APRIL 26, WEDNESDAY

STUCK—MY BARBER AND ME

So here we are, my barber and me, living in the same town, which we see in opposite ways. I think to a large degree we represent the tension between MAGA Americans and liberal Americans. We are so polarized that we see each other as enemies of each other. There is almost the feeling that we would be better off splitting off from each other and going our separate ways. But this is impossible because in every state the cities are primarily liberal and the rural areas are primarily MAGA. There are no blue states and no red states that could separate themselves off into a new configuration, because every state is rural red with big blue urban centers dotted across the state where many of the people live. We are joined at the hip, red and blue. The barber and I are joined at the hip, Asheville and rural Buncombe County.

There is no way out except to deal with each other. North Carolina is 50% red and 50% blue with gerrymandering making us a little more red. We can’t outvote each because we are 50/50. We are stuck with each other.

We are not even that different culturally. We all speak the same language, mostly worship the same god, wear the same kinds of clothing, eat the same kinds of food, go to the same schools, listen to the same kinds of music, watch the same sports on television.

But in one way we are very different. Our emotional identities are very different. The emotional issues that give us identity are different and the things that threaten us are very different. Until we accept this and really listen to each other so that we understand what gives our lives meaning and what threatens this meaning I think we are stuck.

So the first step is to stop accusing and stop demeaning and listen to each other. But we have to really listen to what the other side most cares about and what they most fear.

So this is my attempt to listen to my barber. First of all I have to acknowledge that he really is threatened by liberal values and a growing liberal majority.

I believe that my barber and his MAGA friends truly believe that they are defending traditional American values. And they honestly feel that the liberalization of America is undermining their traditional values and threatening their identity and what it is to be American. They dress up in red, white and blue because they feel they are the true Americans, the real patriots.

And further I can see why they feel this way because when I was a boy I, too, unquestioningly, believed intuitively in the same traditional American values. I understood the history of a the United States from a white, male, European, Christian perspective, a world in which racism (segregation) was accepted, in which there were no gays or lesbians let along trans people, a world in which we were all entitled to live well and hard manual labor was rewarded, a world in which the United States was number one and invariably used its power for the good of the world. Intuitively all these beliefs felt right to me.

But then came the dissent by marginalized people. Feminism and women’s vote came first, and then the Civil rights movement with the insistence on the rights of all colors of skin, and then the demand by LBGQT people that their rights be protected. Each of these was a shock to the traditional American frontier values of male primacy, traditional marriage of a man and a woman, the dominating of the original people of the Americans and of people from Africa who were slaves. All of that was traditional and felt intuitively right before but now with revolt by marginalized people who demanded their rights including women’s ownership of their own bodies suddenly traditional values were not only threatened but were blocked by laws that protected all these freedoms.

These changes came much faster in cities where all kinds of people mixed with each other than in rural areas with where traditional values remained strong. And the changes which were also caused by changing technology were accepted much more quickly by young people than by older people who have more trouble changing their values.

It seems neither surprising or strange that these rapid changes were unsettling to rural, older Americans with traditional values. Of course they were threatened.

So that is the first step in my accepting the threat to his identity of my barber who represents rural Buncombe County. Or course he is upset when globalism shifted the jobs that he and other hard working blue collar workers had depended upon. And of course he is upset when people with liberal values come from the north and gentrify Asheville and Black Mountain and priced the folks who had always lived here out of affordable housing. Or course he is upset when incorporation leads to zoning and higher taxes with outsiders telling him what to do.

He would like to return to the traditional values and jobs of the past but he can’t. New destabilizing technology and new global trading patterns and the demands of marginalized people that they be accepted as equals won’t let him (us) go back. He sees no way out and holds on to his Bible (which represents for him stable traditional values without the threat of contraception encouraging promiscuity, forbids abortion (murder), affirms male and even white superiority, denies homosexuality and trans people, and points to the United States as a Christian nation). And he holds onto his guns as a symbol of his willingness to defend himself, giving him some security.

Seen from this perspective my barber’s resentment and anger makes perfect sense. And since his identity is based on these values any threat is a threat to the very fundamentals of his life. There is no point in arguing with a person whose very existence is at stake. Intuitively he knows he is right and argument is simply an added pointless threat.

And then I look back at myself as I did a couple of days ago. My identity and the values on which it is based is so far from his that we can barely talk to each other.

From the barber’s perspective my identity, made most alive by letting go of American cultural patterns altogether and float along in other cultures where I am a complete outsider seems nuts. I am a Don Quixote making his private mythic journey through my own projections on the everyday world which seems artificial and unreal to me, including even the tradtional American values that we share which to him are real and to me are unreal.

I’m certainly not going to convince him that my reality is worth even understanding. I do believe in the liberal insistence that all people have equal rights and opportunity, but even liberal politics seems to be based on the capitalist, competitive, consumption economy which is as much a threat to my floating along mythic journey as it is the center of the barber’s values.

So I am left thinking that while I can feel the barber’s pain and resentment, I don’t share many of the conventional values that are central to him and which are threatened by liberal values.

I am almost left thinking that he will have to work this out for himself just as I have to work out my own mythic passage for myself. I don’t think my life is a useful model in any way for him or his for me. Somehow in this rapidly changing world he has got to find a path through education or wit or opening up to new ways of doing things that will let him feel fully alive.

Maybe the best we can do is to listen to each other and to affirm each other’s identity and to do the best we can not to threaten each other.