have been plenty of times that someone showed their mastery of very important and useful tasks, demonstrating skills or knowledge that I was completely clueless about, reminding me that as much intelligence as the universe may pump through my brain, I must often defer to and depend every day on the expertise of others.  This includes those who may be completely clueless about what I consider to be obvious and very important to a decent, functioning society.  It takes many kinds to make this world, yes?  When the old timer sold me a face cord of firewood a few weeks ago and asked me who I thought would win the election, I did my best to avoid giving an answer so we could stay cordial, especially after he said he didn't like all the city people moving up here.

Even so, I know I've been guilty of treating others in ways I wouldn’t want to be treated, or as Kurt Vonnegut would say, making them “feel like something the cat drug in.”  Vonnegut also said, in 2004, that “thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.”  That makes me think about the Northern Exposure episode I just watched, where Maggie wins the mayoral race.  Her opponent, Walt, congratulates her on running the “last clean campaign” and lauds her as being completely qualified for the job.  Hard to imagine in 2020.

One of the reasons I began this self-examination of my actions was because I completely agreed with her point: I think one of many reasons people in rural areas vote the way they do is simply to spite what they perceive (often correctly) as condescending attitudes from urban voters.  When I first got into an Ivy League school, one of my smartest friends was from LA (he’s now a doctor at Cedars Sinai).  Many in our group met each other the first night, and wandered around the dorm looking for something to do.  We eventually met a friendly RA, who was simply trying to welcome us and make us feel at home.  My friend asked where he was from.  When he cheerily replied, "Kentucky," my friend replied by saying, “I’m sorry for you.”  He also liked to tell me I was from “bumble fuck.”  He would later visit my hometown and enjoy meeting my friends and revise his attitude, but there are millions of coastal elites like him who will never have that experience.

My dad hunts all the time with people who support the president, and it really bothers him because he respects them in so many ways, and he doesn’t accept any of their voting logic as defensible ("I think he didn't get enough credit for that Middle East peace deal."  "The one between Israel and the United Arab Emirates?"), but he still enjoys their company.  He loves our small town, where he’s met people from so many walks of life, including many uneducated yet skilled people, who have helped him with various construction projects, loaned him equipment, organized a deer management cooperative with him and so forth.  He values their friendship and feels thankful he has been able to find people like them.

One of my best friends in the world grew up in a trailer, and I hate the term “trailer trash” for that reason.  He is now married to a woman with a doctorate in nursing, they have a nice two story home and two beautiful children, and he and I have serious political and philosophical discussions.  Years ago, during one of the greatest panics of my life, I scrolled through my phone and saw his name and called him and he talked me back into sanity while we covered all the bases two people could discuss.  He tried community college a couple years ago, was acing his classes and loved learning about forestry, geology and globalization, but then had to wait to complete his degree because he had to take a new job to support his family.  He doesn’t like the president and didn’t vote for him, but I think of him every time I hear a city dweller put down rural residents.

But there is a reason people stereotype conservative rural voters.  Racism and ignorance are very real in these areas.  One doesn't have to go south of the Mason-Dixon to find it.  Originally from Long Island, I spent my adolescence in upstate New York, and have returned there to visit ever since.  On Long Island (which has its own brand of covert racism), I was in one of the most (newly) diverse school districts in the country, and hatred between children based on race was almost unthinkable.  When I moved upstate, I heard people jokingly use that infamous epithet to describe black people, as there were only two black families with children in our K through 12 school (and two Jewish families, no Latino students, and a few Asian students, all adopted or on exchange programs).  A common explanation was: "I like Martin Luther King, but not most of them, all the lazy ones."  Most of their exposure to other races was the crime reports on the local news from Albany/Schenectady/Troy, which, when I was in middle school, was ranked 297th out of the 300 largest cities in the US.  They just loved to parade the photos of black suspects every night.  I don't mean to paint a monochrome picture.  There were also a few white students who loved Rage Against the Machine and were deeply passionate about Mumia Abu-Jamal getting a new trial.

I think of another of my best friends with whom I am still close.  He was handed a lot of burdens in his youth: his father was an absent alcoholic, and his mother was dying of multiple sclerosis.  I visited him after school almost every day in seventh and eight grade, and he would always stop by his mom's room to tell her how he was, and she couldn't speak, and could only make spastic movements with her face.  She died when we were 16.  But he had the most loving grandmother I've ever met, and he didn't suffer for material possessions: I didn't have cable TV, but he had several TV's, guitars, video game systems, etcetera, and wealthy relatives who took him on vacations.  I even went to Disney World with them once.  But through his extended family, some of whom lived in the same area, I discovered the darker underbelly of rural America.  One of his older cousins liked to visit.  I thought he was a jerk long before my friend told me a story about listening to Jimi Hendrix, and his cousin saying, "What are you listening to that n***** for?"  I wasn't surprised to see his cousin arguing on social media in favor of the president the past few years.

