Growing up red

The joke in the click-bait title of this post is that I grew up neither in a conservative Republican family nor in a Communist one.

I did grow up in a red state, one of the big "surprises" of this election: ever changeable Wisconsin, home to Joseph McCarthy and the dairy industry. I also happened to grow up in Ripon, the birthplace of Lincoln's Republican party.

My father was a history professor at a small liberal arts college and my mother was what was then called  a "faculty wife." I was indistinguishable from my Caucasian rural Wisconsin peers except that one cold day after the 1968 election, my mother outed me by marching alone in front of the US Post Office to protest the absence of Blacks and women on Richard Nixon's Cabinet.

After front and back photos of her protest appeared on the front page of the town newspaper, a kid whose parents were not college faculty conspiratorially pulled me aside  on the playground to share that her parents agreed with my mother but to please not tell anyone.

The courage my mother showed on that November day was not to make a sign and protest politics as usual. Her courage was to march alone at her peril.  

I don't pretend to know the people who voted for Donald Trump catapulting him to an electoral win on November 8. I haven't lived in Wisconsin in 40 years. But I can tell you that two American political parties ignored the people of Wisconsin and most everyone else who does not live in privileged coastal America and this is the price paid for that grand oversight.

While we in the Republic of Cascadia  were counting our 401K dollars, sipping our $5 lattes, and sending our matched dollars to Planned Parenthood, the rest of the country was living in a very different America. The people in our middle voted from the heart of their pain.