(Image from—no shit—the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C.
Irish Alzheimer’s: Having forgotten everything except your grudges.
In 1960, the population of Vermont was just shy of 390,000 people. Within twenty years, it was almost half again as large, as the hippies and the back-to-the-landers flooded north from New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts (the invading population collectively known as “flatlanders”). People who came to the country with their city ways, who learned how to farm from reading the Whole Earth Catalog and Organic Farming and Gardening instead of from their grandparents, who were happy to show the old-timers “a better way” to do something or another. And a vast number exchanged big-city life for small-city life, swelling the populations of Burlington and Barre, and creating meaningful suburbs from the small towns around them—tripling the size of South Burlington, quadrupling Shelburne, growing Williston by sixfold, all within the Burlington gravitational field.
To this day, a sense of being disrespected motivates a broad swath of “real Vermonters.” I remember a fairly contentious public meeting a few years ago in which one of the beleaguered asked their questioner,”yeah, well, where are YOU from?”
“I’ve lived here for thirty years.”
“Yeah, but where are you FROM?”
“Ohio.” And the point was made.
Honor cultures are those in which respect is a vital currency, and disrespect—whether real or imagined—is the worst possible offense. There’s some evidence that honor culture may have its origins in herding communities, in which any possible threat must be addressed instantly (as opposed to crop communities, in which land occupancy is stable and one has to learn to deal with the neighbors). Gangs of all sorts are honor communities, because they’re constantly defending or encroaching upon turfs—wearing the wrong colors in the wrong part of town, or usurping gang regalia without actual membership, can be fatal.
And this, to me, is why waiting for Trump voters to feel betrayed by their leader will not be a winning strategy. There’s a whole group of Americans who’ve felt themselves talked down to for decades; that enduring sense of being disrespected makes “owning the libs” far more important than any good outcomes they might hope for themselves. As the Japanese proverb has it, “if you want revenge, dig two graves.” More important to hurt us than to help themselves.; death before dishonor.
We’ve been divided by decades of curated grudges, amplified by those who benefit from our division. “Those _______ think they’re better than you,” they say, and then fill in the blank: women, African Americans, queer folks, college-educated, urban, take your pick. It works the same way as middle-school lunch tables: “You know what Jenny said about you this morning?” And discord is sown and amplified, with the real power flowing to those who pull us apart. Feuds never end, and never actually achieve strength; they just give us someone else to feel good about hurting.
Generosity is a slow sauce, but it’s the only viable option. Someone has to be grown-up enough to not spin the endless cycle of pain delivered and pain received. Only then can we be allies in the work against the people who harvest wealth from our division.
Herb Childress 