I have spent the past 6 days in shock and disbelief. What has happened, in hindsight, was foreseeable. I am angry. As angry as I’ve ever been. I have some of the most uncharitable thoughts about the voters in our country than I have ever had. My wife has been working on me to remember to be better than “them”. She has reminded me that this is what we must teach our children. I am not fully convinced yet.
I grew up in a small town called Arlee, Montana. It is situated on the southern end of the Flathead Indian Reservation and named after Chief Arlee, the chief of the Bitterroot Valley band of Salish, where a provisional reservation was designated in the Hellgate Treaty of 1855. It is about 17 miles north of Missoula, MT. When I left this small town in 1988 to head off to college, it was exactly that: a small town. Everyone knew your business almost as well as you did and almost as soon as you were aware of it yourself. There are positives and negatives to a small town, I suppose, but at 18, I was tired of everybody always knowing about my business and having opinions about my life and doings, invited or not. College was a way for me to get away from that, plus an unhealthy extended family dynamic. I could also see that if I stayed too close to home when I started college, I may not have finished. The draw of The Rez is great on young people, especially if it is all you’ve known. I needed 1000 miles between me and my hometown to be able to give myself a shot at graduating from college.
Why the history? Well, Montana is not the height of enlightenment when it comes to attitudes and politics. Being on a reservation, you’d think that it would be more liberal. This is true, but it is in relation to the generally conservative attitudes of the state, but still much more conservative than the nice Blue Bubble of Seattle, WA where I now live. I moved back briefly in 1994 after graduation from college and spending an additional year working as an Assistant Manager of a restaurant. I couldn’t stay. There were not many good jobs to be had for us students who were not the top of our classes and also did not have any definite goals or ideas about what we wanted to do with our lives. I like to say that “I went to college to wrestle and ended up with an education”, so there was no plan when I started, except to get the degree. When I graduated and was in the working world for awhile, I couldn’t really see the value of the degree and the debt I accrued to get it. It wasn’t until almost a decade later that my degree paid off, but that is a different story. My need for opportunity outweighed my need to be close to home. Eventually, I ended up in Seattle, met a girl, had a kid, bought a house, had another kid, got a couple of dogs and have had a good life and built a great community in our little neighborhood. However, I am still sick to my stomach and struggling to see any light through these dark clouds.
This is a way for me to vent and try to find myself before I travel back over 3 mountain passes and cover the close-to-500 miles of highway to visit with my family for Thanksgiving. The great challenge for me is that I am of mixed race, so my family can be quite politically divided. My father is a Nez Perce tribal member, my mother is of Finnish/Norwegian descent. Like so many of my childhood friends, I’m a “White Indian”. Not enough native to be a added to tribal roles, but culturally, pretty traditional. I identify as Native, feel native, but have passed through this world as a white person because of my lighter skin color. With that comes white privilege. At times, I have felt guilty, especially when my cousins and friends with darker skin have faced racism and derision by some less enlightened white people, where I would skate by, unnoticed, being assumed to be one of the white people. My dad’s stories of racism he witnessed and experienced growing up on the reservation have had a deep and lasting impact on me. I, too, have witnessed such things in my life. This is at the very core of my liberalism. I can see both sides of white privilege. I can see how it is wrong with acute clarity. However, some of my family members can not. I am certain that some of my childhood friends and white family members are bound to have voted for Donald Trump. They voted for Bush II, and have voted for the myriad Republican senators and house members at both the state and federal level and have generally supported Republican policies. In the past, I’ve tirelessly debated, over beers, on merit and tried to show them the gigantic holes in their logic when justifying votes for any Republican. To no avail. A lot of them are also “Christians”. Until this past week, I was willing to agree to disagree because I could see the political bluing of our country on the horizon. Not any more.
This, dear reader, is where I come back to my point.
My capacity for understanding their point of view has been damaged. I am afraid that I will never regain trust in my friends and family members who are opposite me on the political spectrum. I am not going to let them off the hook and am very, very suspect of their morals and intelligence. I’m afraid I’ve permanently lost a piece of my better self.
This is the first time in my life that I fear for my family’s physical safety traveling across great swaths of Red America to land in a Red State. I just don’t know how far some of the people I grew up with are willing to go to prove they’re right. At this point, they’re complicit in electing a very, very dangerous person. It can’t be because of religion. If it is, then they’re hypocrites. It can’t be because of economics. There is too much evidence contrary to Supply-Side economics working. That leaves only a couple of things. Fear and bigotry. Having fear is a certainty. It's the bigotry part that is the most troubling. The resurgence in hate crimes and misdemeanors in just the past few days is evidence of this. How else do you justify a vote for Trump? He’s a man you couldn’t trust in a room alone with your wives or daughters. A man you couldn’t trust with a dollar because he would steal it from you and call himself “smart” for doing it. He’s a racist, anti-semitic, misogynist troglodyte. How can you not think that makes those who voted for him racist, anti-semitic, misogynist troglodytes? With guns. Lots of guns. And they know how to use them quite proficiently.
I know that there has to be a political correction down the road, but it is going to long and hard and we’re likely going to have to rebuild our economy...if we’re going to get that lucky. If the white-lash is as extreme as the rhetoric, we are in serious trouble.
One thing I know is that the media is largely to blame for where we are. They enabled and legitimized a terrible candidate, holding him up as equivalent to an obviously better person and more qualified candidate for the job of President. Treating trump as equal to Clinton is the most egregious sin. I read earlier from a contributor to Daily Kos that we must not commit the same sin as we confront individuals that are going to try to rationalize to us why they did it. That somehow, it is justifiable because “X” reason and “Y” reason. There is literally no justifiable reason for this. I am afraid I am going to permanently alienate myself from some people because I don’t think I can be guarded or measured in my response to that knowledge. The worst thing is that I might end up destroying relationships with siblings. This is a very real possibility for me. Like I said, I’m angry. I have friends and members of my community in Seattle who are now at risk because of their skin color, their religious affiliation, their sexual orientation, gender, and now, political leanings. And this is Seattle. Arlee, MT is going to seem like a moonscape by comparison. A vast moral wasteland. I sincerely want to be wrong, but I am not holding out hope. That hope was dashed last Tuesday.