The 1%

There have been several pieces trying to make sense of the election. Cracked published one detailing the lives led by people in rural America. Vanity Fair released another about the concerns of women stopping just shy of suggesting that women care about their immediate family more than anything else. And I’m writing one now. Asking who is the 1%? And answering that if you take everyone that voted for Clinton and Stein you probably have 99% of the 1%.  And, unlike the usage of Bernie Sanders and #occupywallstreet, I mean geographically.  The way that anthropologists distinguish ethnic groups.  They were probably more right switching to that than they knew, or maybe they did know and were genius, but essentially American cities could probably be considered an ethnicity.

This sweet looking bird is an election cartogram of 2012

The above map uses population to scale the counties and colors them to show if Romney or Obama won in 2012.See the blue spot around Virginia? That’s 7 counties.  About 150×100 miles around Washington, D.C.  Lake Michigan is the same size as Texas when population density is used because of Chicago. The bottom part of the top right wing is New York City.  The big blue spot on the west  with the islands off the coast is Los Angeles County. One County equals Florida. To put it another way, L.A. Co. is the 11th most populous state between Michigan and New Jersey.  New York City is the 12th. And Cook County, where Chicago resides, is the 23rd. Two counties and one city (which is 5 counties) are in the top 25 populations by State.  D.C. just misses the cut.

So as the election results came in I’m sure you looked at those maps and said that’s so much red.  The people around me said the same.  It looked overwhelming. And it is.  But to  people living outside of major cities it’s overwhelming that cities can decide everything.  This election proved that Pennsylvania has more rural area than cities.  And you might wonder what my point is (I geek out over maps, here’s my favorite)

My point is we just didn’t get this election.  We didn’t get what it was about.  We wanted to talk about racism, misogyny, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia because of what Trump said.  When we could have focused back to the economy.  Notice how Bernie even stopped talking about the economy after Donald Trump?  What happened? We were so fired up about that.  Well, you know how we make fun of people in the country for losing their mind when we suggest gay rights or abortion?  I’m suggesting that during this election they weren’t losing their minds.  We were.  People in cities went into a panic over Donald Trump nearly everyday.  And instead of looking at ourselves we made fun of C.N.N. (which you should totally do, it’s awful) People who lived in cities and voted for Hillary were the crazed population.  And we didn’t know it because we live in this echo chamber. I don’t even cross a river unless I absolutely have to. And that’s only 1 mile from my apartment. We travel further than anyone did in their lifetimes a century ago in a day, to take a weekend in another city, but week-to-week, we probably travel less than the fields plowed 100 years ago.

We have different focus.  Most of our ideas are, and have been, good progress to be more inclusive, utilitarian, caring, and environmentally aware, but while Trump was talking about policy, no matter how minimal in detail, we talked about every bad thing Trump said.  And we should, possibly, consider that maybe we would have won if we stuck to policy.  Which is ironic because Clinton has a command of policy, both current and proposed, that eclipses nearly everyone else in domestic and foreign affairs.  But the news wasn’t focused on that, nor did broadcast do live stage plays of Clinton’s numerous policy proposals from her campaign web page. And so, just like me, living at the bottom of our society and wanting a higher minimum wage and better jobs, people in rural areas knew that it hasn’t gotten better under Obama economically, and before that it was a slow decline from the beginning of post-industrialization.  When Clinton didn’t speak specifically about policy and said Trump was unfit, it probably looked like someone who didn’t have a plan (because she was an insider) to someone who did have a plan to try and win.

That sounds so far fetched.  But, I thought about a conversation I had with an activist in the Black Lives Matter movement about racism comparison between the North and the South.  I grew up in Virginia and had family in North Carolina. Now I live in Pennsylvania.  Would you believe that I meet more obviously racist people here everyday than I did in the south?  Racism in the North scares me more.  It’s the racism that believes people of different races are fundamentally different and have to be fundamentally different. I constantly hear “You don’t act like a black person.” now and almost never did in the South.  Most people didn’t care as long as you tried to fit in (and hey, I’m trans, I also caused a problem). This person considered both types to be exactly the same.  There wasn’t a difference.  It was academic. It was intellectual. Racism is racism is racism. Even though I had confronted them with examples, lived examples, of a difference.  If you want to learn where violence erupted along racial divisions in America you’ll notice how during the 20th century they moved out of the South almost entirely.  I don’t think we’re viewing racism wrong, but I don’t think we’re being honest enough about who the actual racists who act in racism are in this country.  We are scapegoating people from outside the cities and turning a blind eye from ourselves.

