Many of the people I know from my former life are struggling painfully to come to terms with the election.I am sorry to see and hear so much fear and anger.
The suffering is so very real, as it clearly was when the people on the other side of the great divide were feeling it. This disconnection is almost exactly what they were feeling it for some years. Now, those people, my neighbors and friends, are feeling great hope and promise, as so many others elsewhere are feeling great anger and despair. It’s difficult to even see across this divide.
They feel someone is finally worrying about them.
It seems one half of the country has just traded their hearts and souls with the other.
I am a city boy, I’ve been living in the country for 15 years, loving it more every year and slowly coming to understand a few things about it. As my forebears did, I have assimilated, I have many good friends and feel very safe and accepted here.
People here may understandably never see me as a country person, but increasingly, that is how I see myself. I have never felt I belonged anywhere as much as I feel I belong here, a strange thing for a Jewish kid from Providence.
This is my home now, community and character still live here, and we know one another and watch out for one another and live close to nature and the land. I could never go back, and I doubt they would have me anywhere I came from.
I understand I will always be an outsider, a refugee myself, just like my grandmother, but I have always been treated with courtesy and friendship and respect. When I need help, people come running, just like they do for the true locals.
I live on the boundary between these two now warring cultures, it is like having cymbals crashed against my ears sometimes.
The election was not as shocking to me as it would have been if I were still living in New York or Boston or Washington or Dallas or Northern New Jersey. I didn’t put it all together, but I was well aware of the great rage and despair building up around here, the sense of betrayal and abandonment, the fury at the “elites” in the big city who had contempt for country people and all of their values. I saw all of the “Trump” signs sprouting like dandelions on all of the lawns.
They love him and believe in him, he is, for many, their last hope.
I am also well aware of the joy and celebration many people here and across rural America feel about the new President and the bold and dramatic steps he is taking to change the country. I feel schizophrenic sometimes, living between these two worlds who see life so differently, and who have so much contempt and mistrust for one another.
One friend from New York City told me she is preparing to move to Canada or Europe, she doesn’t feel this is her country anymore, she doesn’t want her children to grow up here. She was devastated by the election. One of my neighbors here told me “I have hope now, for me, my children, my country, for the first time in decades. I have never been so excited about a new President.”
The difference in realities is so striking it seems almost like a Rod Serling Twilight Zone nightmare episode of alternate reality, as well as alternate truth. Rather than a country of common purpose and ideals. A land of two mirrors, each seeing the world in a completely different way, each raging at one another across time and space.
I got a taste of this week when I wrote about our taking down of an illegal Deer Stand someone had put up in our woods.
Maria climbed up the ladder with a bolt cutter and hunting knife and took it down. To my astonishment, this story became an Internet phenomenon, shared hundreds of times all over Facebook and via my blog. I got all sorts of comments and messages, some of them quite emotional, quite revealing. People thought our lives were in imminent danger, that we were being reckless and blind.
Many people were alarmed, they thought I was in grave danger, that the hunter who put the stand up was sure to come after me with his friends and gun me down. There was clearly this feeling that the people around me were lawless and violent. Many people said they were praying for my safety and for Maria’s. “Be careful,” wrote a person from Boston, “they are sure to come after you, or maybe shoot one of your animals. Be alert!” Another suggested I get away for a few days “until things cooled down.”
“How could you let Maria put herself in danger like that?,” another woman demanded to know.
I understand that social media is often a hysteria machine, it seems to magnify fear and outrage and distort reality, but what I saw in so many of the messages was revealing about the widening divide in America right now between rural people and urban and suburban people. I live on the borders of both, both places have shaped my life. I love cities, I love the country. I’m not ever choosing between them.
It is as if rural and urban people were both living in different countries, everybody wants to talk, nobody wants to listen. I suggested to a good friend that she try talking to some supporters of the new President, it might be helpful to here, she snapped back at me. “I don’t wanted to talk to stupid people.”
If I write that people like me ought to listen to the people who launched this jarring revolution, I am accused of enabling racism and bigotry. Some things, I am told, are simply not acceptable, can’t be listened to or countenanced or enabled in any way.
That is a sad thing to me. It is not helpful to the idea of listening to consider everyone you are listening to as a stupid or bigoted or racist thug. That is not what I call good faith listening. And it is not what I see in the people around me, people who voted differently and feel differently but are quite good people, in no way inferior to me. They are not stupid or racist either. They have seen their world shattered, and they didn’t like it either.
The alarmed e-mails I was receiving were mostly from urban people, the rural and farm messages I got found the story interesting but not very dramatic. We’ve all been there, they said. Yell at the jerk when you see him.
Everyone with some land or a farm has put up with amateur deer stands snuck in by unethical kids, strangers or hunters. You just take them down. The hunters get more ticked off about then I do, it gives them a bad name. They always offer to take the outlaw stands down themselves.
Up here, there is rabid distrust of city people, Ivy League people, media people, politicians. People see the city as dangerous, valueless, insanely expensive, and obsessed with political correctness. Cities are host to the changing world they fear, they want the old world back and they have not accepted the idea – reality to some – that it can’t ever come back. They have not lost hope about that.
Most people dread the very idea of going to New York City, and they wish that there was some way for upstate New York to secede from a state dominated by New York City’s money and population. City people in the abstract are the enemy. City people in real flesh are welcome.
Reading my messages, I see that there is this equally rigid and shallow view of the country, people see it as a place right out Deliverance, where gun-toting thugs and bigots resolve differences with guns and violence, where culture has died, where outsider people like me are targets.
Like all stereotypes, this one doesn’t work very well.
It was not in any way dangerous to take down this deer stand, if the people who put it up show up, they’ll get a lecture on asking permission before invading someone’s property and firing guns on it. That is sacred law of life here, there is no difference of opinion about it.
I have lived in 15 different places in America, most of them cities, and I have never been safer or felt safer than I do here. Generally, violent crime is unknown here. Up here, the good people all have guns and do not hesitate to use them to protect themselves, but many more people are shot in cities than in rural America. Life is complex.
What I have learned living in both places is this: the people I knew in cities, the people I know here, are remarkably similar, once you get to know them. They worry about the same things – kids, jobs, money, schools, taxes, security, health. The people up here feel they have been betrayed and abandoned by every government they have ever known.
There is no prosperity or excitement or hope in these towns and cities, they are broken and left behind. People have spent their entire lives watching their jobs vanish and never return, their communities fade, prospects for work slowly and painfully vanish. Their Main Streets are sad and empty shells, their children gone away.
The people in cities have plenty of their own problems,but many are also increasingly prosperous, culturally exciting, filled with the new jobs everyone here was promised but never materialized. They have a media that celebrates their lives and culture, nobody ever comes to talk to the people here, or ask them about their lives.
I know from my own experience that people want the same things, they are just not as different from one another as they think they are.
The people I knew in cities were almost all good people, if one can generalize, the same goes here. There are some bad ones as well. Here, I am constantly reminded of people’s prejudice towards the so-called urban elites. When I looked at my messages after the deer stand came down, I just see more of the same thing coming from the other direction.
We are losing the ability to see one another as individual human beings, only as labels and stereotypes to argue with and dislike. We can’t go on this way. For me, listening is the only answer, one person at a time.
I will leave the politicians to eat one another, and godspeed to them.