There's been a lot of talk on here about the protesters at various town hall meetings and their fear of a black president. As I read this, I, too, am caught up in the fervor and the simplicity of that explanation. But I live with two Southern men (one my husband of 32 years, one my adult son), I've been to a town hall, and I think that we are dangerously oversimplifying what's going on here. If you're willing to look closer, follow me over the fold.
Last year, during the campaign, candidate Obama got into a lot of trouble with folks on the right for using the word "bitter" to describe folks in small towns. That quickly became and us v. them, thereby losing Obama's point. Republicans went around saying "He thinks you're bitter," and Democrats didn't say much. But in the background, there were some quiet voices saying, "He's right. We are bitter."
For decades, administration after administration, Republican and Democratic, people in the small towns of America have been told that things were going to get better. And they haven't. Their children are leaving the towns their ancestors grew up in and moving to the city. Family farms are harder and harder to keep in the family. The church is no longer the center of American life. Banks are no longer run by friends who help each other out. Entertainment seems to be all about sex and violence, and city people. Disrespecting authority is the norm. All of the institutions of their lives are moving away from small town values of friendship and helping neighbors to big city values of greed and hedonism. (Yes, I know that's not all big cities are about, but that's what it feels like to them.) Raising children has become, as Jim Wallis has said, countercultural. And so they are bitter. They don't think it is possible for a change to do good for them, because all the other changes proposed by all the other presidents and Congresses did them no good. A rising tide didn't lift all boats. The War on Poverty got lost. Saving the savings and loans led to larger and less personal banks. Everything in which they once took pride is gone. So they express their anger not at a black president, but at one more change that can only help the rich folk. How do we tell them that this time we really will make their lives better, when nothing good has happened yet--regardless of who was in power in White House and Congresses.
Unfortunately, there are many around who take advantage of these feelings and are more than happy to show them the bogeyman that caused them--often lying through their teeth, but giving the people what they think they want. And when the people are disappointed, there's another fearmonger to say it's the liberals fault. And some of it is. Many of the changes in the last paragraph are liberal changes. But more of them are about shifting wealth to the already wealthy, the very crafty wealthy.
To dismiss their anger as only being about race is to trivialize small town folks (and even in the cities, many of us think of ourselves as small town folks--I certainly do.) once again. Their bitterness and their anger are real. They've been trying to live quiet lives, helping their neighbors, raising their children, working for a better life. All of those things are getting harder. To dismiss them as racist allows them to think of us as more people from the coasts who think of them as the "fly-over" states. They are tired of being ignored.
Is racism a part of this? Very possible, and in some cases, most definitely. Our attitudes on race are shaped by where we grew up. I know that there are traces of racism in me, even as I celebrate the first Black president offer sixteen medals of freedom to what must have been the most diverse group ever. But I think there is more to the anger than race, and I think that we ignore that fact at our peril.
In my diary about going to Steve Cohen's town hall, I said that "in the end, nothing much happened." I was wrong. A bunch of folks got to express their anger. They cannot say that they haven't been heard. And ten or twenty or forty years from now, they'll be as proud of whatever program comes out of this, because it will truly have helped them. That is my prayer.