Simplicity
There is a fundamental drive to keep things simple. To some degree, President Trump campaigned — and won — on it: his “revolution of common sense.”
And, yeah. People like when you talk at their level, when you make them feel seen. Columnist Salena Zito has written about it numerous times over the last few years. While Democratic candidates typically stay in metro areas, Republicans have been far better over the last several decades at actually going into the wilderness and meeting people where they are, which, as a rural area, we obviously think is great.
People here, and indeed all throughout Appalachia, are surly and angry, passed over and forgotten by the big city folk, if you will.
Critics will call that failing to improve yourself and say that you’re supposed to move away from the sticks and find a better life elsewhere.
But we call it…home.
Yes, we have struggles.
Yes, for many of us, we could definitely live a more successful life somewhere else.
But, likewise for many of us, our eyes look upon the same mountains that our pappy and his pappy’s pappy saw with theirs, if you’ll pardon the informal accent.
Our history and our culture binds us together. It’s a part of our identity — of who we consider ourselves to be on a fundamental level.
There’s a lot of stereotypes about rural America. Simple folk, some call us, in a way that recalls author J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits.
We like common sense and plain talk. We like knowing who we’re voting for.
These are not bad traits.
But, at the same time, we do have to acknowledge that unfortunately, what we think of as common sense isn’t always that common.
The world is complicated and getting dramatically more so all the time. We live in a world, even here, rurally, that our ancestors would regard as nothing short of magical.
We flip a switch on the wall and lights turn on. It’s so mind-numbingly commonplace that we do it without thinking at this point, but have you ever thought about the complexities of the systems that make that work?
Have you ever thought about how that power is generated, transmitted to wherever we are and bent to our will safely and without causing us harm to use?
In our drive to keep our world simple, we must not lose sight of the fact that, on a basic level…the world isn’t simple.
A failing of Democrats is a fixation on the moral purity of a person. You see this a lot with historical figures, in particular.
People are messy. People, like our world, are complicated. Bad people can do good things, and good people can do horrible things.
Unfortunately, we now see the Republicans joining in with the Democrats on this broad-stroke brushing of people.
If you’re a woman or person of color, the narrative is that you must be a DEI hire — regardless of your actual qualifications.
If you’re trans, you’re “anti-American, subversive, harmful and false” — according to the language in a recent executive order signed by Trump.
If you’re an immigrant, well, you know the rest.
Nothing is as simple as we want it to be, sadly.
There are absolutely DEI hires who don’t pull their weight. There are absolutely trans people who subscribe to harmful ideologies. There are absolutely immigrants here illegally. All of these should be rooted out.
But by attacking all of these groups whole-cloth, by declaring the entire system foul and seeking a hard reset, by saying that it is simple and that all of a group of people are bad, we miss the texture of reality.
Reality, like people, isn’t simple.
Call us bleeding hearts or fools, but we believe in the cultural value, the very American value, we all share: that the lives of innocents have value and are worth protecting.
That we are free people, entitled to the pursuit of happiness.
Now, that — that is simple.