A post-election road trip

Nothing is working anymore. Guidelines for myself for these next few months.

Night sky, Ohio. Photo by Jorge.

The defining feature of the drive between Columbus and Cincinnati is a massive black billboard with the white lettering HELL IS REAL.

The billboard stands beneath a navy sky in a stark wasteland of winter cornfields. It has boldly shouted its truth since at least 1992, when I would pass it in my dad’s Skittle-sized Toyota Tercel en route to the town of Washington Courthouse, where I’d be handed off to my mom in the Wendy’s parking lot so I could spend the weekend in Cincinnati.

I made that drive in the sticky pleather backseat of the Tercel and then the fuzzy backseat of my mom’s Volvo with its “Kill Your Television” bumper sticker hundreds of times as a child. Watching the cornfields peel by, gray in winter and emerald in spring and tall and lemon in summer. The stark white barns marooned in the endless flatland, the sweeping sky with its Midwestern dramas.

I made this drive again this past weekend to take my daughter to a swim meet. We don’t usually travel for meets, but this would be a good opportunity for my mom, who still lives in Cincinnati, to see my daughter and watch her swim. So there we were, cruising down I-71 south, the sky the shade of Nordic sea, the corn stubby and low.

It had been years since I’d made this drive by myself, and I was hit with a wave of sadness. In the backseat lay my daughter, reading an adventure book with her feet pressed to the window, ten years old already, with wild hair and strong opinions.

And there I was, age 42, a writer, with a family and a grown-up life, returning again. How had I gone from nine to 42? From dreaming of being a country vet to writing books? From that little girl holding a stuffed polar bear, often missing one home or another, to a mother? How does it go so fast? These are the kinds of thoughts one has in severe Midwestern landscapes with Biblical incantations.

After the election results, I almost didn’t go to Cincinnati. I wrote two essays for all of you, and didn’t publish either. They didn’t feel right.

At first, I was furious, incredulous, and depressed. I flew home from Mexico with Elena on November 6th feeling utterly grim.

But then on the third flight from Atlanta to Pittsburgh, when Elena was a little nervous because of storms at the airport, I asked the pilot if he could reassure her about turbulence, and he said, “Absolutely! Come on into the cockpit!”

And he took her into the pilot’s seat and introduced her to the co-pilot and explained turbulence with the metaphor of a boat crossing an ocean and gave her a collectable 747 card and invited me to take pictures, in which she is grinning and he’s giving an earnest thumbs up.

I have no idea how this man voted. I was just so grateful for his kindness. And then the familiar election venom bled out of me and didn’t return.

This is not to say that I don’t care about the results, that I’m not anguished and worried about what will happen to the U.S. – especially, selfishly, as a precariously middle-class millennial watching a bunch of kleptocrats get their hands on the national coffers - but rather that the rage and blame attached to all those worries just isn’t there in the same way.

I don’t know why, really. I didn’t make a conscious choice. Maybe it’s the meditation. Maybe it’s all the work I’ve done around birth and education, which has led me to question much of the status quo, and many liberal assumptions as well as conservative ones. Maybe I’m just older and understand now how spiritually corrosive righteousness and hate become.

When Elena and I went to the farm after returning from Mexico, my dad told me, “I just can’t access the same feelings.” This was precisely it. In 2016, there was so much despair. Jorge and I had many serious conversations about leaving the country or at the very least moving to California. I went to the women’s march, I did all the things. I was earnest and outraged and sincere.

But this time around, I couldn’t access those feelings. I didn’t gloriously rise above them or actively suppress them. They just weren’t there.

Grimness, yes, dread, yes, my dad and I both felt those things, but also a sense of: this system is not working. Nothing is working anymore.

Hateful, corrupt dysfunction based on the wholesale blame of immigrants (fentanyl! housing! you name it, immigrants caused it!) certainly is NOT the answer, but what is?

These two parties, this whole circus of outrage and righteousness and reaction and counter-reaction, this madness of the American experiment racing furiously around in anger and certainty, doubling down on oil and more oil as the word burns, denial and blame…It’s not working.

We are, as

Rosie Spinks

captured masterfully in her newsletter this week, in an era of collapse.

What to do with that? It’s a very different question from how to fight them.

