THE RIGHT IS WRONG SIDE OF TOWN

Ah yes… the days grow shorter and tenser as wet leaves pile
up in my back yard and election day approaches.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to listen to the
results on the radio next Tuesday or if that kind of tension will just drive me crazy. On the other hand, I also don’t want to wake up to any nasty surprises Wednesday morning.

In my completely unofficial, unscientific and informal perusal of political opinion, I’ve watched formerly balanced neighborhoods begin to polarize one way or the other as election day approaches. Where once was an approximate 50/50 split for either candidate, there now seem to be clear favorites in particular neighborhoods.

Where I live, for example, there is exactly one pro-Bush sign in a yard. They have had a "Support President Bush and Our Troops" sign for months, so their candidate of choice is not exactly a surprise. But it is, literally, the ONLY sign supporting the current president in our entire zip code area that I’ve been able to find.

In nearly direct contrast to this is the West Side of town. Yikes! Though really, this shouldn’t surprise me…

I lived on that side of town for many years and worked there as well, so I was very familiar with the attitudes and prejudices which abound there. That side of town really feels like small town America about forty years ago… they still look at any man with hair below his collar with suspicion and probably wouldn’t eat in a restaurant if their waitress had a lip piercing.

Really, I remember it all too well. I worked in a small health food store on the main drag through Conservative Central and know how many times I smiled, said nothing, and waited for the racist across the counter from me to change the subject. I would just stand there, smiling, saying NOTHING until the person became horribly uncomfortable and would eventually be forced to speak of something else. I refused to answer questions, refused to comment, refused to argue – I just smiled and said nothing.

Though technically I was a clerk, primarily I had an acting job. No matter what (well, with one exception, but The Oat Bran Troll pushed my buttons) I would be polite, smile, and say nothing. Once, still smiling, I went into the back, ostensibly to look for something, and kicked a very large box all over the stockroom. But, when I returned to the large-eyed customer, I was still smiling just as serenely as when I had departed.

On occasion, someone would get it into their head to try to "save" me. This just about drove me mad… But, I would smile, take their religious tract then leave it for my boss to laugh about.

Once, though, I ran into one of the evangelists in the parking lot of another completely unaffiliated store and when he tried to approach me to discuss "Jeeeezus" he was in for a surprise – at that moment, I was NOT being paid to be polite, so he got to hear exactly what I thought of him, his blood-thirsty bigoted god and his pushy intolerant religion. Loudly.

Ahh… the good old days. (Yes that is, in fact, a note of irony you see tingeing my text.)

So, I wasn’t really surprised at the number of pro-Bush signs I saw a couple of weeks ago while travelling to a local parenting group meeting which happened to be on the West Side of town. Though it wasn’t quite as polarized as, say, my neighborhood, it was at least a 10/1 ratio.

Sigh.

Part of me wanted to stop and knock on the door of these very small salt-box houses with postage stamp sized yards and ask what Herr President had done for them lately. But then, really, I know the answer to that.

It isn’t about how particular policies benefit or harm one personally, it isn’t about honesty or integrity, it isn’t about any kind of long-term vision of the future, it isn’t about our place as part of a world community. No, it’s about two very scary things: Hatred/fear and a fundamentalist agenda.

It’s like the president is the coach of The Winning Team, and for people who enjoy sitting in front of the TV rooting for someone while drinking a six pack, he’s The Perfect President. There’s nothing complex or complicated to think about – it’s us against them, good against evil, the bad guys against the good guys.

Then, of course, there’s the fundamentalist agenda. The Religious Right scares the hell out of me… they always have. But you know what? They vote.

It is one of the reasons that I chose to start voting in the first place. No, I don’t agree with the system. No, I don’t think that the election process in this country is as representational as it ought to be. No, I don’t think that being given a choice between this guy or that guy is really any kind of choice at all.

But, it’s exactly that kind of cynicism and disgust which has worked to the advantage of the most conservative agendas for years now. Liberals are much more likely to be disgusted with the system and abstain from voting, therefore allowing a highly conservative agenda to dictate the dynamics of the system.

What percentage of potential American voters voted for W in the first place? 16%. That’s it. It only takes that much support to become president. Why? Because most of the rest of the potential voters don’t care. Well, it’s not that they don’t "care" because certainly they’ll complain about how shitty the system is, thus insuring that they continue not to vote. (I’m using myself as an example.)

However, this dynamic has allowed a much more conservative tinge to politics in the last few decades which is not really representational of the actual attitudes of the majority of people who live in this country.

Anyway… back to the West Side.

Last week I was meeting a friend for lunch who lives on that side of town, and since I was the one with a car we decided that I should head over there. It had been more than six months since I had eaten at Price Hill Chili, and I was really craving a Stinger. Since it was only about a mile from his house, we decided to go there after I picked him up.

Alas… it was not to be. Our plans were thwarted by none other than Dick Cheney himself.

As we approached the corner near to the restaurant, traffic came to a near stop. Up ahead I could see people on the sidewalk, jumping up and down holding pro-Bush signs.

