Quelling the Nightmare of Reality through Understanding
So, I’m at a truck stop. The booth next to me is spewing Fox axioms. I feel a volcano start to sputter inside. I close my eyes and try to turn repulsion into compassion. They are defending their worldview just as I am. I stand up, and they scan me. I become awkwardly aware of my purple stretch pants, hand-knitted, ratty sweater, and my hemp necklace. I want to say my truth without putting them down, because I know as soon as I demean them, they won’t listen and maybe start a fight. But my mind goes blank. I just smile and go to pay my bill. Who wants to start something in a truck stop? Not me.
As I pay my bill, of course I come up with something good to say. Something snappy and harsh. But then I remembered something Jane Goodall said. “We can only change people through the heart and not through the head with information. When people feel how their viewpoint hurts the Earth or other people, they may consider a change.”
Next time I’ll come up with a good quip.
At night, the overheard conversation keeps me from sleeping. I know I’m just deepening the division by condemning their glittered misogyny and circus politics as sheer ignorance. Lying in bed, staring into the dark, not sleeping, I wondered if there was a way to heal my mindset instead of adding to the feeling of division. Can I understand or see this mayhem in a different way that will make it more tolerable? Can I choose not to hate? Because hating the haters is doing nothing besides keeping me up.
It’s the plethora of injustice that really gets to me. I’m so tired of disappointment in humanity. Hating the haters is burning me out. I’m sure you've all found some kind of coping mechanism. We all are seeking one - ignoring, ranting, moving, or isolating. Late that night, an idea came to me. Not an easy or convenient idea, but it’s... something.
This word came to me - Integration. I blinked into the darkness. I couldn’t even visualize what this would look like.
Not the hippie integration with different cultures, skin color, sexual orientation, and able-bodied, but integration of the far right with the far left. Electric art cars and Ford trucks? Drumming to country music? Guatemala shorts and Old Navy Shirts? Quinoa with ribs at a BBQ? Can it be done?
I just don’t think cheap beer and LSD are a good mix.
The uptight, clean-shaven, gun-loving, wholesomely fake profile gives me the heebie-jeebies; I wonder if I could relax and be more accepting. Is it possible to not react to things that tick me off, like prisons, rape, collapsing social services, greed, and war? I wonder if the people supporting the right think about these things, or if they're overlooking them for a greater cause.
I let myself drift off into the minds of those who are backing this regime.
I think they see a return to a more wholesome time. (Stay with me here). The religious white suburbanite sees diversity as a threat to their way of life. They live in white communities, their children are straight, they go to church, and everything is amiable and wholesome with baseball caps, Coca-Cola, hamburgers, and church. There are no complications, no questioning of the systems. Life is simple. The husband heads a nuclear family; mom takes care of the kids, and parents go to work while the kids go to school. Challenging situations like interracial or women-led government, equality for all, or transgender bathrooms make them go ballistic. They fear it viscerally, because it challenges all their assumptions of normalcy. Men are men, boys will be boys, women know their place, and dogs sleep in the doghouse.
As their children are exposed to things that are not “American Values” (not referring to democracy or equality but that sense of white Christian normalcy), they feel the need to wave the American flag frantically. That is why they have attached the American Flag to their mission, overlooking that it means separation of church and state and democracy. To them, it means white, straight, Christian, blue-collar working families. It is their America, and all these people wanting to be seen and heard who are not in line with this white Christian image are destroying the American Value System.
Jobs are for white people. White men rule the government. A blond, blue-eyed Jesus is our savior and keeps us in the moral lane, else people get crazy ideas like dyeing their hair rainbow, piercing their face, changing the norm of sexuality or supporting minorities and women as leaders in the white house. This is unacceptable to a large part of rural, suburban white America. They do not want to see weird Americans on TV, so they are fighting it. Yet they can’t stop their children from straying. This takes the fun out of fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism arises when people see society reject their belief systems, so they clamp down harder. Christian majority is slowly dribbling away in the Western nations, overtaken by a secular pop culture. This is painful for people who live and breathe a religious worldview.