Then there was the County Fair.  A couple years ago a different friend from my hometown (who works for a college and is more heavily invested in Black Lives Matter than anyone I know) wanted to visit a tiny winery a few minutes from my house.  It turned out the owners were recent transplants from Long Island.  The woman who served us wine loved the area, but was horrified when she learned that the County Fair was going to be selling Confederate Flags.  Wasn't this hundred of miles above the Mason-Dixon?  She had a real ethical dilemma between trying to increase business by having a stall at the local fair and protesting by not participating in an event which allowed something that was obviously racist to her.

After Dylan Roof murdered nine black human beings in a South Carolina church, I visited home, only to be disgusted by someone proudly displaying a gigantic Confederate flag on route 40 on the way home from Troy.  They put it back up for Martin Luther King Day as well.  I know that such people were raised differently and may have received different information than I have, but nobody's that ignorant of history.  They've made their choice about which side of human decency they prefer to be on.

Such examples also remind me of a study someone did about Google searches.  They were permitted to view certain data, and I'm not sure about the methodology, but one example was how often people searched "n*****" the night Obama was elected.  The highest results weren't in the South.  They were in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York, which have much whiter populations.  So I wasn't shocked when later that week it was reported that a KKK flag had been discovered in a shed on my high school alma mater's property.

I must qualify these recent examples by pointing out that as widespread as these views are, they are still in the minority, and that these rural counties in upstate New York voted for the President for many reasons.  My hometown voted for him, but they also went for Obama in '08, the first time they'd gone for a Democrat in decades.  So it isn't all racism or ignorance.  Some people just want fewer regulations or believe in changing parties every so often.  After all, voting for Hillary didn't imply that I supported her vote on the Iraq War or her ties to various industries.

So, given how much empathy and sympathy I have for my fellow products of rural America, I think about the clever insults I have readily dispensed as a comedy lover originally hailing from the suburbs of Long Island, where quick wit and rapid speech were the norm.  Four years ago I was at a Hiromi concert at the Blue Note Jazz Club in Manhattan, and I met this very sociable and friendly self-described “Dead Head."  He was nice enough, and seemed to think I was old enough to have seen every one of their shows in the early 90's, when I was 8 or 9.  I saw him again at her concert last year, and afterward he befriended me on social media.  He seemed really amiable, although he had a lot of weird stories about being roughed up by police for riding a unicycle on a sidewalk.  He was illegally taping the show, even though Hiromi’s manager had gotten him a ticket because they were friends.  He was going to post it on social media, and then he had a realization: “Wait, my friend is gonna see this if I post it, and she got me this ticket!” Then he smacked his head and called himself stupid in a way that made me think he had a habit of doing that.

I figured out he was a conspiracy peddling fan of the president after a month or so.  He also really cares about the Holocaust because his dad helped liberate one of the camps.  He’s convinced that AOC and her fellow supposed Communists will cause the same thing to happen again, even though, as awful as they were, the Soviets were the first to liberate Nazi concentration camps.  He will post about Kristallnacht and “never again” within minutes of celebrating the anniversary of the president’s election. 

Why do I feel guilty?  On Election Day, I posted that people should vote for the Democrat, and he commented with a post supporting the president.  It was a silly photo with a fake hidden message on some money, and I quickly pointed out why it was ridiculous, and with quite a dose of sarcasm.  As much as I tell people that one of the greatest lessons from my journey was patience, I am far from perfect on that account.  All these people laughed at my response, and someone else posted a meme making fun of the guy’s religion.  His response to me was more cordial than I expected, and I felt a little bad, so I responded politely and then gave a longer explanation of why I voted against the president.  

But context is important: this guy I felt bad about, perhaps hurting his feelings by sarcastically replying?  Well, he used to drive a bus, and now I think he drives a garbage truck, or did recently.  He claims to have a college degree in business.  But the reason I had no patience for him was he’s been such a jerk to people in the year since I’ve accepted his social media friendship.  He posts fake videos that paint Hitler mustaches on AOC and overdub her to make it sound like she’s giving Adolf’s speeches, he’s mocked cancer survivors for fearing the spread of Covid because it’s supposedly all a conspiracy, and he regularly shares memes referring to liberals as idiots.  I feel like I’ve been very patient with him this past year.  I’ve only commented on a few of his insulting posts, and also did so very politely, referring to him as “sir” and so forth.  I would ignore him if I had more fans of the president on my news feed, but they’ve either unfriended me or remained silent, and I want to be aware of what's being shared by the other side.  Above all, as a writer and philosopher, I want to understand humans in general, so I am loath to unfriend unless the "friend" in question openly uses pejoratives in hateful ways.  I am friends with many conservatives, but the most educated ones have either retreated from the Republican label and are claiming sanctuary in the church of libertarianism, or are simply smart enough not to share their views online.

