I live in a town that was once featured on this site because our mayor (an Italian immigrant) went full Trump before there was Trump and tried to “crack down” on “illegals” — then he ran for Senate (and lost)
In that same state, in 2020, Emmett Oz and Doug Mastriano ran for office … and lost… but their campaigns were the doggiest dog whistles that everybody heard, but nobody listened to.
So I’m telling you that I live in a place that is the belly of the beast; if the next civil war starts, I think it will be less than a mile from here. I am going to write now about my impressions, and why I think “the left” is missing something.
I am “the left”, if you want to know the back story. I have been a Democrat since 1992, when Jesse Helms ran in NC against Harvey Gantt. That campaign was … as sick as what we see today. What I wrote back then, in places nobody heard was that the Republicans backing Helms only ever said the same thing:
”Your life is lesser than it could have been.
The reason is because “those people”, “they”, “them”, “the others” took something from you, or stood in your way,
‘We’ are here to defend ‘us’ against ‘them’”.
I was about thirty, and not really into politics, being an spoiled upper-middle class white kid whose parents gave him everything. So how did that guy become a lefty and not a Reagan nepo-baby?
I don’t know the simple answer. I remember my mother standing behind me, while I kneeled on the living room carpet as Nixon was getting on the helicopter and waving “V” for Victory as he was … resigning. ?
That’s weird on it’s own, even to a kid that age — but my mother was crying. I had heard my father and mother up arguing, night after night, and that little kid in his green plaid flannel pajamas came down the hall and told mommy and daddy to keep it down because little boy could not sleep over the shouting. That’s how i knew who was on the side of what.
And “why are you crying, mom? You don’t like him” — my mother says, as solemnly as she sounded upon announcing that someone had died, she says — —
”I’m not crying for him, Joey. I’m crying for the country.”
My mother died two years ago at age 82. She had a pretty good run. If you smoke cigarettes — stop.
But that moment has been playing in my head now for … fifty years …. and it gets louder, and plays more often every day.
My wife told me when we married in 2015 that she did not care about politics. She said they are both bad. She went to a Trump rally in 2022, and she now has all the MAGA merch. Our divorce is …. inevitable. It’s complicated.
I’m on disability, she just turned 65, and she voted for MAGA. How does a man break into that mindset? Like I said, it’s complicated.
But I wanted to tell you about my town. When I moved here to be with my father as he was in his twilight, it is the town he grew up in, born in 1935. His family had a “Victory Garden”, his father was a World War i veteran, he was ROTC at his university until the found him 4F… he had polio as a kid, and survived, but he was tall, and his frame was thin, and the doctors found something that said made him unfit for … the things a person must do in the course of defending the nation.
My town? I was at a big-box store, and I’m crushed. All of the old European immigrants that looked like my grandparents are gone. The industry that was here that sustained them is gone; we went through 40 years of decline, and now .. now we are seemingly the warehouse capitol of the free world. Forty warehouses in five square miles, ten miles from the intersection of two major interstate highways. The earth movers and the OSHA back-up alarms come through the walls and wake me up every day for the last two years, and the warehouses will be 500 feet off my back porch.
I have pictures of wild turkeys parading through my yard. A bear comes into my yard a few times a year to tear down my bird feeder. Squirrels eat peanuts off the window ledge in my kitchen. I have so many small birds come to the house I cannot learn them all, but they seem pleased with the 160 pounds of sunflower seeds I buy in a year. About the same weight in peanuts for the squirrels, and they keep me entertained.
The Western horizon outside my window has changed. It’s no longer the tops of trees, but the bare pavement that a warehouse will be built on top of, which is above the top of the tree-line for all of my life. It’s horrible. The sound of jake-brakes punctuates the early morning in a way that no rooster ever could, as the big trucks trundle down the hill from the interstate, to an intersection 400 feet off my front door. I recorded it at 70 dB in the yard; its’ +10 dB inside the house with the windows closed and all the insulation i blew into the walls. Its’ maddening.
But I used to work in the warehouses. They were built to “give people good paying jobs” — and there are no people in them who look like me, who talk like me, who even acknowledge me. Like at the big box store last night. I’m surrounded by people — all of them — not one like me that i could see — all speaking a language foreign to me. I’m in the town I’ve known all my life; I live in a house that was built by my grandfather and his father-in-law in 1933. This is my sacred land. This place is the ONLY constant in my 57 years on this Earth — and I feel like a stranger in a strange land .. in the place where my grandfather first held me in his arms as a baby only a few weeks old.
