It was nice to spend the weekend with friends and family in celebration of a wedding, and it was also interesting to see what’s going on in another part of the country.
I was in central Indiana, where there is no doubt whatsoever that you are in the middle of a very red state. All of the roadside campaign signs were for Republicans for state, local, and federal office; everything from town council to Senate (a lot of Mourdock signs) and of course Romney/Ryan. In fact, on Saturday when my brother and his wife and I took a little road trip to see the area — we ended up going to Bloomington just in time for the IU Homecoming football game kickoff — I saw one lonely Obama/Biden sign on a hillside, all by itself.
I know this part of the country pretty well; it’s not much different in texture and sentiment than the parts of Ohio and Michigan where I grew up and lived for nearly 45 years. Small towns and small businesses; high school sports or hunting and fishing on weekends and church on Sunday is the rule. And there are churches everywhere; ranging from industrial-sized tabernacles with valet parking to small modular buildings with a few cars in the driveway for Sunday services, and roadside signs exhorting you to remember that Jesus is coming, ready or not.
And I get this part of the country, too. I grew up in a town not much bigger than some of these places. Yes, it was a suburb of a middle-sized town with a large Democratic base, but it was a short bike ride to the country to where the hard-core conservative base was the foundation and the question of “What’s the matter with Kansas” applied as well. So I understand it. I even know the why and the wherefore. And I know how hard it is to get people to change. They do it, but they do it on their own, at their own pace, and for their own reasons. Even if they come around to your point of view, it’s not because you persuaded them so much as they saw it themselves. They understand things like marriage equality when they slowly accept their son or daughter — or brother or sister — as being gay or lesbian, not because Dan Savage or Chris Kluwe raised their conscience. They understand women’s health and reproductive choice when it is they who are in at the doctor’s office and the heartbreaking news of a troubled pregnancy is gently and tearfully broken. And they understand tolerance when it is they who are the victim of mindless prejudice based on misconceptions and old tales perpetuated by fear and smugness that is its own bigotry.
I didn’t talk politics with any of the people I met this weekend. I didn’t try. I was a guest. I also believe in the Quaker tenet of leading by example in silence. (At least in person. Writing is another story.) When people get to know you and like you and trust you, that is when they follow you… or let you lead them. And then they also lead you.
What I see as a problem with people from Posey County Indiana or Wood County Ohio or Kansas, for that matter, is that they are never personally exposed to how it is to live in, say, Detroit or on Nebraska Avenue in Toledo or Kansas City. It’s the same problem I see in the attitudes of Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan. They’re clueless about how the other half – the 47% – of the country lives and the often desperation any one of the residents of an urban area or even rural backwoods where starvation is always at hand, can experience. Outside of family and neighbors they, in their self-satisfaction, simply aren’t their brother’s keepers.