JUNE 11, TUESDAY

TWO WORLDS

What I am wonder about is how I can feel comfortable eating a pancake breakfast at Flag Pond with people who are friendly and fun to sit with. And then feel at home the same day in Asheville with its liberal values with people I feel comfortable with.

When I was a boy during the Second World War we used to sing a song mocking the Germans, our enemies. “Kaiser Bill went up the hill to take a look at France, Kaiser Bill came down the hill with bullets in his pants.” I didn’t know any Germans and was singing about the wrong war but I learned to call the Germans, Krauts, and I hated them. Japanese were slit eyed demons whom we called Japs. But I was 8 when the war ended. I hated people of whom I had no knowledge at all. My friend Fred Ohler, whose parents were German immigrants, was told by his teacher that from now one he wouldn’t be Fritz Oegleschlager, he would be Fred.

I carried that feeling of dislike of Germans until I was sent by the US Army to Aschaffenburg, Germany, when I found that Germany was a wonderful, very civilized, place where I soon married a German girl and began a life long love of Germany where I have many German friends. And I just heard from my doctor who was recently in Japan with his wife and friends that Japan is the cleanest and friendliest place on earth.

How can you hate a tribe of humans and then discover they are wonderful people and feel bonded with them?

So that is what I’ve been wondering about these two worlds, Madison County and Asheville, only an hour apart. The people in both places are friendly human beings in separate communities but all making their way through life.

But I know that almost everyone I met in Madison County are MAGA Trump voters who feel threatened by liberal values that threaten their church, their race, their educational values, their standard of living, their All American Traditional Values. They have their guns and Bible as defence. And on my suburban street just outside of Asheville everyone is a liberal who feels intensely threatened by the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president again and heading us into a dictatorship. Everyone on my street is bewildered by the popularity of Donald Trump and thinks anyone who votes for him is nuts.

This is not quite the fear and hatred of the Second World War or the Civil War, but it is similar. How could I have hated the Germans and Japanese so much when they are such friendly and civilized people? How can we be so polarized right here in Western North Carolina when, if we sit down together and talk with each other, we find each other to be such pleasant and friendly people?

Why can’t we sit down together and accept our differences and see how we can get along together and support each other as I seemed to be able to do this weekend?