As a spiritual person, I don’t take kindly to shallow secular pop culture either, feeling like it lacks real perspective, deeper wisdom and does not address the spiritual needs of humanity. Ironically, the very thing the right adheres to is a segment of pop culture dominated by capitalist. McDonalds and Ford is all American and so is the Dollar Store. (Oh, ahh maybe that’s Chinese? But you know… it’s mostly American). Like the founder of McDonalds said, “God, work, family and McDonalds.” Can’t be said any better than that.
Jesus is now the CEO of capitalism. It’s the – don’t tell me what to do- mind set of the Top 500 used against the government but also by the religious right about prayer in schools.
I’m working here to see the 30% not as haters or ignorant but as people trying to hold on to their values. I want to see them as intelligent and passionate people who have a right to be, or else we will always be fighting, and I won’t sleep for the rest of my life. Even if I ram my liberal values down their throats (which I really want to do), they will be resentful. I’m guessing this is where the violence is coming from.
There will always be people we don’t agree with we cant rid the world of others. This is the basis of the Armageddon fantasy- everyone gone but the Christians.
Many of us have just written off our right-wing friends and relatives, but I’m seeing now that this is not a wise move. Even in the hippy world, there are right-leaning racists and sexists. Just look at Harley-Davidson clubs and rural white hippies. They might wear leather or tie-dye and give the middle finger to the establishment, but they don’t have minority and women’s rights on their mind.
And just as much as I want to leave this America of racist, sexist bigotry - the religious right feels the same way when we have black or female leaders, or a whole generation changing their gender orientation, or social programs that have been deemed terrible by the Coca-Cola capitalist. Except Midwestern working people don’t fly to Europe or drive to Mexico, but instead, hole up in their self-reflecting rural communities.
How can we integrate? Well, for one, I don’t think we will - completely.
Things are changing fast, and there is little patience for slow integration. People want to be seen, heard, and accepted now. Not like the women’s or black movement that took over a 100 years. The media, however, makes change happen fast because the media loves shock value, so they give the mic to anyone who is going to do something shocking – both left and right. Hence, we have a president who is a master of this on the conservative side. He thinks up shocking stuff all the time, overshadowing transgender entertainers, ethnic spokespeople, and liberal waves of color and diversity.
It is moving too fast for real integration because integration requires a slower time frame, one that has people changing their minds over multiple exposures. In some ways, we are having the clumsy shift not through understanding and time but through shame and desperate need, because the egomaniac leader of our country is creating so much strife and economic strain that people are dropping away out of desperation.
So as people fall into the fray with doubt, their connections with their ideology crack. They become socially fake, pretending to adhere to ideologies that they internally question. These are the people that might consider opening to change, only if they are accepted as they are. Not converted to liberal values but accepted with their simple conservative values.
To make the America we want to live in, it’s going to take effort to touch the hearts of people, to stop othering each other. Every person has a place where we can relate. We both like our worlds to be friendly and comprehensible. We both want our country to reflect our values. We both want safe communities. So here is the commonality and the divide.
Can we hear people with compassion while not getting caught up in the rhetoric and emotionally triggered? I’ve tried. It’s hard. Almost traumatizing. I hold back the impulse to retch out a long tirade. Instead, I ask questions and stay interested in what they have to say. Sometimes I offer another perspective and hope they can hear something different, for a magic exchange and a subconscious shift. Trying to break down the othering of anybody, even with people who don’t want integration, is a messy paradox.
The least I can do is try. This vision of integration, patience, and tolerance becomes my beacon of light in these dark times and through the long dark nights. Even if it doesn’t heal this nation, it reduces my anxiety and allows me to snuggle my pillow, close my eyes, and dream of hippies dancing in an equitable world.
