 In reviewing the recent electoral catastrophe, I find myself seeking answers. Am I wrong about my own views? Is it me or them? How did this train wreck happen, and why? It's similar to how I feel when confronted with cruelty and apathy on the street. I'll witness a moment of extreme selfishness and wonder, where is their best self, their considerate self? Why this instead? Selfishness happens most naturally when one's survival is at stake… or when one thinks one's survival is at stake.
Rural white poverty has always been, numerically, the largest type of poverty in the US, and as ever, it remains the least studied. Sociological studies of the poor tend to stem from major cities and the diverse demographics within them. Many of us have relatives who live out there, with baffling perspectives we cannot share. And don't forget– they find us equally baffling. Perspectives come from education, whether in school or from lived experience. What sort of education do we imagine exists out in the red states? To what degree are our rural and working-class neighbors equipped to decode the clever messaging politicians send their way? 1. Breaking it Down Literacy comes to mind as an effective unit of measure. And literacy is more than being able to read and write. Let's briefly review the PIAAC’s (Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies) six levels of literacy (more here). -Below Level 1: basic vocabulary only; can understand info on a familiar topic. -Level 1: can fill out basic forms; can't make inferences from written material (unable to understand correct dosage on a medicine label). -Level 2: able to make comparisons and simple inferences; unable to evaluate reliability. (can understand product reviews. Able to write a paragraph about your day). -Level 3: able to read multiple pages of text. Can evaluate sources and infer complex ideas; can identify inappropriate or irrelevant info (can compare two bus schedules and plan a trip). -Level 4: can understand non-central ideas from multiple texts to evaluate subtle claims and persuasive discourse (able to detect subtle bias and form one's own conclusion). -Level 5: can synthesize contrasting points of view; select key info to evaluate conceptual models of ideas; aware of rhetorical cues and high-level inferences requiring specialized background knowledge (can write a PhD dissertation). These are not measures of worth. I write the above without condescension. There are numerous types of knowledge, including all those the PIAAC system can't even begin to measure. Many of my favorite people, from the street or otherwise, are exactly those whom the above criteria would deem limited in their ability to decode written or spoken messages. I happen to like some of these people, and I respect and learn from them. I find something to admire in a certain freedom they sometimes exhibit, a freedom from the homogenizing intellect-based worldliness that becomes so tiresome after a while. But when an election is going on with this much at stake, you need to be able to understand what you're looking at. And as it turns out, 54 percent of the US is below a Level 3. This means they can't identify bias, evaluate reliability, or make inferences about what's irrelevant. They can read headlines, but not multiple pages of text. This map has breakdowns of literacy levels for every county in the US. You might be surprised to discover how many counties are mostly illiterate at levels 3 thru 5. You'll also notice a certain vast, recurring and undeniable correspondence between… you guessed it, counties with limited literacy levels and a high Trump voter response. 2. Feelings & Distractions All of us humans nurse a loneliness we pretend we don't have. We yearn to belong, to be seen and heard and wanted. What vast pocket of Americans has been continuously ignored, ridiculed and overlooked, by the wider culture, by media, news, politicians and governments? You know the answer. They have spoken now. They don't care about your needs, because survival is a selfish act and they imagine their survival is at stake. They believe the lies they've been told, the reassuring pronouncements that their needs will finally be addressed. They've fallen for the urgency capitalism wants us to think is true: that only some can survive. A person who feels ignored, especially in the sense of being able to sustain their livelihood, as rural and working-class folks today do, is going to respond enthusiastically to a politician who claims to see them, not condescendingly but equally, who claims to be one of them, who will save them from the rest of the world that ignores them and their needs. Who wants to burn down the whole broken system that's sidelined them for so long. Fear and frustration: these are the ways to manipulate the masses, especially if they're not looking too closely. Which is where the literacy part comes in. Trump is not “one of them,” and never was. You know this. He's an unstable billionaire with dementia seeking to make life easier for himself and other billionaires. He’s a convicted serial rapist and 34-count felon who absolutely does not care about poor white people, as his previous administration makes numbingly clear. Those folks are doing just as badly as they always were. No, he cares about rich white people. He distracts the poor with hot-button social issues that shouldn't even be political, taking advantage of people's shortsightedness on class, while making economic decisions that disadvantage everyone besides his own tax bracket. Only in a country that turns such a blind eye to class could voters fail to comprehend this massive and thoroughly obvious oversight. I'll refrain from discussing the many other oversights. Literacy. That's what this election was about. The ability to decode rhetoric. To read through advertising, to perceive the culture's political tricks for what they are. They fell for it, millions of them, to the point that they voted against their own self-interests. 