I'll do another entirely ridiculous round of photos at some point, but right now I'm sitting on my side porch - Birdie by my feet and Hippo nearby - waiting for my phone to charge before I make the hour drive to W. Jefferson to buy my preferred box wine (can't find it anywhere closer), seafood, and a number of other treats and necessities.
In the last couple of months I've been struggling with the cognitive dissonance of America. I doubt I'm alone on that one. About a year ago I came down here for a two-ish-week stay to determine whether I could 'make a go of it' in an area that was obviously very "red" and pro-Trump. I knew I wasn't going to have a lot of liberal neighbors, but I wanted to get a sense of what the more progressive minded folks in the area thought about overall community and vibes. Everyone I spoke to acknowledged they were in the minority, politics-wise, but that nonetheless the idea of being a good neighbor was still a very large part of what made up the long-time locals' ethos. I've been here full-time since December, and I've largely found that to be true. I have three neighbors in particular who have offered help to me without my even knowing I needed it. Danny came by in the spring and offered to churn up a garden plot for me with his tractor. The slow-going, hand-digging I had been doing was fairly hard work and hadn't got me half as far as what he did in about 20 minutes. Hac helped me as best he could to suss out the issue with my water supply and now mows my lawn at what I can only assume is a discounted rate. Randy also tried his hand at helping with the water issue, and does a little extra mowing for me (well, that's not entirely altruistic, as he gets to bale it up and sell it as hay). No one has been too stand-offish or weird. Granted, I rarely go anywhere and haven't broadened my social circle much outside the farmers' market folks and the aforementioned three neighbors.
I did recently meet another neighbor up the road. She and her husband have a sheep farm, and I had looked forward to meeting them given my own interests and intentions. She was quite friendly and upbeat. I did her a very small favor one week - bringing her meat orders to the market so she didn't have to - and when she came by to pick up the cooler afterwards, we momentarily got into a discussion in my driveway. It was friendly on the whole, but we did somehow touch on politics. I wasn't surprised she voted for Trump in 2016 nor that she planned to do so again this year. What did take me aback is when she said (paraphrased but fairly accurate) "I just think about the America I want my grandkids to live in. Do I want it to be a free country or a communist one? You know George Soros is determined to make it communist." This is so far from what I consider truth, I basically laughed and said "maybe we shouldn't talk politics, would you like half a watermelon from my garden?" The fact that I, too, don't want America to become a communist country, but that she and I have radically different ideas of where the threat comes from stymies my sense of hope.
Danny, meanwhile, a few months back, asserted that wearing masks was going to cause a secondary pandemic of people "breathing in their own germs" and that masks caused legionnaires disease; a doctor told him. And Hac and I once got into a friendly discussion where we basically agreed that we didn't agree on much. Highlights from that were him saying that Mexican/illegal workers get paid more than white workers/don't pay into social security; that Nancy Pelosi raided the social security coffers to try to impeach Trump; and that all governors had asked Trump to let them decide how to handle the Coronavirus. At one point he said "you know when I watch the news with my wife and see what liberals are saying, I tell her they have the right to their opinion, but they're wrong." And I replied that is pretty much the same thing I think about a lot of conservatives. We laughed, and he left as still a neighborly friend...but geez. Hac also mentioned his concern that a civil war was brewing, and that he was trying to find a little more ammo just in case. He didn't want it. He wasn't gearing for a fight. He's not a member of the Proud Boys, and I wouldn't lump him into a white supremacy box either...and yet, he has this vague idea that shit is going to go down.
Later on I wondered to myself, if a civil war were to happen. What would that mean for me? Would I suddenly become an enemy to Hac and Danny and Randy? I feel like no. But the many more people I don't know in the area? Who may have noticed my existence? What is also ponderous is that there is a very "woo-woo" organization one town over, all about new methods of spirituality and ghosts and other such stuff. It's not my bag at all, but I did go on a tour of their "campus" last year, and the woman who showed me around mentioned that the founder of the organization recognized that we were in perilous times, and if things were to get crazy, we might be in flash point area, which is why, in the basement of her "peace pentagon" she had a basic bunker constructed. So Hac, a conservative, Christian Republican is seeking more ammo, and a rich liberal woman trying to find the next paradigm shift in spiritual religion...is building a bunker. They couldn't be more far apart ideologically. And yet? They're coming to the same apocalyptic conclusion.
I've been a sucker for apocalypse narratives for years. Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy has long been a touchstone of the future I most fear. Handmaid's Tale too of course. I've watched The Walking Dead for years less because of zombies or gore, and more because of how they depict a world where infrastructure we all take for granted is simply gone. Water on demand. Electricity. Internet. Grocery stores! I moved where I did when I did in part because I *did* want to be a little off the beaten track if shit hit the fan. But these days I'm not sure what apocalypse I'm waiting for. I am zero percent worried about "black thugs" coming to rural Virginia looking to take anything from me. I am not convinced that any government would really try to "take our guns." People have been pointing to Handmaid's Tale, the television show, as the likely outcome of the recent ACB nomination. As if that would change the minds of anyone who wasn't already opposed to the whole thing. I may live in the middle of nowhere, but I don't know if that makes me any safer than my friends living in NYC or Philadelphia.
The whole thing bums me out. I don't see a way out of it. And I live in a low-grade fear of what will happen next. The election is so totally being undermined by Trump's offensive to make his base believe that no outcome other than his winning could be true. So let's just say he doesn't win. Do my neighbors just grumble? Or do they get radicalized? Maybe not become vigilantes here, but drive two hours to cities and, what? Burn the houses of liberals? I just can't really fathom that. But if the last four years have demonstrated anything, they have demonstrated that as much as I think of myself as pragmatic, there is an optimistic and naive streak in me that just cannot truly grasp how wide the divide has become. That even "common decency" seems to be a subjective term. If we can't all just get along, what is the next best thing?
Yesterday I had an outdoor dinner and beer with a friend, and she suggested that maybe this is the one last push. That those who struggle with the white majority disappearing are trying one last time to consolidate power and somehow avoid the inevitable. And that losing this time, they'll maybe just have to give up. This seems highly unlikely. Since Charlottesville I've been saying that it seems like the best that could be hoped for, at least in the next year or two, is that being racist goes back to being something people know they should be ashamed of. Racists have been around this whole time. That's not news. But their feeling that they should have no fear in expressing themselves, and in larger numbers, now that is something that feels slightly new, and reversible.
I don't know. My phone is now charged. I'm going to go get groceries.
