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| Photo by Sam Wheeler on Unsplash |
He was born in a small southern town at the beginning of
World War II. His dad worked for the railroad. His mom was a typing
teacher at the local high school. He grew up in the carefully curated world of a rural
southern sundown town. White men ran things. White women were feminine and
subservient. Minorities were obsequious or invisible. Everyone pretended to be
a straight Christian. Non-conformers left town as soon as they were old enough
to.
He did pretty well for himself. Tennis player. Good student.
Went to college and got a degree in accounting. Got a government job. Married
the girl next door. Had 4 kids and worked slowly but steadily through the
ranks. He wasn’t brilliant, but government offices are filled with people who
learn how to apply the rules correctly and perform their duties adequately.
It’s the sort of work that doesn’t reward intuition or genius. He wasn’t racist or sexist, of course, that would have been
unprofessional, but he always thought his female or minority colleagues who excelled at their jobs were unusual and noteworthy.
He got an MBA. His wife wrote all of his papers for him, but
that probably doesn’t really matter. After all, he was a very busy man. By keeping his wife on an allowance and counting every
penny, he managed to save a good bit of money. He read all the financial
magazines and invested his money cautiously. It made him feel like a high
roller. He could talk about “my stock portfolio.” He had a disabled son who took a lot of the parenting energy
and resources. His other children turned out pretty okay, all things considered.
They all disappointed him in some way, but none of them were really failures
either.
He retired, got a party and a plaque, and bought a little
place in the country. He got a part time job with the local senior center,
driving the van three days a week. He walks every day with his neighbor.
Saturdays he takes the trash to the dump. He likes a predictable routine. It
feels safe.
Then COVID19 happened.
He’s an educated man. He knows that science is real. He
watches a documentary now and then. So he wears a mask to deliver meals to shut-ins
and takes his temperature every day. But he doesn’t want it to be real. He’s watching his stock
portfolio take a beating. His grandson’s college closed and his church switched
to virtual services. Family events are cancelled. And it just doesn’t go away.
He wants it to go away. He wants to be in control of things in his world, the
way he used to be.
After a while, he starts to believe maybe the whole thing is
being blown out of proportion. After all, he doesn’t personally know anyone who
has it. His little town hasn’t seen many cases, and maybe those were really
something else. He’s tired of wearing masks. He wants to see his grandkids and sit down for lunch at his favorite burger joint and get his hair cut and to watch his stock portfolio creep upwards.
He’ll vote for Trump again. Because it’s not really that bad.
The media’s blowing it all out of proportion. Maintaining the status quo is
more important than anything else when your world is a fragile house of cards.
Even if the status quo is literally crumbling to the ground. Because if the
status quo isn’t real, isn’t preserved, then what was it all about? All those
years of living according to the rules, checking off the boxes and slowly
accumulating the accouterments of a successful life. It has to mean something. Anything else is terrifying. Anything else is unthinkable.
It's true that some Trump supporters and science deniers are
uneducated mouth-breathing idiots. But most of them aren’t. They are just
nightmarishly afraid of change and clinging desperately to the mirage of a
stable and understandable past. Never mind that they world they lived in was a
very narrow slice of reality. It was their slice and they lived comfortably
within its rules and confines. COVID is disintegrating the walls around that
world. The screaming is predictable.