I’m not saying the KKK doesn’t exist. It does. So do Nazis and other white supremacist groups.  But they don’t make up all of Trump’s supporters.

We get angry when white people don’t care about black people or care less than white people. We fume when we hear someone ask  a street harasser “would you say that to your mother” because it suggests women owned by a man are the only ones that matter. These are great, but that thinking works in a city. People aren’t concerned with things they don’t interact with on a daily basis. Learning feminism, queer history, black politics, whatever think pieces we discuss over mimosas at brunch would strengthen and enrich and make better everyone.  But it doesn’t help when there aren’t jobs in your hometown. And you don’t have money to move. And you can’t afford college. And your car breaks down so you can’t get to the one job you did have because there is no public transit.

Hillary Clinton wanted to address all of that. We knew she did, and we have so much privilege in the 1% that a lot of us voted for other candidates, or not at all.  We even have so many people in our high-rise, studio, updown, kitchenette-living-room-combo, or homeless shelter castles that it only mattered because of the Electoral College and still cast more votes for Hillary.

The problem is that in a city, living in a shelter is a privilege. Because cities have them.  Because we can. 

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t address the staggering amount of wealth that flows upwards. I’m not saying we shouldn’t push for student debt forgiveness and affordable college or a higher minimum wage. I’m saying that we look really silly speaking about those things to people about to lose their house. When they’re living with relatives because they lost their job. Our ideas are wonderful, but rural america needed them 20 years ago.  If they were bothered, and many probably were, by the horrible things Trump said they held their nose and voted because Trump at least had the chance to change something. And he wasn’t going to go slow in changing things. Or incremental steps as a progressive, but a progressive who likes to get things done as Clinton said. We are the 1%. Laughing at the hicks while applauding ourselves. And now we’re the 1% being aghast that they have a voice and champion that can hurt us.

Am I feeling right?

I’ve had a lot of thoughts during this election.  And many more confusions. Or of times being hesitant or impatient.  Questioning my self in actions and behaviors and even in thoughts. And, in a most improbable place, my weekend home, Hot Mass, a gay afterhours disco, I heard a statement that coalesced around all of my meditations:

 fear is a privilege

But that isn’t enough.  Even the remaining puzzle piece, once determined, must be rotated into place.  The same is of our ethics and logic even when pertaining directly to, and/or influenced by, the whimsy of emotion.  I needed to think about what that meant.  How to explain the culmination of, by this point, over a year of my being inundated with stimuli ranging from emotional pleas, to fact determination, or process of elimination and simply being told I’m wrong or right.  We have all had this. Rich and poor, queer and cisgender, whatever color, ethnicity or nation of origin.  We all experience life through one unique lens. Mine isn’t perfect, nor is yours. It doesn’t come from, or not come from, belong to or controlled by divinity, at least not directly.  It has been molded, even in the strictest ideologies of creationism, through generations upon generations, celebrations and catastrophes, stories of legend and anecdote to the neutral zenith of the present. So what kind of fear is a privilege?

I hated the movie Crash and my friend loved it.  They saw in it the cogs unable to swivel in systems not of their design.  I saw a ridiculous trivialization of racism being more complex. Our discussion wasn’t unlike a number of talks we had.  They were usually diametric (diatribe on my part) over wine I thought was too bitter or they thought was too sweet.  And as I’ve grown older my pride suffers greatly knowing how wrong I was.  Or, advocating for my pride, blame my intelligence for overlooking a truth they could identify in the world and within themselves.  I was just too smart. (i’m literally shaking my head at myself for writing that last sentence, it’s not just you)

But it was my intelligence. I was brash, rigid, history was fact, science was proof and unwavering in my commitment to my way of thinking.  To the way of many individuals way of thinking.  But my friend saw something I didn’t see, or saw and did not correlate or tolerate.  The chaos of expectations. It’s almost like The Butterfly Effect where the wisp of the powered wing thousands of miles away reverberates to the beginnings of a great storm.  In between the reality of ourselves and the reality that surrounds us a friction occurs. Stresses can produce fractures. Determination can limit perception. Opulence indulges ignorance. They identified racism as the villain where I saw the actors as being weak. My friend also spoke frequently about the fragility of everything. To them, weakness was not a handicap, but a condition required of our humanity.