Great. What the…?

Then, there were the police cars. And the fire trucks. And the blockades.

My stomach growled. My daughter started to get restless in her car seat. Traffic crept.

Sigh.

On the corner over the heads of the jumping people, I could read the big sign which said something to the effect of "Welcome Dick Cheney." This sign, I might add, was hanging right outside of the office of one of those dreadful "pregnancy problem centers" which I’m sure most of you have heard about.

You know… one of those places which are listed in the Yellow Pages which promise to give guidance and information to people who are pregnant and "in trouble"? And when a client gets there they offer a free pregnancy test and while they’re waiting for the results they put her in a room and play a horrible video tape showing screaming women strapped to tables and garbage cans with dead babies in them? You know… one of those places.

Folks like that might welcome Dick, but I sure didn’t. The news got worse as I was finally able to approach the restaurant…

A sign announced that they were closed that day since The Dick himself was going to be there giving some kind of rah rah talk to the conservative West Siders. That *#^@%!! could have been, at that very moment, eating MY Stinger and sucking down iced tea while I was still hungry, stuck in traffic, with my cravings thwarted.

We quickly picked another acceptable nearby restaurant and drove on while I called my partner (who was also going to meet up with us) and directed him to take another route which would allow him to bypass the traffic.

But, I still had to deliver our friend back to his home, which meant getting from where we were back through the mess. Though I know that side of town pretty well, there wasn’t really any way to avoid the traffic. There were back streets, certainly, but all of them led to a couple of fairly narrow through-roads which were, as I had expected, already completely clogged with stopped cars.

We sat. And sat. And sat.

Since we were close to The Dick himself, we also got to see many, many people holding scary signs, some of which still baffle me completely. (One of them said something about respecting America – learn to speak English. I have no idea to whom it was referring. W, perhaps?) The pro-Bush bumper stickers covered most of the parked cars along the route, and Bush/Cheney signs were in nearly all of the yards.

Except one. There were three kids standing on their front porch as the traffic slowly inched its way past holding an obviously hand-drawn with crayon sign that said "Elect Kerry." We made a point to honk and wave at them.

Finally… finally… we made it to my friend’s street, only to find that an auto accident blocked the way between where we were and where he lived. So, yet ANOTHER detour.

Eventually, we did make it out of there, though for a while I wasn’t too sure. I feared that I had become trapped in some ultra-conservative Twilight Zone where I would be forced to watch television, drink American beer and vote Republican.

You know, I never liked Cheney to begin with, and now that he got between me and my Stinger, I like him even less.

But hopefully, HOPEFULLY, I won’t have to hear about him much again after next Tuesday. Just in case, I’ve asked my partner for suggestions on how I’m going to cope if W gets re-elected. I really don’t know if I can take it and I currently don’t have the resources to move to Canada. His advice? Become a protest singer.

Not likely.

So, really, I don’t have a plan in place if W would be re-elected. Could I actually stay drunk for four years? Hmm….

No, I couldn’t do that to my daughter, though I do tend to be a silly drunk rather than a mean one, but sometimes I can tend toward maudlin. What else?

Join the circus? Become a hobo and ride the rails? Catch something meaningful on fire?

I just don’t know. Perhaps, if it becomes too painful, I’ll go back to ignoring the world and what happens in it. I did that for years and it seemed to work for me, so I suppose that I could do it again. I started paying attention as a stated experiment, so if the results of that experiment are negative, then perhaps I should consider abandoning this experiment and trying a new one.

So, we’ll see. For now, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and try to tell myself that the people I share this geographic spot on Earth with can’t really be that gullible. I mean, they see the agenda, they see what’s going on, right? RIGHT?

And you know, I hate to sound like a snob, but it’s hard for me to deal with the fact that we have a president who has worse grammar than ANY college graduate I’ve ever met in real life. I know how he got into Yale, but how the *&^$#@! did he manage to graduate?

Until the debates, I had never heard him speak. And though I knew before the last election that he wasn’t the sharpest marble in the bag, I had NO IDEA that he could barely put three words together coherently. "Me and Vladimer’ have a good relation." What the hell is that? Does anyone else notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills… how can someone who speaks and thinks like this actually be our head of state?!?

Ok… enough. I am still, genuinely, shocked. Perhaps all of those years ignoring the world at large allowed me to expect / believe more of people. I really had no idea that something like this could actually happen IN REAL LIFE. Doesn’t anyone else feel like they’re trapped in some bad movie or fifties sci-fi novel? This kind of stuff isn’t supposed to really happen….

But it has. Though, hopefully, the insanity is almost over. Or rather, this particular insanity is almost over and a new, hopefully less malevolent and dangerous insanity can take its place.

So, regardless of the weather I’ll be at the polls bright and early next Tuesday and then, despite my better judgement, will probably spend the rest of the day listening to NPR to find out how things are going.

Who knows… there may end up being a hundred law suites and it might be January before we know who the next president is going to be, though by then I’ll have a bleeding ulcer… or have become a hobo.