I was born into what was at the time the most conservative federal riding in Canada. I grew up there and in (based on voting percentages) the most Republican congressional district in the United States. I live in what is now the most conservative federal riding in Canada.
But that is just the beginning. I own land and have businesses in Eastern Washington, Western Montana and Appalachia. Two of my daughters married hillbillies and I have hillbilly grand babies.
I fit right in. I always have cow shit on my boots and grease and dirt under my fingernails. I have spent most of my life either living in the pine forest or close enough to easily walk to the pine forest. I love to ride and to shoot. I am a devout Christian. And I could go on and on, hell I once lived in a trailer, well for a year I lived in a tent.
But most of all just like all my neighbours I hate asshole elitists and ivory tower academics without any common sense telling me how to live my life. Truth be told I hate anybody telling me how to live my life. If you are going to claim to be smart I will provisionally accept that claim but the minute you decide that your intellectual pretensions lead you to conclude I am stupid I will immediately write you off as a poseur, a wanker and worse, a libertard. And should your inability to correctly estimate our relative degrees of smartness lead to you trying to impose your idiot ideas on me I have plenty of land that could use some bone meal.
I travel extensively throughout the Republican heartland of America and the people I meet, the friends I make, the family I visit, the farmers I do business with, the small town businesses I buy from are mostly Republicans. By and large they are good, hard working people, thoughtful and considerate. Certainly some of them are leaning towards looney land and some of them are definitely five strings short of a fiddle. But most of them are just doing their best and muddling through.
I don’t feel any great need to impose my view of the world on them. I am a curious George. I want to know all about their lives and views. They share their food and their houses with me. We talk about all the usual things; our kids and grandkids, the weather, crops, livestock, Taylor Swift, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, dogs, regenerative farming, sports, guns, alternative energy, gardening, prospecting for gold, quantum physics, building bird boxes, religion, fishing, cats, Reimann Sums, Amazing Race, sex, commodity trading, futures and hedges, sun rooms and golf. You know, all the things us stupid folk talk about.
By and by it comes up that I am an asshole elitist, an ivory tower academic, a progressive activist, a radical environmentalist, a person of colour, an injun and worse, Black, and that in Canada’s last federal election I voted for a turban wearing Sikh and that I believe a global climate catastrophe is bearing down on us. You would think this would end our nascent relationship there and then but the vast majority of the time it leads to them liking me even more and teasing me endlessly. For example people start introducing me as their libertard friend. I keep telling them I am a socialist and a radical not a liberal but the nuance is lost upon them.
Being a democratic socialist, a scientist, a progressive activist and radical environmentalist in the Republican/conservative wilds can get very irritating at times. That is why I come to DailyKos, to avoid killing my neighbours through witty keyboard repartee. While I have learned a huge amount from both the diaries and the comments here it has come at a price.
A big part of the price is being forced to realize my banjo picking American ex-pat friend Dave has correctly described the country of his birth and my ancestors. “They have never stopped fighting the Civil War. The problem is Americans on both sides aren’t smart enough to understand all they stand to win in the end is a sack of shit. And each side thinks the other side is so stupid they eat donuts by shoving them up their ass.”
I am going to add my own briquette to Dave’s BBQ. On my travels in the Republican heartland and in my reading here I have met our enemy and they are all of us. I have also met our allies and they are all of us. We can choose to go on being us and them or we can choose to become a new thing.
I have come up with this wonderful new term for this radical new unification. I call the new entity “the people”. Just imagine what we the people could accomplish.