Probably about two decades ago, or possibly one billion years, I wrote a Journal entry menioning a loud truck going down Belleville, Illinois’ main street. We were staying in someone’s apartment above the bar we were playing and I frankly mostly remember it as a wonderful experience, but I think the only thing that marred it was this loud-ass truck.
I don’t remember implying that it was red-necky or only stupid people drove pickup trucks or anything, and I’m not going to hunt down the Journal entry to see if my memory is accurate, but it was one of the first times I got a really, really angry response to a Journal entry. I got an angry email from someone saying that our music appealed to people that weren’t like “us” and that it’s a shame I saw Midwesterners as dumb hicks or something along those lines. I don’t remember what happened with that. I’m sure I apologized and said that’s not what I meant at all or something, but it was my first experience with the blue / red divide in the nation, and the idea that certain stereotypes out there absolutely existed AND overlapped with my own existence.
After that it was a point of pride that, maybe our politics differed or we did NOT see eye-to-eye re : religion, The Gay Agenda, environmentalism, the military, crime, racism or almost ANYTHING else, our music could bring very, very disparate people together and unlike the coast-touring folkies, we could go ACROSS the country and singing to various choirs hidden in urban centres throughout the south and Midwest.
Of course 2016 broke all that, pushing everyone to wear their politics on their sleeves or at LEAST on their Facebook pages, and after all the name calling and electoral wars what WAS a big, beautiful, nationwide ilyAIMY community sort of lay in ashes and it’s never recovered. Any possibility of rebuilding that trust was sundered when touring itself got broken by COVID and that belief that someone who’d be hateful and obnoxious online just needed to spend some time breathing the same air as people who different from them became deeply problematic.
And I don’t know how to rebuild that trust. In 2016 I started feeling like I needed to go out of my way to show that THIS greying old white guy isn’t like all the greying old white guys that put Trump in office. I really, really understood how Mosno felt, going out of your way to say “yeah, I might be one of THOSE but I’m one of the GOOD one of THOSE”. COVID literally added an existential threat (or at least a perceived one) to the whole thing and everything just got so divided… and whether or not COVID’s numbers add up to the perceived threat of the early pandemic, the fact that people were so fucking cavalier about others’ fears really wiped out the rest of my trust in my species.
Like we were playing some massive game of Russian Roulette with Schrodinger’s pistol… I believed the gun was loaded, someone else didn’t, and they waved it around anyways, and at the time we just didn’t know HOW many bullets were in the gun.
In ANY case – what I’m trying to get around to wrapping my brain around is the difficulty in finding HVAC and electrical contractors when it seems as if blue collar America has fully embraced Trumpism and anti-science. Every time a plumber, electrical engineer, HVAC engineer, or whatever comes to work on the house I feel this tension. Like I’m just waiting for them to say “shit, so glad you weren’t one of those faggot socialists wearing a mask when I came to the door… “ And I don’t know WHY I’m so paranoid. I don’t wear MY politics on my sleeve (or easily-researched Facebook wall) – but especially the experience of trying to shop for a heat pump seems to run full-tilt into some sort of … well … anti-science WALL telling me about how I REALLY want gas, or keep my oil heater, cause only an idiot (or environmentalist) wants a heat pump.
I don’t THINK I’m making it up.
I try to feel it out. We talk about how, it’s not like we want solar panels or have an electric car or something. “Oh good, cause you know those pollute more than REGULAR cars” “well, you’re just using coal to put electric in your car instead of gas” – there’s a couple of logic lines and replies that really indicate what kind of news source they’re reading – and of COURSE someone who’s got that impression of electric cars has that impression of heat pumps and hasn’t stayed abreast of the technology…
Because anything green is bad, right?
I just don’t know what to do with that, and I hate the idea that it’s hard to buy a fucking heating and cooling system for my house because we’re busy walking on eggshells around politics. THIS is where there absolutely IS “true and false” and it is effecting my Real World plans to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.
Because red uses fossil fuels and blue uses electric and neither the two shall cross.
Or maybe I’m just making it all up. But an answer to “can we do THIS” should at least BEGIN with “yes” or “no” even if it’s followed by a big-ass “but…” It shouldn’t just be “those suck”. Not helpful, and not engendering of trust.