I received a note from Jessi, who’s farming in West Michigan, asking for my thoughts on how farming/rural living attracts very liberal and very conservative folks.  She writes, “I’ve just been processing a lot of thoughts about neighborliness and civility in the face of seeing neighbors show more extremist views and actions during these hard times.”  Jesse wonders if there’s a way to navigate and stay true to your beliefs while being civil.   

I had some other projects I had to work on, so I didn’t schedule my response to Jessi until this week.  

And whoa.  What a week to try and answer this question….

Ula hardly touches her pork roast during dinner.  Saoirse and Corey have cleared the dishes, and she stays in her chair, head down, weeping.  We’ve been discussing the news about George Floyd, trying to wrap our heads around the latest developments.  Bob stands at the sink washing dishes, Saoirse and Corey put the food away.  I sit beside this weeping child, waiting for the tears to form words. 

“As soon as I turn 18, I’m leaving,” she suddenly barks in my face.  “I’m moving to Ireland with Matt and Erin.  I’m going to vet school!”

This, from a kid who has panic attacks about summer camp?  

“That seems like a long and expensive route for vet school,” I offer.  

“I hate the people here!”  She shouts. “They’re horrible to each other!  I don’t want to be American!”  She hangs her head again, then lifts it once more.  “And I HATE our flag!  I used to think it was so beautiful.  Now, it just represents how mean and horrible this country is!”

No flag hangs at our home.  I’ve never said it, but Ula has identified why.  I feel like flag waving has become a symbol of bigotry.  I’ve grown ashamed of the stars and stripes.  The last one I saw was earlier in the week, flying outside the office of our mechanic.  

We wait til the end of May to get the snow tires off the farm cars.  Bob drops me off to pick up the last vehicle.  I draw a deep breath and pull an N95 from the glove box before opening the door.  No one here is wearing masks.  I feel deeply embarrassed… like a hypochondriac, like someone who’s bought into a line of bullshit that’s been spoon fed by the liberal media.

Being the only person at the shop with a covered face, I feel all the things the president and his supporters want me to feel.

But we’ve used the same mechanic for 20 years.  And we brought food to the grange for his 50th birthday party, and shared meals over Christmas potlucks.  He’s loaned us his car when we were broken down, and his wife would drive me home if he couldn’t finish by the end of the day.  We stood in line with hundreds of mourners to hug him and his children when his wife died a few years back.  

I keep my mask on.  The other customers don’t stand six feet away.  But they don’t make rude comments, either.  While he cashes me out, I ask how he’s doing. 

“We were at about 70 percent through most of that bullshit,” he tells me.  “It’s comin’ back now.  How ‘bout yerself?”

“People need food,” I shrug.  “So sales have been fine…Except now I can’t get anyone to kill the animals.”

I tell him about the animals getting shipped east from the factory farms out west.  The plight facing local small farmers distresses him.  He’s one of my most sympathetic listeners.  He shakes his head in disgust.  

Then he makes some disparaging comments about China, about how everything started getting bad with the Clinton administration. I just listen. 

We don’t agree on how the disease should be handled.  We don’t even need to find words to reveal that anymore.  It shows on our faces.  

We’re doing the rural truce dance.  We let the peace of our backwater, and the number of years we’ve known each other, soften our emotions.  We won’t see eye to eye on this.  But we don’t want to lose each other, either.

My compulsion to get along with everyone makes me want to whip off my mask and conform to the prevailing views in the room.  I want to make fun of the craziness.  But I believe the mask is important, even if I don’t have the words or the spitfire to drive home compelling arguments.  Yet still, I feel like wearing it here is somehow an invitation for conflict.  So I leave it on but take care to meet his eyes as he pushes the car keys across the counter.   

“I’m just so deeply thankful that you’re here, and that I’ve got you to do business with,” I tell him.  He nods and wishes me a good day.

We have both been part of the fabric of this place too long to let politics interfere with our relationship.  

And I feel proud about that.  Rural people often have a higher regard for the importance of community above left and right politics.  We have to.  It’s essential to our survival.  Thus, trust is slowly built over years, with dollars spent, time invested, food and tools shared and favors granted and returned.  We become us, and outsiders them, for better or worse. It has its drawbacks, but it is also a comfortable known entity in my life, giving me a certain currency in my community earned by virtue of my commitment to one place. I know that I will not be bullied or harassed for wearing my mask.   But my convictions are also watered down.  I won’t cajole him or his customers about masks and social distancing, either.    We each have safety in our viewpoints, in our economic security, in our race, and in the fresh air that abounds around us, making it much harder for any virus to penetrate.

And so I can walk out of the mechanic’s office with car keys in hand, go to my vehicle and drive home relatively unscathed by our mild difference of opinion.  I feel comforted by “the rural answer,” that I can ignore the fomenting rage across this land if I choose to, tending only to my family and my business and my inner peace.

But Ula does not share my comfort.  Her tears tap into the vein of fear and outrage that I want to suppress.  And she calls it up from my core with her brutal assessment:  It’s so bad, she doesn’t want to be here.

And she is right to call it out and whip me from my comfort zone.  I may have learned to navigate left and right in my backwater town, but the issue of race and police brutality and the unrest across this nation cannot be ignored.  

And more to the point, with this child who sits beside me, I need to underscore something else. It cannot be escaped.

“It’s everywhere,” I tell her.  I remind her of our own family’s flight:  from Ireland in the Potato Famine, from Germany as Hitler came to power. The United States is not the first nation to battle racism and nationalism and cruelty.  It will not be the last.  But we have to move through it.  We have to welcome the wakening and the need for change.     I remind her of the recent assaults we’ve faced in our own community — nearly losing our post office, fighting pipelines and hydro-fracking.  They were stopped because people didn’t flee or give up.  They were stopped because we put down roots and held our ground.

The struggle over racial injustice in this country is an urgent one.  It rises above politics and demands all of us raise our voices and cry out.   I worry about the police brutality.  I worry about Corey, half Haitian, every time he takes the car and leaves the bubble of our farm.  I worry he’ll get stopped, that he’ll be bullied.  I worry that if he wants to go to college to study farming some day, that he’ll face racism from his white rural classmates.  

I want this to stop.  I want this to change.  But if there’s one thing I can assure my daughter, it is that abandonment won’t solve the problem.  America is in a bad place right now.  She’s taken a long time getting here, and she’s erupting with illness, mental and physical; with hatred; with a burning fever.  But the only way to heal is to commit to the healing process.  And that means moving through the illness.  Right now, that means wearing masks and washing hands.  It means listening to the voices of the protest, and giving their stories more weight and attention than the antics from the White House or hand wringing over the economy.    

I’ve learned from living in one place for my whole life that we don’t have to come out the other side of this with full agreement on all issues.  We have to come out on the other side understanding that all parties are committed to being here, to making it work. All parties have a right to be heard, a right to feel safe, a right to peace.  And when we get there, there’s a flag I’d like to hang outside my business.