Yesterday I had to stop by the Reno Costco to gas up the Subaru and found myself stuck in line behind a guy in a pickup with North Carolina plates. Festooned with NRA stickers, and a particularly inspirational 2nd Amendment decal on the rear window with two AK47's arranged like angel wings.
The strapping young white man, mid to late 20's, gets out of his truck at the pump and wouldn’t you know he was open carrying. With his clothes hitched around the holstered pistol, it was about as unsubtle a display as I’ve ever seen.
This is Nevada. We have that here. But you don’t actually see people packing very often. Maybe once or twice a year. At least not in the places I visit and the people I work and play with, which is all over this valley. Costco prominently forbids weapons on its premises, which the law says they can do. So you notice it.
My first thought was what is this person afraid of? Why the rattlesnake behavior, so obviously warning everyone in sight that he is dangerous? Since I can’t think of any ordinary circumstance on an ordinary day when it would actually be lawful to use that weapon, I have to wonder what the real intent is here. Intimidation? A form of pheromones I’m unfamiliar with? Or is it just fear?
Then I thought, This exemplifies where we are right now.
Nothing really changed this week. After thinking about this for a while, I had to admit to myself that all the things that trouble me about the state of our nation today were already in place before this election.
This election was another edition of “those people” are getting something and it’s not fair. There is no other way to describe the Trump campaign since it was entirely based on resentment over jobs, Obamacare, immigrants in general and Latinos specifically, and God knows what else. Our problem with “those people” is one of many signs of a serious breakdown in basic civility.
Today’s autopsy piece in the New York Times about Michigan voters captures the problem succinctly in the words of a woman who claimed to have “loved” Bill Clinton and thought Obama was “all right:”
“There’s people who’ve been here 12 years who don’t even care to learn the language but want to reap all the benefits of this country: food stamps, free health care, Section 8 housing, welfare checks. People are sick of that, especially in Macomb County.”
This pattern repeats over and over; the core complaint is that undeserving people are getting something. You hear a lot less “I need help because ...”, and a lot more “those people don’t deserve to get ....”
Yet, it was not, in fact, a poor vs poor, marginalized vs marginalized election that the “forgotten worker” meme implies. If Trump voters were just the people who were really hurting—underemployed, unemployed with no prospects, drug addicted—I’d have little problem with it. But that’s not who gave him the win. It was middle class white people, with above-median incomes, include the majority of white women, who handed Trump the keys to the White House. It was 1/3 of Latinos/Hispanics.
I am particularly fascinated by the opposition to Obamacare. Why do they have a problem with a program to help people get health insurance that does not cost middle class people a dime? I get that some people just don’t like being told they have to buy insurance, though the subsidies certainly ameliorate the pain. People who don’t qualify for subsidies face a hefty insurance bill, but then they are making more in relation to family size than the rest of us, so their complaint implies a total lack of empathy for everyone else. If the premium is painful, imagine the pain of medical bills (with none of the discounts given to insurance companies) rendered to the uninsured. Its not even a close choice if you fully understand the trade-offs.
I also understand that some people fall into the crack between the insurance subsidy cut-off and Medicaid. People of good will can fix that and other problems in the system.
But for everyone else who does not get health insurance from their employer, the ACA is a small miracle. Do Trump voters disagree with the idea that “those people” should have access to healthcare? Apparently so. Perhaps it’s the Medicaid expansion that galls them .... but making everyone else suffer because of that makes little sense other than as an expression of opposition to “them,” whomever “them” happens to be.
That brings me back to the gun-toting white man from North Carolina. In other parts of the world, entering another community fully and openly armed would be an Act of War. He is in no danger in Reno, NV. This is the sort of place where a would-be bank robber is quickly caught because he took time for a lunch break at a local casino. Come on, man!
We create a civil society to deal with a whole host of problems: the most obvious, though not necessarily the most important, is to protect the people from all manner of skullduggery. We form governments so that we can lay down our arms and live in peace. The West may have been won by Colt and Remington firearms, but it was settled by peaceful, civic-minded people who brought an end to gunfights in the streets as fast as they could manage it. There is a reason that, up until recently, you had to go to Tombstone Arizona to see a gunfight played out.
Yet a segment of the population–mostly white, because you know what happens to a black person who open carries–feels it must wander the streets fully armed. You do not publicly display arms without intending to send a message. In the minds of some, the second amendment is real freedom of speech: the first amendment is something “those people” abuse.
The speech they utter is ugly and uncivilized. It’s a reservation of the right to object to “them” by force. It’s the open flouting of civil conventions and niceties: trusting that most people are not looking to do us harm, and relying on policing and legal institutions to handle the bad apples. We’ve gone way beyond protecting our homes from intruders; some of us are expressing an implacable threat to kill anyone, anywhere we perceive as .... doing what exactly?
It’s taken us decades to get to this point. Anyone have any idea how we get out of it without blood in the streets? Unfortunately, human history is littered with these moments, and all too often the blood does eventually flow.