WOOSTER COLLEGE STUDENT: IDENTITY 3
My parents both went to college. My father had a PhD in Agricultural Economics. Everyone at Woostock went to college in the United States or India or Britain or Germany. Everyone I knew went to college and of course I did, too, as my children have. This also wasn’t a choice. I knew nothing about American colleges and either there was no competition then to get into a top college or there was and I didn’t know it. I had heard of two American colleges, Harvard and Wooster, because a yearly student graduating from Wooster came to Allahabad where my father was a Principal of an Agricultural College. I chose Wooster. I didn’t feel at home socially in Wooster, or anywhere else in the United States, but Wooster opened me up to the world of learning which had begun at Woodstock where everyone was a serious student. One teacher woke me up to the idea that I could think for myself. The courses that touched me most deeply were courses on Literary Forms, Evolution, Introduction to Music, Beginning drawing and Introduction to Economics. Wooster was and is a very liberal place. I loved reading and learning. This has a huge effect on my identity but it is something that happened to me, I didn’t choose it.
MAGA: IDENTITY 4
Of course it is with the MAGA tribe that I feel polarization most intensely. My liberal tribe feels that Donald Trump is a person who breaks the law and the boundaries of civility and is unfit to President and that everyone in the MAGA tribe is either stupid or approves of his behavior and are therefore complicit in all disgusting ways. But of course the MAGA tribe feels that the Liberals are threat to destroy the American traditional values. They are sure that Liberals are the enemy and Donald Trump, despite his flaws, is standing up for everything they think is good about America.
On August 14th Donald Trump came to Asheville and held a rally in the Civic Center. I decided to photograph the MAGA crowd as they waited to get in. And sure enough, their costumes, if you go back and look at the post on that day, were filled with hate for liberal Democrats and were as filthy in their taunts of Kamala Harris as Trump has ever been.
But a funny thing happened. I embodied everything that the MAGA crowd hated, but on the way to the rally I bought a MAGA hat and wore it as I walked down the line taking photographs. Everyone was friendly, almost everyone wanted their photographs taken even when their message was completely obscene, not something that they would say on the way into church even as they compared Trump to Jesus. Not only did they like me and encourage me. I was one of them. I belonged to their tribe. I didn’t have to say a word or defend myself. We were buddies. They laughed and joked and so did I. At that moment I could feel what it meant to be in the MAGA tribe among an army of friends, all having a good time and sharing their hatred of the other side.
Ezra Klein in his book tells me why. Hate is stronger than love and polarization creates ever stronger hate of the other side. All the liberals I know feel just as strongly that MAGA people are not just wrong, they are evil, maybe without knowing it. The election was between right and wrong, good and evil, on both sides.
But for those two hours that I was taking photographs the MAGA people, as nasty toward Democrats as they were, they were smiling, caring, god fearing, patriotic, loyal Americans who were having a good time venting their feelings. I didn’t really feel a kinship with them but I did feel accepted by people who seemed to be good ordinary people. For a moment I could see their tribe from their perspective with a kind of empathy and even friendliness.
It was a short moment of empathy, but it felt good and could be the first step to listening to MAGA people without being furious myself.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 