I grew up in a crappy little small town in Iowa that would be very offended by my public description of it as such. It’s not the town in the pictures here — those are from Kansas.
Individually, I know a whole lot of really neat people from my hometown. I got a lot of support from very many folks. But it’s also a place where I grew up watching people sit in church pews on Sundays listening to big talks about love and care… only hours or days after those very people were mean, were having affairs, or were causing trauma. Denial of trauma and meanness doesn’t mean it didn’t happen and doesn’t still. Rather, it helps it persist.
My experience was a front row seat to the America that’s front and center today.
What I didn’t realize when I tore out of that town as fast as I could after high school is that running away to anywhere else wouldn’t save me from the meanness and hypocrisy… because here we are living in a sea of it in the US. All of us.
And it’s worse — not better.
I used to read a lot of sci-fi growing up, so I had this idea that by this point we’d have evolved into a way shinier society. I thought things would be markedly different. Improved. Evolved.
To be fair, lots of stuff has advanced. I have access to people anywhere (with translation) and much of the world’s collected knowledge on a tiny device through the amazing power of radio signals and the internet; for five fine examples of advancement.
But my little hometown actually looks a hell of a lot worse. It’s not the only one.
Drive around to any small town in the US… and they’re falling apart. Downtown buildings have been covered in plywood for so long that everything has faded to the same shade of decay. In my hometown, houses are falling apart; apparently code enforcement isn’t a priority. Or building codes?
In the rural towns I’ve driven through in state after state… houses are rotting, rooves are collapsing into structures, and old schools and factories are covered in vines. Larger abandoned structures are in a state of suspension; as huge pieces slowly fall over years. People are living next door to decay, rot, and atrophy.
I haven’t driven through the entire country… but I’ve lived in or driven through rural areas in, well, most of the country. Except for like six states (AK, HI, ME, ND, NH, VT).
IT ALL LOOKS THE SAME.
The vegetation is different if you’re in Maryland or Kansas or Arizona… but it’s still all the same. There’s so much abandonment that VICE did a show called “Abandoned” with no shortage of material. There are books and photograph collections. Some of them specialize — like on abandoned malls, or abandoned factories. There are online groups all over the place that photograph places where buildings and houses are falling apart. It’s a whole thing.
Some abandonment is a natural part of societies evolving. It happens. Abandonment alone is not the problem.
Our country stopped investing in itself in real and serious ways about 50 years ago, in reaction to the civil rights era which codified that were were going to collectively be at least a little bit nicer as a country to some of our people, and also to share some stuff, and also to give more rights, and so on.
Our collective backlash reaction to all that also as a country was to stop spending money in serious ways on the things that help communities, families, and individuals flourish.
That was codified in the 80s, as Reaganism’s “trickle-down economics” set in and we were promised that the wealthy would share if we’d just favour them. So we have been… for 40 years.
Now we’ve got a very huge wealth gap, and it only intensified during the pandemic. CNBC reports that “the top 1% owned a record 32.3% of the nation’s wealth as of the end of 2021, data show. The share of wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans… [is] 30.2%.”
In 2005, these words from Reagan advisor Lee Atwater were revealed from a 1981 interview. They show the very intentional strategy:
“Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****, n*****, n*****’. By 1968, you can't say ‘n*****’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N*****, n*****.” So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”
Atwater later chaired the Republican National Committee (RNC), and advised President George H.W. Bush as well.
We’ve engineered our national policies to hurt very specific people, and hurt everyone in the process. People are pretty peeved about the state of this country, but they don’t dig that deep to find out why. Partly because not long after the Reagan years, talk radio and then talk television took off… and spawned a whole set of culture wars. Or what was framed as a culture war — but with one side really doing all the framing.
Donald Trump’s skill as a demagogue has been to tap into that carefully curated culture war anger and resentment, to mix it with racial bias and also blatant racism, and to deliver it in a package that resonates to those who dearly, dearly want to hold on to the status quo where the alabaster-hued straight men have all the power.
The demagoguery — much like the talk radio before it — carefully obscures that all that stirred-up anger helps the wealthy hold onto the status quo. You can move mountains of money while you’ve got a hyped-up angry mob fuming over on these other things over here that you’re pointing them at. Which the entire Republican party did when they passed a tax cut for the rich — and it was the only major legislation that got through Congress while Donald Trump was in office. Trump’s base doesn’t care, because he’s the most skilled demagogue this country has ever seen.
I write all of this because this week our Facebook wall got a troll infestation when we ran an ad to promote one of our engagement events. When I talked about it on Facebook, many passed off the trolls as probably being bots, or somehow paid through troll farms.
I get that we have a huge disinformation problem out on social media, and I understand bots, too. I’ve tracked the disinformation situation deeply enough to understand much of what’s at work.
But dismissing around 1,000 written, substantive, angry comments as all being from bots or paid sources runs the risk of missing what’s really going on up in this country — especially out away from the cities.
A whole lot of us live in places where we deal with people in-real-life (IRL) who think it’s okay to be hostile, aggressive, misogynistic, intolerant, and straight-up bigoted. It’s considered okay. I go to the grocery store with these folks. They’re the kinds of people who attend my high school reunion, and who are on the community Facebook groups I see here locally.
They’re part of the 74 million who voted for Trump in 20202; and who still support him.
It’s harder to deal with risk if we’re not willing to see it.
I suspect our denial of these tough truths is part of why we still don’t have a coherent, unified movement effort to counter this authoritarian threat in a major, large-scale way just yet.
I’d like our nonprofit here to help do that, but we’re just brand-new. We’re all going to need a lot of us in so many organizations to see the very real threats to this country to seriously counter those threats.
The threats are intensifying. The response to them… not so much.
I’d like to build a different future than the trajectory we’re on.
What do you think?
Sigh...all that you write is true, Vanessa--and it's quite depressing. I worry that even though avid trump supporters do not represent a majority of the people, their influence is out-sized because of the efforts of the Republicans to seize control of state governments and the judiciary. It's not just a matter of big state/small state, urban/rural. It's about the leverage they have to impose their will on much larger majorities who want no part of their "Christian"-dominated autocracy. So how do we counteract this? Liberal organizations are organizing like crazy--but in many states their efforts are thwarted by those very same conservative forces. People like me who live in safe blue bubbles are horrified by the extent of power that is concentrated in the autocratic bastions of Republican-dominated states. And provisions of our Constitution reinforce their out-sized influence. You are fighting valiantly to address this crisis. How can we elevate the movement to bring about real and lasting change?
Brilliant Vanessa, How can I help you distribute this? I don't live in the US so my digital footprint may not help ensure American eyes see it. If you have any suggestions on how I can help ensure this gets seen and read I'm open to learning.