They photographed me a decade before I came out and transitioned as transgender. And on one of the pictures they wrote me a poem.

They knew more of me than I did.  They saw, constantly, what I could not. I’ve thought of them as I thought about fear because of another thought they had, but one in which I didn’t disagree or agree because only empathy and understanding mattered. And it’s a quote that isn’t rivaled by any collection of words I’ve heard before or since. “I hate hospitals. I can’t stand them. I’m afraid. It’s the smell like death. It’s where people go to die.”

They grew up in Zimbabwe. To them, their experience, their childhood was radically different than mine. To them, hospitals were where people died. Medicine in many countries around the world is focused on containment of disease. Quarantining the sick is cheaper than the prescriptions and vaccines taken for granted elsewhere. Local beliefs might also make vaccinations or other medical modernities suspect so corralling the sick to a single place keeps the most safe most effectively. I didn’t share their view of hospitals because I had an alternative, but my reaction was the same to nursing homes when I was a child visiting them on a school trip. I faked being sick once to not go. An irony entirely not lost on me now. And putting these two thoughts, not of my own, together I had a workable frame. What did I perceive as a child? What perceptions did I neglect for more palatable ideals and truths? How do I think again as such?

fear chosen is a privilege.

chosen fear is a privilege.

Adding choice as both a descriptor and modifier creates two unique privileges. Choosing to be fearful and also choosing what, specifically, should be feared. Another privilege is choosing how to fear, but that remains entirely outside my current focus (see how determination limits perception?). Free will, then, ought to grant us the ability to choose twice in any emotional response. Once in our ethos and once in our telos. I imagine that is what they saw in Crash.  They saw how the actors choose fear more than other emotions, and, perhaps, without choosing what fear. It wasn’t a logical decision by them. They all were victims. They all suffered. I only saw a shooting of an innocent person of color. My determination for history and science, fact and proof limited my perception that the intangible isn’t intangible. It’s there when we don’t perceive it, and when we ignore it. It doesn’t care if we think it isn’t or when we yell about it. It’s irritatingly complex while being deceptively simple. Like an illusion drawn on a sheet of paper seen from one direction holding three dimensions when in all other points of view clearly holding two.

On the eve of this election this is my thought process. At the start of the year I wanted to return to activism and to politics. After Bernie Sanders did not achieve the Democratic nomination and did not announce a third-party bid for the presidency I did not want to acquiesce to Hillary Clinton. In watching Donald Trump accepting the nomination for Republican candidate I was bewildered, while a part of me knew that this was also expected. Part of me knew Clinton being nominated was also expected.  And so much chaos between them.  When we expect we stress. When we stress we fracture. When we focus we lose sight of our periphery. And in our decadence, our hubris, we remain ignorant. The expected is chaotic. The unexpected serendipitous .

I don’t want to be an activist. Nor engaged in politics. I don’t want to fight or care about so many things.  It’s too much. And in them, not only am I focusing too much, but I am focusing and operating within fear.  Hindsight is 20/20. Envisioning the future is somewhere between blind and our most advanced lenses viewing deep into space. Astonishingly beautiful and yet lacking in full clarity.

we’re fragile alone. fragile together.

I wasn’t wrong to feel betrayed and angry after Obama campaigned on a message of hope. Likewise I am not wrong to feel wary of Clinton and choosing to vote them into office. My feelings are valid. I thought transparency of government, disengaging from conflicts and regime change, open internet, healthcare accessibility and advancements in the rights and protections afforded to women, queer and minority communities were the goals. And many of them were warped or not pursued beyond symbolic gesture.  But I was wrong in feeling betrayed and angry at hope. My cynicism blamed, and also refuted, an entire emotion because I singled out Obama and placed all my hope in that. Tomorrow my hope is not in Trump. Or Clinton. Or Johnson or Stein. Or the people voting for Bernie despite him clearly saying thank you, but can we not? It is where it should always have been. In me. Behind egg shell thin walls strong as a castle. I hope they’re in you as well. We’re fragile alone. Fragile together. Choose an emotion. Choose what to emote over. We’ve changed our culture through terror and rage. Made decisions, then, in grief. Condescended in laurels and payment upon our amazement to our created arts. Stressed in our vigilance. Loathing and admiring our peers in all stratifications of society. When did we ever choose ecstasy? Where is our elation? Where is our hope? It’s there. Waiting to be chosen.