Note: This article was published in Ellemeno on 3/21/23
Awkwardness is the experience of finding yourself not quite right. You’re somewhere between a size 38 and 40, but they don’t make many 39s. And the rare ones you do find, you don’t look good in. Walk away and you feel like you’re odd shaped and unsatisfied. Force yourself into a bad fit and you feel manipulated and unsatisfied.
Being unsatisfied in either case, upsets you. You’re an intact, whole person and you want to be treated as such. You don’t want to risk being dismissed or stuffed into something that’s not right.
But the reality is that you are a statistical anomaly in some way. The manufacturers know that there are way more 38s and 40s and relatively fewer 39s. If you want a perfect fit, go to a tailor.
Recently, David Todd McCarty wrote an essay for Ellemeno that looked at awkwardness on the political spectrum. An acquaintance of McCarty’s, also a progressive, characterized McCarty as being a lesser variety of progressive, intimating perhaps that he was not a true-believer.
McCarty took exception to that characterization and explained in a beautifully wrought argument why he resisted it, why he wouldn’t be metaphorically squeezed into a 38, when he was a 39. It had to do with his predilection to be suspicious of group-think and loyalty tests.
Several months ago, as I was going through one of my periodic life reassessments, of which there have been many, I found myself wondering if there was some way to combat the political polarization in the country. I’d had a national perspective on the issue, but was dumbfounded after the 2016 election to find that the country was to be guided by the wisdom of someone substantially lacking in it. (I hereby reveal myself to be a progressive too, pretty far along toward the left end of the spectrum.)
I had been a member of a mostly seniors discussion group, comprising both conservatives (not so many) and progressives (the majority). The election inflamed the group and good-guy-bad-guy labels got slung left and right. Eventually, the conservatives, being in the minority, got sick of it all and left the group.
What happened after this self-purging was that the group could air its grievances freely and openly without hurting anyone’s feelings. But after a while, the conversations tended to be one-sided, as you’d expect, and meetings became mostly about grievances. Absent for the most part was consideration of how to address them, make them go away. Who knew that you might need both sides at the table to get that to happen?
The net effect on me was to rein in my national purview and focus on what was doable in my own community. With more chutzpah than experience, I replied to an ad in one of our local papers asking for contributors. I responded, sent along some writing samples, and got a hearing. I had a history with this particular paper, writing letters to the editor and the occasional op-ed. All of these previous submissions were one-sidedly leftist complaints or rants.
The new me-to-be, however, in conversation with the paper’s editor, ended up agreeing that I would drop the haranguing and contribute periodically to a column. That column, which was to be named the Neighborhood Watch, would showcase local people and institutions that demonstrate the good bits in our community and, by implication, showed there was no reason for people not to like one another, regardless of their politics.
The newspaper has a county-wide focus, so each article was delimited in its topics and scope to the boundaries of the county. Within those bounds, there is a slight registration advantage to Republicans, but we swing back and forth on which party wins elections. Four years ago, we were significantly Democratic but in 2022, we became mostly Republican. It’s the way the wind blows around here.
What has happened over the last few years is that the rhetoric has become more inflamed, especially on the right. It’s not common, but you do see Fuck Biden signs. You also still see Confederate flags, Don’t Tread on Me bumper stickers and, of course Trump Won and Trump 2024 signs. But the signage in the next county over is much nastier. Letters to the editor in their local paper run from mild disgust for Democrats to out and out burn-‘em-at-the-stakes hatred.
Our polarization goes way back to the Civil War, when our county joined other counties that had earlier seceded from slave holding Virginia. We joined them in the free state of West Virginia. That decision, by the way, happened when many of the county men were away fighting on the side of the South. History in our county has not lain quietly in its grave ever since.
So, my campaign as a mild-mannered columnist bent on healing divisions going all the way back to the Civil War, does it have any chance of success? If the prospects aren’t entirely hopeless, success will clearly depend on me holding in check my progressive tongue, avoiding opportunities to generate hate mail, and generally just being respectful of all my neighbors.
That still deep down doesn’t sound like the real me, but maybe breaking down my own animosities one column at a time will be where any healing I can do is going to start.
McCarty frets about group-think being a stumbling block to creative problem solving. He says, “We can disagree, but still be on the same side.” I’d say that pretty well summarizes my aim for the Neighborhood Watch; that is, don’t deny or trivialize our differences, but provide evidence for why we’re on the same side.