I like to mock my small town with my stories of Dunwich. And it’s true that nowadays even small towns are caught up in the awful consequences of the blue state policies that reach down and afflict us with all the bad practices and crazy programs that are out there.
But small towns at least have the advantage that you are forced to see who it is that has to try and make the machine work regardless of the craziness of the system. And the funny thing is that face to face with individual people they tend to look a lot like human beings.
And this is not saying that some of them aren’t crazy. They most decidedly are. The woke ideas that they’ve been steeped in for their whole lives has rendered a goodly number of them certifiably mad. They advocate for the worst programs and ideas and claim that it all makes perfect sense. Everything about them is backwards and upside down.
And yet, they’re still demonstrably human. They have families and friends and they have tragedies afflict them like everyone else. And when you hear of these things it reminds you of your own brushes with mortality and fate. And unless you’re implacably driven you can’t help but feel empathy.
So, it’s a little harder to hate people so very entirely in a small town. You have to see their faces and talk to them when you want to argue. Your kids and grandkids go to the same schools and fairs and kids sports with their kids and grandkids. And sure, you also go to the budget meetings and zoning meetings and disagree about taxes and school programs and road work but it’s hard to see them as the same as Joe Biden and the FBI and the IRS. They’re not Goerge Soros sprinkling billions of dollars to corrupt justice. They may want to waste thousands of dollars and fund projects that you think are wasteful and possibly harmful but they aren’t trying to destroy your family. They vote for the people that are trying to destroy your family but they don’t think these things up themselves.
And when you get the chance to talk to some of them, they’re just as distressed as you are about the price of bread and meat being up forty percent in just four years. They’re worried that their kids can’t afford to live in their own places because rents and real estate have skyrocketed. They know that kids have been proselytized into believing that they can never achieve a middle-class existence on their own. They’re scared for the future too.
I mention all this because during the day-to-day existence of reading the atrocities that the Left perpetrates on us, anyone can imagine the “civil war” erupting all around us and neighbors at each other’s throats. And maybe in a big city it’s already sort of true. Nobody knows anyone and random violence is a regular feature that goes hand in hand with anonymity. But in a small town you even know the “devil” himself, the leader of the progressives. And what does the devil look like? It’s a middle-aged woman who volunteers on two or three town committees and wants to hire an extra librarian for the high school and get a new ambulance for the EMS crew. Not precisely Klaus Schwab.
None of this changes the fact that we disagree diametrically with the things these people vote for. In small ways, day after day, these people are contributing to the destruction of normal life. They are a big part of the problem. But when they are also your neighbors and you have to work with them to keep the town going hate is a lot harder to muster. Annoyance definitely, and even anger, sure. But hate is a stretch.