Still Floating
So what does my floating along have to do with Cassidy Hutchinson? My floating along is my life experience and this determines, to some degree, how I vote along with the cultural values of my parents who were not hard working blue collar works and who didn’t resent big government and who also traveled, even living for a couple of years in Kandy, Sri Lanka.
Having lived among brown Indians much of my life I am a little ashamed of my white colonial experience growing up in India with a high ceilinged house and a number of servants. Having traveled in many countries, all of them stimulating and lively, with all kinds of foods and clothing and cultural values, migrating myself and married to a German immigrant who remained German, I find immigrants to be stimulating and interesting and fun to be with, the more diversity the better. Even though, intuitively, because I am straight, I find other gender attractions not attractive to me, but I’ve had good friends who are gay or lesbian or trans who enliven me. We are born of different races and sexes and genders and skin color and religions and that seems to be the norm for humans. I went to a religious boarding school in India with a huge range of Christians from liberal to fundamentalist and we were all friends living among Hindus and Buddhists and Moslems and Sikhs and Parsees. No religion seemed to be the one true way, all give people meaning and identity and make them feel more alive. While we Americans fired rockets over the Himalayan hillside on the 4th of July, we were a minority among many nationalities. Patriotism was fine as long as it didn’t put anyone else down, which seems to me anyway to be nuts. Americans are exceptional, all nationalities are exceptional.
Enough of that. The point I am making is double. How can I possibly assume that I vote right and anyone else in Swannanoa who has a different life experience and who votes differently from me is wrong? If I had their same lived experience I would likely vote the same way as they do and with my experience they would vote as I do. My account of floating means that my life experience was very different from most of the people who were born in an Asheville hospital and who have lived their lives in Swannanoa, different also from the other people who have come from across the United States to live in Swannanoa. We are all very different. Our values are different. Our identities are different. What threatens us is different. So of course we all vote differently. Somehow we gravitate to one wing or another of one of the major parties and vote that way. We feel we are voting in the right way because of our upbringing. But none of us can be “right”. All we can be is sometimes alike and sometimes different.
But we all live here together which brings me back to Cassidy Hutchinson. To live well together we need to listen to each other which will lead to feeling empathy with each other, which will allow us to accept our differences and to resolve our differences by voting our own values which is only possible if we maintain our democratic processes and institutions which are more important in the end than our strongly held beliefs.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 