Instead, there is this: what to build? Not, this time, in opposition, but in spite of. In spite of whatever hideous government apparatus is sprouting before our eyes, eating McDonald’s in suits in billion-dollar corporate jets, what can we build? What is there to do, with this? It’s an annihilation, but from an annihilation can come seeds.

I almost didn’t go to Cincinnati because the suburbs of Cincinnati – I was raised in the city, where my mom used to live, but most of my family is in the suburbs – are red country extraordinaire.

I texted Jorge (who has studiously avoided Cincinnati since 2016 and generally tries to stay away from Ohio after our first extremely unpleasant experience of racial profiling there) from the first night of the swim meet, “There are 1,794 white people and two Asians!” “Have fun,” he texted back, with a death emoji.

There is a powerful sense of conformity in these spaces. Life is good – if you color within the lines. If you don’t dress, talk, act, eat, look, or think “weird.” In many places there is a palpable paranoia in the air: people who live in HOA-run suburbs 75 miles from the nearest act of crime triple-lock their doors and warn you to be careful when you drive to the CVS. A kind of Fox News-induced mania radiates in which someone (probably brown, probably foreign!) is coming to break into your GMC and steal your kid’s soccer equipment the second you turn a blind eye.

I was reticent to go to Cincinnati. In 2016, I wouldn’t have gone. I would have been too angry. I wouldn’t have had anything to do with “them.”

But I can’t muster that up any longer. I can definitely conjure plenty of ferocity in the abstract, when I think of “them” and what they voted for. But in person, in the flesh, with the people I actually know, with my family – I don’t have that same kind of commitment.

I am not advocating a policy or position here. I understand there may be people who cannot find common ground, who feel very differently than I do, and I respect that. But I can’t hold that anymore.

During the course on racial relations I took at a Cincinnati megachurch, reporting for Pacific Standard magazine, one young black guy in a Morehouse sweatshirt stood up and asked the moderator, who was also black, “What am I supposed to do? A white guy comes up in the store and asks me if I’m stealing and I’m just supposed to forgive him?”

And the moderator said, “You do what’s right for you. Don’t follow anybody else’s playbook. You do what you need for this real estate –” she ran her hand up and down her body – “right here.”

For me, at this moment, that’s trying to find a way to be with people I profoundly disagree with, who also love and support me. To see where we connect. To see if they can also see me.

When I actually went to Cincinnati, I discovered kindness. My family was incredibly kind to me, and to Elena.

I remembered a conversation I’d had with friends on our most recent trip to Mexico, in October. These friends are fairly unconventional: homeschooling their kids on a little plot of land in a Oaxacan village with a wild pack of dogs, cats, and guinea pigs, plants everywhere, no bedtimes. Their families were sometimes judgmental, often quite different from them, but they’d learned to let that go. “Los niños necisitan ser apapachados,” the mom said.

Apapachado has since become my favorite Spanish word. It is actually derived from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and it has been translated many ways: to cuddle; to show tenderness or affection towards; to pamper; to adore; and, my favorite, “to embrace or caress with the soul.” It speaks of both a physical and an emotional affection; a close holding.

My family made sure Elena was apapachada during her time in Cincinnati. The aunt we stayed with introduced her to goetta, the food of my German ancestors: pork mixed with oatmeal and spices, fried up crispy. I remembered going with my mom to my grandmother’s house on Sunday mornings, listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 on the radio, then eating goetta with my cousins and playing for hours.

My family showed up to the tedious, endless slog of the swim meet, which is NOT a comprehensible experience like a basketball game. (“See, there are multiple heats, and each heat is faster, and you can win the heat but really it’s about the time, see, so she’s in heat 9 and she’s aiming for something under 46, which is a BB time, so that qualifies her for this next meet, got it?”)

You sit there overstimulated for 4,000 hours and then all of a sudden your kid dives in the pool and swims for 37 seconds and you try frantically to take a picture of the scoreboard before her name disappears and then you wait another 4,000 hours for her to do it again.

They showed up and they hung in there and they hugged her and told her they were proud of her and they took selfies with her and they cheered and they let her do their hair.

“It’s good for her to have people,” I told Jorge. “A sentirse apapachada.” He agreed.

On Saturday morning, I ran around the streets of a Cincinnati suburb. I saw multiple Trump signs, one Ten Commandments sign, and one “Pray for America” sign. Pray for whom, exactly? I thought. I doubted it was the person who harvested that household’s food or slaughtered their meat.