3. In Summation This great, young country of ours strikes me now as an adolescent, a fiery, brilliant, impassioned creature who seems fully formed but isn't, who has difficulty understanding basic truths, who responds not intellectually but emotionally. Puberty. It's when you make your worst decisions, when you think only of yourself and ignore the needs of others. Sometimes there's nothing harder than having to share the room with a teenager. Especially when they get to make all the decisions. --- What lies ahead? As a society, we have no choice. It's a cancer diagnosis. As individuals though, we do have choice: to help the person next to us. To foster community locally. To remember we do better when those around us (different as they may be) do better. Helping others takes patience and effort. Let us breathe. We don't get to choose the times we live in, but we do get to choose how we live in them. I'll see you out there. --- Sources and Further reading: Trump
Literacy
Rural white poverty
Although I feel compelled to share the above, this won't become a political blog, I promise! As Paul Currington said, politics and opinions push people apart... whereas stories bring people together. Right now we need the latter.
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Celia just called me, a spur-of-the-minute decision as she sped down Rainier late tonight. “This is Celia,” she says in the voicemail. She adds her last name, as though I might have forgotten after all these years. Not a chance. “I saw you driving the 7 just now, and I thought I would call. You were northbound on Rainier at Rose. You had your light on, as usual. I was reminded of all the good times we had together, all those rides and conversations.” I am suffused with a kind of bewilderment, the melancholy joy that comes when we are reminded of the size of existence. Her voice brought back a flood of– not so much memories but the sensation, the bodied recall of an effortless peace, when the clutter was benign, those sections of our lives that did not feature pain or stress as their principal ingredient. You remember. She worked at Italian Family Pizza and brought me slices regularly. Those were the days when I got so many meals gifted from passengers I didn't know what to do. Her and I, laughing at the terminal. Or the two of us quietly absorbed in the world moving by, me driving and her up front watching, one or the other of us periodically punctuating things with a comment. The genial silence of relaxed friendship, easy, uncluttered by romance or goals or futures. Or later, speaking softly in her family’s kitchen, the two of us building ideas after the rest of the house had gone to bed. Was she the sister I never got to have? Celia sitting on top of the wheelwell because why not, she's light enough. And me so happy she made it running all the way down First Hill from work to downtown to catch me, just in time, a long jog in the dark hoping for this moment, her flustered smile still scented with cardboard and dough. She was carrying leftover slices in a box under her arm. Why do I remember this moment better than all the others? Memories. They overwhelm me now, the surprise that once upon a time this was the biggest thing that ever was, the present, a Tuesday night bus ride home. Catching up over rain-slicked neon pavement. We echo into the deeper past, unknowingly, a gift for our future selves. If the only intelligent response to the incredible gift of life is gratitude, then the only meaningful interpretation of the past is through forgiveness. We must forgive, others for their hurtful actions and ourselves for our faults. Why dwell on ignorance, laziness, selfishness? There is no time. The time that was is gone. Let the gauze of selective memory paper over the pain, work its magic, that we might more fully recall the rest of the picture: all of the joy, the lightness and normality, the neutral afternoons and the textures that become real when we forget to rush. Tonight she continues in the voicemail, telling me she tried to make my recent art show, plus an update: she has a newborn now. It was going to be a surprise at the gallery, but here we are. Her voice is at peace with itself. The times we shared could only have happened then. That was our season. She makes no mention of “we should get together.” We humans drift closer and then apart, pulled by the tides of ourselves, new projects and people. It is the way of things. Friends once, now acquaintances. They're living their life now and so are you, and you're busy. But you find yourself pausing, now. You tarry tonight in a still room, alone with your memories even if someone else is sleeping nearby. You go to the kitchen for water and remain a bit after turning out the light, appreciating the darkness and the liberating fullness of time. How the faint light catches the rim of the water glass. You say to yourself, “She was a good friend of mine.” |
Nathan
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