I've semi-retired from social media arguments in the past couple years, only to be dragged into a few the past couple months.  Some people have privately and publicly commented to me in these instances to thank me for “fighting the good fight and holding forth,” because they were happy to learn from the discussion.  I often feel like it’s a waste of time to argue on the internet, especially with strangers, because I might as well throw batteries at a wall expecting lightning, but if somebody else learns something, I guess it’s worth it here and there.  Anyway, I felt kind of bad for responding with blunt sarcasm and, by implication, belittling his intellect, although he was so mean and shockingly immature for his age. 

That is not all.  My friend had another powerful insight: people may not necessarily disagree with goals and civil rights that politically correct speech is intended to protect, but they feel uncomfortable and even scared by those who police speech.  Once again, I completely agree.  That has been my largest criticism of the left in the past few years: they are constantly updating the accepted terminology for a panoply of human identities, as if they are part of some elite club (which they often literally are) hip enough to be several steps ahead of the general population in the best ways to virtue signal.  It’s not that I’m afraid of being policed that way or that I am callous to the feelings of those who have been oppressed.  It’s that I think changing words every few years doesn’t actually accomplish anything that raises people’s quality of life, and in many ways, these PC updates are counterproductive, because they wall off worthy political movements from potential allies who might otherwise be on board with various civil rights claims.  You know, that liberal rallying cry from four years ago, "Bridges, not walls."  But all too often, PC speech is about building a wall.

A study in recent years showed that minority groups in the United States dislike PC terminology more than white people do, with Native Americans finding it the least appealing.  I remember one quote was something to the effect of, “It’s hard to even know what you’re even supposed to say anymore, even if you’re trying to be polite.”  A good example is when I teach foreign students about the term "people of color."  I have no problem saying it if that's what people want me to say.  It's been around for decades.  But students are confused when they are taught, "noun A of noun B" is good, but "adjective B noun A" is not.  What is intrinsically good about adding more syllables?  One of my roommates was from Yale and studied African Studies.  I asked him once which term he preferred to describe his racial demographic, and he told me he preferred "African-American" when referring to anything related to history, but "black" for culture.  Which is all fine, I can remember that, but that was just one human's preference.  How is anybody else supposed to know that, especially when that doesn't necessarily apply to anyone else from the same demographic?  I doubt he cared much, and I doubt many people do, but enough people are loud enough and there are enough anecdotes about various professional ramifications for innocently misusing words that I end up reading private testimonials of those supporting the president simply because of this one issue: "you can't say anything anymore!"

All this made me think of how, just for fun, in the aftermath of my sarcastic response to truck driver, I posted a satirical article mocking those who complain about PC speech, not because I think such arguments have no merits, but because those who protest the loudest are often the ones who are angry about not getting away with being as rude or outright racist or sexist as they can.  But the problem with social media is that when you share something that somebody else wrote, it isn’t easy to discern why you find it funny.  Someone else could read the headline of the article and think I'm saying that such complaints have no merit.  Conversely, two of my friends shared a Simpsons meme making fun of the two-party system, and I asked them privately if they were being cynical about voting (because they shared the same meme four years ago when they definitely were), and they said of course not, they just thought it was funny.  We play many roles in this life.

What I’m getting at with all this is that seeing each other as human beings who are shaped and influenced by myriad interactions with our complex universe is something to keep up front when attempting to persuade our fellow citizens in our fragile democracy.

Everyone has a different story.

Then again, sometimes you get a Kristallnacht situation, and there isn't any time for hand-holding with those who hate others for being born the way they are.  Maybe we are who we are, no matter what, without choices.  Yet living that way isn’t any fun.  I think we’re here to produce as much fun as possible for everyone.  If we do have choices, political preferences are the essence of choice in this country, whereas sexual orientation and skin tone are not.  If the former use their choice to hate and destroy those of the latter they deem unworthy to be themselves, then they forfeit their right to respect.

Einstein once said that, given his view of the universe, he could philosophically forgive a murderer for his crimes, but he still preferred not to take tea with him.

Because of all this intellectual stimulation, I am humbly reminded I should be thankful for the many blessings this complex universe has given me, all the education, love, material resources, emotional support, and, most importantly, observations that help me have a hard look at myself so I become the best version of myself, in service of this wonderful world.