But I couldn’t conjure the same sense of outrage, because that outrage would have to exist within the push and pull and rationale of a system that I feel has entirely failed. All of it. This big oil, this fire culture, which burns and burns until it extinguishes itself. These massive constructions we’ve built up around us and are now desperately trying to sustain. The story of these two parties and what they represent and all the ideologies attached to them. The fear of the other and the fear of change and the fear of the future and all that time spent glued to the terrible terrible specter of our tiny screens.

Right now, I have to get out of this space entirely. And so I came up with a list of guidelines that apply for me, at this moment in time. They are not meant for anyone else, but perhaps you might find them helpful.

1. Get off of social media and the Internet as much as possible. The sense of urgency is a trap and a distraction. The issues that are so urgent have been here for fifty years and are still here – just watch any Bernie Sanders clip from the 1970s – and we aren’t solving them with outrage-posting or reactivity.

   Read Demon Copperhead. Read everything Barbara Kingsolver. Read A People’s History of the United States. Read Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Read Of Woman Born. Read Gabor Mate. Read everything Wendell Berry has ever written. Read real, substantial works fomented for years in the compost of real lives and communities, and fold them into your own life. Act from here: this wisdom, not the junk food of the Internet.

2. Work with people, not issues. What do you want to build together? Put aside the entire ridiculous framework of our two-party system. What do we agree on? Do we want clean air? What do we need to do to make it cleaner? What can we do to make school happier and saner and kinder for children? Do we want to get tech out of schools? How can we do that? Do we think hospital birth is damaging and dysfunctional? How can we move and advocate around that? Do we hate giant corporations like Amazon and the way they abuse workers? How can we move and organize around that? Do we want workers to have better protections, more union support? What can we do there? What is your gift, your passion, where can you bring people together? What community can you build?

3. Build for something, not against something. I feel like I have spent so much time in reactivity. This is one of my weaknesses, and it was also a weakness in the reaction to 2016.

   Instead of responding to what “they” do, to some enemy that the media often stokes into epic proportions, CREATE something you believe in. Want beautiful, empowered birth? Want a healthier food system, a love for plants and animals? Want a more thoughtful, meaningful education? Build a community around that and make it happen. I saw that in such an impressive way with homeschoolers. They wanted a farm school, they built it. They wanted a learning co-op, they built it. They went out and did the thing. Speak it, celebrate it, teach it, make it.

Elena swam fiercely and intensely, some of her fastest times yet, under those pale November Cincinnati skies, in the city where I was born and that I can’t escape, no matter who I turn into. She swam apapachada, and that made all the difference.

Driving home I passed first the 10 Commandments Billboard and then the ol’ Holy Matrimony = One Man and One Woman billboard. Goodbye, Ohio.

The U.S. was built on religious extremism and racism, and there are plenty of terrible, dangerous people, like the neo-Nazis who just marched on the streets of Columbus shouting the most vile of racial epithets. This is real. It is hideous. It is the truth of our country.

But there are also plenty of people with whom I might disagree profoundly but who would love and support my child no matter what: people who, when confronted face to face with other decent humans, generally want to do good by them. That’s the crack in the political machine. That’s the crack in the abstractions, in the ideology. That’s the crack in the fear and the hate and I have to find it, find it, find it, and wedge it open.

When we got back to Pittsburgh it was dusk but Elena desperately wanted to go to the park to play basketball. Jorge and I took her and as we got out of the car at Blue Slide, a wild ruby sunset flared over the city’s hills.

One of Elena’s gifts is being a bridge person: she is as comfortable and happy in a tiny Mexican village, dancing with a basket on her head, as she is in a condo in suburban Cincinnati or a country fair in rural Ohio or in Sweden or Pittsburgh. I feel like we are losing these people just as we need more of them.

So I want to cultivate this in her: not a vague and dull neutrality, not weakness or complacency, not a timid blending-in, but the ability to be herself, joyfully, with both openness and integrity, wherever she lands.

I want to cultivate this in myself, too. To find the crack. To cultivate the old hardiness, if a little grief-driven, if a little sad, of moving on a flat Ohio highway between worlds; the stubbornness of my German immigrant ancestors who, in spite of their stolidity and bland pretzel-driven diet and aversion to pride, had a wild dream of another life.