Today, I have a day off from teaching school. In New Haven, Connecticut, the holiday is officially called “Indigenous Peoples Day” and “Italian Heritage Day,” a compromise between the liberal community and the Italian community for renaming Columbus Day. On Saturday, when I walked my dogs, I saw members of the Italian community gathered in a small ceremony at the park by my house, circled around the stump of a recently-removed Columbus statue–Italian and American flags flying. Today, though, it’s raining. And I’m giving myself the morning to process and write—and then I’ll try to catch up on grading.
Yesterday, my wife and I got in a fight. It was about politics. Not about who we were going to vote for. We will vote, and we are voting for the same person. I suppose undecided people exist, but I’m not sure who they are. We are still wound up, though. Our fight went something like this:
“This election isn’t going to make a real difference, you know?” she said.
“What do you mean? Of course it will. Think of our friends who are trying to get visas–”
“And we’ll help them no matter what.”
“Think of the people we can’t help. There are thousands of people in their shoes.”
“Fine. But if voting makes people suddenly feel like they’ve solved the problem—”
“No, I know. That’s not good. But this chaos right now has to end.”
“But it’s not going to. This presidency, this pandemic—they’ve shown us what we really are.”
When Trump was elected, I went through a short period of denial and a long period of anger—primarily directed at the conservative wing of my family in Missouri. I don’t know what it is. I’ve always been able to be patient with everyone else. I actually enjoy talking politics with the conservative wing of my wife’s family. They include military veterans who come at political issues with a host of experiences that I have little knowledge of and that I know are important for me to listen to and consider (despite my tendency toward pacificism). And if I’m truthful, I would long for someone even a little bit conservative in my current New England bubble—someone to push back a little when there’s too much groupthink. I often become that person, but I don’t do it justice. I guess, with my own family, though, it’s just too personal. It feels like I know them well—or like I should know them well, but I don’t know them at all. I thought we were raised with the same Christian beliefs, but I see very little of the radical love and acceptance and bravery that we were raised to value. I see nothing but the errors in their vision—the specks in their eyes.
Which, of course, means I ought to be looking for the plank in my own. And it’s there. There is an elitism deeply ingrained in me. I went to Yale (and Hopkins and NYU.) My friends are doctors, lawyers, academics, consultants, journalists, artists. We have cultural capital. Many (not all—but certainly me) have financial capital. We rarely wonder why so few conservatives are part of the Ivy League. The answer (too many of us think to ourselves) is so obvious that it’s unspoken: they aren’t smart enough. When we speak about adding diversity to our circles, we almost never talk about conservatives or even people from rural areas. We pay lip service to poor people in urban areas, but we really don’t do much for them, either. Our institutions have billions of dollars, and we continue to donate money to them, wear their sweatshirts proudly, and accept the power that they give us—as though we are entitled to it: As the “smarter, more educated” people, of course we should continue to make decisions about policy for areas we know nothing about. We’ve read Plato and can recite the first 16 lines of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English. We can do anything.
This is the true “white supremacy.” The poor, homeless man who tries to abduct a governor is created by this form of white supremacy—by Yale graduates. By Harvard graduates. By New York billionaires. Eurocentric elitism is structural white supremacy. Any of us who have dismissed someone for not catching a Western academic reference or mis-conjugating a verb or not attending a college—or attending a college with greater than 15% acceptance rate—we are the problem we are yelling about. As most “average” Missourians could tell us. We powerful, rich costal elites are, in many ways, colonizers of the Midwest and South, insistent that we know the best way of life and determined to force it upon them. If we saw this happen in another region of the world—say, I don’t know…a powerful country that was trying to dominate and control the life of less powerful fundamental Muslims–many of us would express alarm, even if we disagreed strongly with the beliefs and practices of fundamental Muslims. But we can’t see ourselves doing it here. Or, for me, it took the Trump presidency for me to see myself doing it.
It’s not hard to understand why frustration bubbled over in 2016. And it’s not hard to see why it’s happening now—and why it’s largely happening from people who have been disempowered, whether they are white militiamen from Michigan or members of Antifa in Portland. Maybe they see themselves on different “sides” of an issue, but they are reacting to the same phenomenon: They feel unable to provide safety and basic essentials for themselves and their families right now. So they are trying to take power by any means necessary. Meanwhile, coastal elites are riding this pandemic out with take-out Pho, new office chairs, and, “you know, maybe starting to train for a half marathon—to have a new exercise goal.” (That’s what I’ve done, anyway.) I imagine my family sees me as this type of elitist. And they aren’t wrong—but I’m working on it. Because of the Trump presidency, I’ve switched back to teaching in public schools instead of at an incredibly expensive, ($60,000 a year) liberal-leaning boarding school. My wife and I are starting a business that we hope will open up new pathways for artists. As much as I want to yell at Missouri anti-maskers, I’m trying not to negatively engage with people outside of my community. What good would it do, anyway? Who am I to them, now? A condescending coastal elite. I can see it now.
