Advice for climate and taxation refugees

Don't bring silly battles to town

Photo: David Clode.

Greetings,

That Michael Jackson song, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” kept playing in my head all last week. Since I don’t listen to the radio, that’s not how the ear worm got in. So finally (good ol’ iTunes), I put the song on and sang it, a lot, to purge it.

By day’s end, I was singing Billy Jean to myself instead, but the next day, the root of the message at last bore fruit. Someone whom I had no previous beef with, nor even much contact, recently had started something. Essentially, this person tried to make me look bad by picking a fight unprovoked.

It was so out of the ordinary for how people treat one another around here, it confused me, and I suppose the frustration for this person was that I let it go rather than duke it out. I didn’t fully comprehend what had happened until later, after MJ gave me the hint.

Looking back on my recent illness, I see it as having been some kind of awful initiation. That’s because so many people looked in on me, that I realized yes, it’s how people are here in this little town on the edge of Appalachia, but it’s also because I have been accepted as part of the community. And, communities take care of their own. I am blessed by the level of care and inclusion I have here.

Having lived in overtly political and politicized places for much of my adult life, I’m accustomed to people being frank and rather entitled to their opinion. I’ve also been that way, and still can occasionally forget myself and honk out my proclamations.

But that isn’t what happens here, at least in real life. (Facebook is its own hinterland.) People have opinions, but daily living is not fraught with rallies. There are the Baptists of course, the ones who perfected “Bless your heart” as a way to say “I’m counting the seconds before you burst into flames you sinful dumbass,” but such cleverness means the day-to-day around here is amicable.

Anyway, I have been thinking about it and wondering what makes the people I observe here just get along when I know damned well that many people in this town have a hard line between themselves and others when it comes to politics. Heck, lots of folks don’t even like lots of other folks.

For one thing, it’s not a town addicted to any given news info stream that convinces residents here that only they have the true vision, and are therefore more special than their stupid Commie or Nazi neighbor.

Folks here still operate by a premise that understands you to be a member of a community first and a political animal only if you must. The way it was more common to operate before the relentless info streams flooded America and poisoned people’s blood, magnetizing the iron in their platelets all to turn and face the direction opposite their neighbors.

Is the gal who picked a fight with me a harbinger of change, and not a good one?

I worry that maybe she is. The funny thing to me is, she’s a transplant.

Our town is growing quickly. Kentucky is a hot spot for climate and taxation refugees. Where I live, people are attracted to our Appalachian arts and crafts legacy and the brick Colonial Georgian architecture of the college campus right in the center of town. It is lovely. Who could blame them?

The homogeneity is starting to fray at the seams. I sense residents who’ve been here a while are wary, although still welcoming. This is a college town, after all, that was the first in the South to declare we are all “of one blood” and so ensured all races would be educated together, not segregated.

I am an outsider here, in many respects, too. On my dad’s side, I am the first generation going back two centuries to have been born in Kentucky but not to have grown up here. I have since returned. Still, that ain’t Kentucky enough for some. One man told me I’m not really from here, as a result of not having been schooled here. It’s a bit like an Irish-American showing up in Ireland and claiming to be Irish, too: The Irish don’t really see it that way.

In any case, no one really owns land here, even if we fool around with the papers that tell us we do. We are of the land, and of course, there were others before us who considered this their home until our ancestors (mine included) killed them or forced them off it. That’s how this hierarchy thing goes.

Still, people have to be from somewhere and so that place, wherever it is, ends up with natives. That can be problematic when non-natives show up, since in our linear paradigm world, there is always a pecking order.

Not being at the top of that order means not having enough access to survival resources such as land. The more people who show up and seem to need those resources, the more people fear there won’t be enough. It is thus easy to become grumpy about having to share with “others.”

But I think there are ways around that.

When I was sick, among the most caring was a couple who’d moved here from California about two years ago. Their strategy upon arrival was to participate in the community, not wait to be welcomed. According to my theory of survival then, they came to give, not to take. It seems to have worked, as they are not only welcomed, but popular as well.

I’m not the only one who’s feeling these tremors of conflict. I own an online newspaper in town. Last week, I ran an interview with the mayor, who has lived here his entire life. His parting comments were that if our town is to remain the unique and pleasant place it is, people need to be on guard not to let the national noise of division filter into how we govern ourselves here.

At the very least, I say don’t move to town and pick fights.

Peace,

Whitney

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