It hurts to be stared at like I’m the one who does not belong, and talked to in a language that is not my native tongue; not the one I spent all those years in school learning to be articulate in; and being told when I worked in the warehouse that I was “talking down” to people and “making them feel stupid” by using all those words i studied to learn in school. The word that set them off was
”erudite.”
I was eventually fired. lost my heatlh care — went through a few brain surgeries to deal with a condition I’ve had since birth. I’m a most fortunate man, but that good fortune … times are different. I was not able to walk the same path as my parents generation; before the baby boom. They lived THE American dream, and I … I feel like I’m hated by everyone.
I get the look from the new immigrants speaking their language, like it’s their town now, and I ought to get the hint and leave. Immigration raids happend in front of me, as a dozen government vans pulled up to the warehouse and people in tactical gear got out — fully armed — and hey, “You’re a white guy, what have you got to worry about” — — I think that diagrammed the problem painfully well right there.
AT THE SAME TIME = that house my grandfather built is far enough out of town that the State Law says firing a rifle on private property is legal, provided you don’t shoot the “wrong” people for the “wrong” reasons. So on any given day, while I’m feeding the peanuts to the squirrels and refilling the bird feeder “how does a bird that small pack so much seed in there?” — while I’m watching a hawk circle over my little patch of grass surrounded by trees, hoping to pick off a slow rabbit or some other rodent. …
BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM
with no warning, a clip worth of ammo discharges from a house that is only 300 feet away.
Which is legal in my state. If he fires at the target in his back yard, its’ “practice”. If he rotates his hips and aims, I am an easy head-shot through any one of seven windows on the side of the house that faces his. The State Police not only told me
”MOVE.” — because he’s not doing anything illegal, until and unless he shoots me — —
But they actually told me that if I call it in too often — being terrified of gunfire — — that might be considered harassment on MY part, since he’s not breaking any laws. Some simple physics says that if he ever decides he has a reason, that gun can put a bullet through my skull through those seven windows in under half a second. Basic algebra.
And do you know what he said — 16 years ago when he and I were still neighbors on good terms, on the first day I heard that rifle shatter the peace? I ran over there, thinking the worst, and there is this guy, with that stereotypical weapon-of-manhood slung over his shoulder like he just came back from “the shit” in some far-away war zone — barrel smoking — — and he says,
”Well, the messicans got ‘em, now I got one.”
As the gods I don’t believe in are my witness, that’s my testimony.
Over a decade and a half I have had nightmares about what happens when they start this new civil war they think they can “win” —
and then I go downtown and everyone speaks Spanish, and I’m in hell.
Muslims, Jews, and Christians fight over Jerusalem and they will not leave. The place — the land — is sacred to them. All the ghosts of the elders are still there. Stand in front of a wall and wail to them — they can hear you better there.
I am in the house my father was born in. I am in the house where my grandfather first held me in his arms — it’s over there, ten feet away as I type this — and there’s the room next to it where I found my father dead twenty years ago now.
That’s where the Christmas tree was; that’s where we used to have “Connect 4” tournements on holidays when the family was all together; that’s where Baba used to make Halupki and Halushki for us — for me — poppyseed rolls…. we ate them every Christmas when i was a kid, and I never worried that I might fail a drug test if my employer pulled a “random” one, or I needed to apply for a job.
It’s all a nightmare now. I studied Spanish in junior high and high school, thinking it would be useful. Now when I hear it, it feels … threatening… it feels … designed to exclude me, to tell me this is not my home anymore, its’ their home, and I need to get the hint.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood and the gunfire seems to have other designs.
Think about this — uptown in “the grid” where the row houses all share walls on the street — gunfire up there is a no-brainer 911 call. Right? But if I call 911 and say “there is gunfire very close to my house”, The State Police will come out here and tell me that no laws are being broken if the guy is target shooting on his private property. Meanwhile my skull is one-quarter of the effective lethal range of that same gun, just in a somewhat different direction. Just aim, and …
Greatest Country In The World.
Land of the Free (to move, if you don’t like it)
DO you know how many towns in the Northeast US still have names stolen from native American Indians? I was born not too far North of here in NY, and I never realized when I was a kid how many things were stolen from the Indians who once lived there… until we drove them out, in tears.
Now the State Police tell me “MOVE.” if I don’t like the sound of MAGA practicing (projecting, terrorizing, intimidating… warning...) in his yard.
”I’ve never been a big fan of irony” That’s a line from the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard HBO special “From The Earth To The Moon” — about the Apollo 1 fire. Sorry, got sidetracked. But I keep hearing that line in my head.
Written extemporaneously. Not spell checked or edited. You are today’s therapist.
God help us all, says the atheist.