Empathy has its limits, though. While I can understand a strong critique of coastal elites (myself included), I can’t actually understand, despite all of what I just said, why people would still vote for Trump–largely because he is the quintessential New York City elitist billionaire. And if I’m honest, I don’t think I can listen fairly. I can talk about issues, but not about Trump. I don’t think Trump voters are evil. Or stupid. I don’t think they are wrong about their critique of liberals or liberal hypocrisy. BUT I think that the rich New Yorker in power right now is the ultimate colonizer—employing tried and true methods of division and fear-mongering to gain power, blaming others for problems happening under his leadership, and ultimately serving the bottom-line of wealthy, coastal elites. He critiques liberals, but he hasn’t done a thing but make them more radical—and he has no interest in bringing them into the fold. If you believe that “conquering” the other side is the only way forward, I suppose he’s your guy. But if you believe in the power of love and unity, it’s hard to imagine why you’d vote for this man who has brought America to this point. Sure, he can blame a thousand things. But I’m ready for a leader who will say the “buck stops here” again—who will take responsibility and practice care for all of the country, not just the people who are in his political party.
But that brings me right back to the conversation that started this meditation. Is Joe Biden going to be the answer? Probably not. Will he be better than Trump? I’m hoping so. He’s not a New York billionaire born into enormous financial privilege like Trump. He’s not going to have those blind-spots or the raw greed that it takes to amass the kind of wealth that Trump (along with many wealthy “liberal” business owners) has—the willingness to keep profits instead of paying employees a living wage or allowing them to earn shares of his organizations. I do have hope that Biden might bring some relief for our immigrant friends and neighbors, a slightly more reasonable tax structure, short-term relief from losses from the virus, and a more scientific/data-driven and universal approach to handling the pandemic—and climate change for that matter. These things are certainly worth voting for.
But here, my wife says that I’m endorsing Biden too much. “How can you argue, in the same article, that voting isn’t going to change much AND that it’s important to vote for Biden? Aren’t you negating your own point?”
To some degree, I think my wife is right. The change that most of us long for—the ability for everyone to be safe, to have their needs taken care of, to find purpose in work, to have real pathways to get to wherever they want to be—they won’t happen through this presidential election. And if Biden is elected, there’s a chance he will pacify us back into our prior (or current) status quo, and we will fall into hypocrisy once again. I want to think that we are more likely to move forward if we get rid of the master divider at the helm now–that we will learn a lesson that we desperately needed to learn from these four years. But that’s quite a leap of faith. Who’s to say we won’t continue to be locked in the same types of partisanship that we are stuck in now? People have really dug in over the past four years. It’s quite possible that no president can unite us at this point.
And these next few months are going to be hard no matter what. The pandemic is almost certain to get worse this winter. Already, I’ve been connected to too many people who have taken their own lives during this difficult time, and I worry for the mental and physical health of loved ones. I worry for the people who have been unable to speak to their parents and grandparents in nursing homes, for those whose unemployment benefits are about to expire, for those who are struggling to balance parental responsibilities and jobs. I worry about hospitals that are, once again, filling up—and are likely to be unable to handle the predicted winter surge in the virus. I worry that people who are already stretched thin and vulnerable are going to reach their breaking points. I am not counting on any government official to save us from all of these problems–not in this political climate.
But this doesn’t mean we should give into despair or nihilism. On the contrary, it means we have meaningful work to do. It’s going to be on us, as individuals, to take care of our neighbors, to run our businesses in ways that are fair to our employees, to humanize every person we encounter—no matter how difficult that may be. It’s going to be up to us to put more love in the world as people are dealing with so many types of loss. We citizens hold significantly more power than we think we do; we just have to be brave and step outside of our comfort zones. We need to open up our hearts and homes. It’s up to us to do anything we can to help the vulnerable in our own communities get through these next few months—whether it’s shopping for the elderly, giving employees a raise, providing a safe space for someone in need, or reaching out to someone who you know is suffering. After all, we have a lot more power over our own communities than we do over communities we’ve never been part of—or even communities we’ve left. It doesn’t matter if you are Republican or Democrat, if you are acting from a place of genuine love and care, that message will be received. If we can simply follow and enact the greater principles we espouse (and tend to share), we’ll make a bigger difference in our communities than Trump or Biden. I wonder how different our world would be if, instead of cold-calling people people to convince them to vote for our candidate, we simply called everyone we knew and asked if they were OK—and offered any support we could if they were not.
On some level, presidential elections are always symbolic victories. Trump was a symbolic victory for people who felt (and were) mistreated by coastal elites. Biden and Harris might be a symbolic victory for liberals. Removing the Columbus statue and changing Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day was a symbolic victory for Indigenous People; and adding in Italian Heritage Day here in New Haven was a symbolic victory for Italians. But that doesn’t mean we’ve addressed the actual problems that impact people in rural states, people in cities, Indigenous people, or Italian-Americans. Politicians can say, “See, we did something. We responded to the people.” But too often, they think surface actions earn them a vacation. And we do, too. Real, positive change, however, only happens after people push for it. And push for it. And push for it.
So on November 3rd, I’ll vote. For Biden. And between now and then–and after–I’m going to keep writing and loving and trying to forgive and creating. And it maybe very well be that, of all the actions on that list, voting will turn out to be the least important.
