Town Vs. Country

I started working here in The Dalles, Oregon at a farm & ranch supply chain. It sells animal feed, ranch supplies, fencing, tools, wood fire stoves, dog goodies, garden supplies, clothing, fishing stuff, and guns. It has been a weird transition, to say the least.

It has been a different culture than my previous job at a small health food grocery store. Almost all my coworkers are conservatives. Not fiscally, but the total package. I’m talking second amendment defendin’, two genders, Bernie will turn us into Venezuela, the Las Vegas massacre was a hoax to implement gun control laws, Oregon governer Kate “flush it down” Brown has already turned Oregon into Venezuala, and COVID-19 is either bullshit or a liberal hoax to control the population kind of conservative.

It was an epiphany when I was sitting in the lunchroom looking at your memes that are all very liberal and my coworkers were sharing the very opposite memes to each other. It was startling. I wondered what would happen if I showed them your memes. I have walked up to the giant wall that divides America and have seen no windows between the two sides.

I’m the new guy, both at the company and the area. It has been hard to not come in swinging and isolating myself from all my coworkers. I try and share a little about my opinions, but keeping myself away from straight-up confrontation. There is a lot of anger towards liberals. You know how there is this debate about how center-right Joe Biden is compared to Bernie Sanders? Well to them it is the difference between Stalin and Mao. I have shared when I confidently have known that what they are saying is untrue with a very matter-of-fact kind of delivery, and when people say awful racist, sexist, and other-ist comments, I just say either I don’t get it or not to laugh (which is easy, their jokes aren’t funny.)

Then we find ourselves in the thick of the COVID-19 outbreak. The customers, who will also freely share their opinions about the world, come in and buy a Costco amount of ammunition. They make fun of Portlanders and their toilet paper and kale shortages, but I just stare at their bucket of bullets and wonder if they see the ridiculousness of their criticisms. They don’t. They are right. There is no meme, no fact, or no argument that will change that. So I have to make the normal adjustment to this job in a time where a viral disease that kills people is just as political as Obama in a khaki suit.

I don’t get any relief coming home and reading your thoughts and memes on this. It actually breaks my heart more. A meme on your Instagram stories is like walking by a conservative and yelling your opinion and running away, but that conservative had earphones in and he is listening to Tucker Carlson. You didn’t do anything but make a choir of same-minded people nod enthusiastically because they already believe. It makes me feel more isolated than I did at work.

I’m not saying anyone should stop sharing the stuff, but just know that it is a no-set. It is emptiness.

BUT. . .

. . . during the Cold War, the CIA funded covertly many artists and literary journals including Jackson Pollock and the Paris Review. The reason is to show the people living in communist countries our freedom of expression. All of the Soviet’s art programs were strictly ran by the communist regime, and the idea was that the artists and writers would gaze over the wall and see people doing crazy original ideas and doing it successfully.

The Soviet Union is no more, or at least overtly, and we sit in the post-Cold War world where the American identity is at odds with itself instead of something else.

I mean, there is the terrorists of the Middle East who spark our anger and we define things to be afraid of that they will take when it is what we already need and want from them that stirs their ancient resentments, but the ideology isn’t there like it was with the Russians of yesteryear.

Identity is easier when there is an opposite. We aren’t that, so we are this. We aren’t German Nazis, we are very open to many different people living together. We aren’t Soviets, we are into Freedom, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Now we are without that. Suddenly we have become Town versus Country, Urban versus Rural, Blue Collar versus White Collar, Real Christians versus Atheists, Agnostics, Pagans, Jewish, and other religions including sometimes Catholic.

That’s fucking stupid.

So let’s make shit. Crazy shit. Original shit. We color out of the lines. We make things that aren’t familiar. We make things that are very familiar. We become Shamans who use art as an expression of talking to many gods and spirits.

We stop the virtue singling, demands, and no-set memes. The other side does that already. They meet every one of your posts with one of their own and it cancels each other out leaving the world the same. We have this tool (the internet) to create and instead we have been using it to shout in an echo chamber. I already know! Instead, I want to see you give birth to something. We can be whatever we want now, we don’t have to try and define a national identity.

This is my call to action: Make rather than Lecture. (Unless you are making memes then I don’t know what you should do.)

AND. . .

. . . if you’ve read this far, just know that I’m grumpy about not having an easy time fitting in at my new job in a very weird time and place and I have never found myself comfortable in the Social Media realm and I guess I’m having a hard time admitting that I’m an old fuddy-duddy who doesn’t get your goddamned memes or why you insist on spreading it faster than a virus so I have to see it thirty times a day, but then I could opt out and sit and read books and write more and create more but then I feel the pulling sensation that I’m missing something or that you might be missing me or even worse, you are forgetting my existence, for without some constant reminder that I am walking around doing shit that you will just cease to think of me and do I exist if you don’t think about me? The answer is very few make the effort, but am I the same? No, I am also out of sight, out of mind.

The other day I was sitting on my porch in the evening watching the hills in the east turn golden thinking about this guy who I know who had just died. He died on purpose, and that breaks my heart, but I know that kind of pain. None of this makes sense, nor does it really need to. That guy made me think about this other guy I met one Saturday somewhere in the hills above Detroit Lake. We blew up an old abandoned car with a pipe bomb. We ran through the ancient fir trees as chunks of sharp rusty metal fell all around us with ringing in our ears. We were laughing hysterically the whole time. I met that guy that morning and I have never seen, heard, or heard of him since. I thought of him. He could be dead now, but he existed for one minute as the evening birds sang their spring songs.