Nurse the Hate: Red State Blue State

It doesn’t take long when driving from where I live for things to become decidedly rural.  Within 20 minutes I can detect a twang in people's speech.  If I left my house on my morning commute and just kept driving southwest, I could have lunch in Kentucky.  Despite it being a relatively small distance, it is a completely different world, as was confirmed by spending the last few days in Kentucky and Tennessee.  There are Confederate flags, enormous pickup trucks, gun racks, fast food deserts, Wal Marts, trailers, and many, many, many people standing in line at gas stations with lottery tickets.  Side note:  If you cash in a winning lottery ticket so as to buy even more lottery tickets, it is safe to say that you will never “win” the lottery.  I suppose your dreams are still alive and that’s something.

When I was in Nashville I saw a man in a bar sitting with his friends.  They were clean cut with that side part haircut that preppy Southern guys seem to have worn since 1962.  This man was wearing a t-shirt that showed the American electoral college displaying a sea of Red Districts and the relatively small number of Blue Districts to show the large swath of the country that geographically voted Pro-Trump.  The script on top of the shirt aped the Constitution and said “We the Deplorables…”.  It is pretty persuasive until you stop and think that about two thirds of the population live in cities while most of the red on that shirt are cornfields and gas stations.

On the Kentucky border with Tennessee I saw giant flags attached to the backs of pickups that roared back and forth up and down the main drag.  Men wore baseball caps with Patriotic slogans and symbols.  There is a large Army base nearby.  Everyone belongs to a church, mostly Evangelical Protestant.  This is an area of the country that when strangers meet and try to weed out commonalities, they might ask “Which church to you go to?”.  These are very polite people.  They smile when they meet you.  They work hard.  They see themselves as “real Americans”, meaning people of shared values.  People tend to agree with each other.

There is a disconnect there when it comes to understanding differences.  Everyone is so much like one another here and tends to stay in their community that it breeds fear of the unknown.  It is hard to understand another culture when you are afraid of it.  If you don’t understand someone different than you, it’s very hard to have empathy.  It’s a fertile breeding ground for discrimination against anyone or anything different.  Unfortunately for our country we now have a leader that is committed to combining these fears and anxieties while wrapping them up in the same patriotic slogans and symbols that are such a source of pride.  It is leadership through division.  Us against them.  Get on the winning team and be afraid of people that look different than you.

Today should have been eye opening to these supporters.  This man is not your friend.  He is morally and ethically bankrupt.  He always has been and always will be.  To have an American President side with Russia over his own intelligence agencies is easy to understand.  Trump is either stupid or compromised.  There is no other rational explanation.  The good people I spent time with all weekend did not sign up for this.  They believe in their country and the vision of pride I witnessed did not include a leader folding to a foreign adversary to protect his own shrouded self interest.  They are proud of their home and they never thought they would see a man that promised them everything turn on what they thought they stood for on the world stage.

It's a real mess.  Things that all of us took for granted are up for grabs.  This is a crossroad.  It is a historically significant moment in our history.  It will likely come down to enough of these people that supported Trump to shake off the flimsy Fox News propaganda explanations and demand truth.  Can they do it?  It is not easy to admit you made a mistake.  These people got swept up in it.  They got sold.  To admit being suckered by a con man is painful.  I hope that the people that got conned will take that pain and turn it into anger at the lies they were told.  There is a traitor at the wheel.  What are we going to do about it?