Living in a Red State

I live in a Red State and I’ve been here for nearly twenty years. Sometimes, it’s almost like living on a different planet, as the majority of people here view the world quite a bit differently than I do. My libertinism is merely the tip of the iceberg in how different I am from the typical local mindset.

Many people here have been brought up as religious fundamentalists from their earliest years. Fundamentalism teaches people not to question and to be suspect of depending too heavily on reason, teaching that only faith is completely reliable. It presents spirituality in a rote, black and white fashion: yes/no, right/wrong, with no room for shades of gray, which is viewed as the slippery slope to evil. Fundamentalism is also big on authority and the “chain of command”.

Fundamentalists think in absolutes and believe that children should be taught what to think, rather than how to think. Unsurprisingly, such an upbringing produces adults who are firm “in the box” thinkers. Fundamentalism is a “Just Say No” form of faith, that emphasizes external things that people shouldn’t do, much more than inner spirituality. There is a common bumper sticker here that pretty well sums up the fundamentalist mindset: “God said it, I believe it, That settles it!”

Consequently, it’s not hard to see how many people here embrace right wing conservatism, despite the fact that voting for such candidates is against their best interests economically. Right wing Republicans have learned how to play their crowd, to play on the insecurities of the superstitious, and how to mouth all the buzz words and cliches that correspond to the fundamentalist mindset: “moral values”, “family values”, etc.

Never mind that there’s nothing moral about people who are unemployed or underemployed and can’t support their families. Never mind that the sons and daughters in these families who can’t get a job or afford to go to college turn to the military and then are sent on a fool’s errand as Bush orders them overseas to fight the wrong target as America gets mired into another Vietnam.

I mean, what’s having a job when they can elect a President who can keep two people of the same sex from getting married? They never stopped to think that their moral self righteousness won’t pay any bills or put food on the table. Instead of voting to help themselves and their families, they voted to meddle with the happiness of strangers who have no affect on their own lives.

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My son is of an age where this could have been his second time voting in a Presidential election. But he’s always refused to register to vote, with this election being no different.

Is he indifferent to politics, you might ask? Hardly. This year, especially, he followed the election and fully agreed with me that Kerry was the better choice. Though he was born and raised in Red States, he was brought up by me and my father, so he is a critical thinker, able to look at the issues for himself.

He’d told me he’d been debating with his coworkers about why Bush was the wrong choice, but that it was hopeless; that everyone there, except for one other guy, was a die hard Republican. One of his coworkers even said he thought Bush was too liberal; that he wished Pat Robertson would run again!!

I understood how my son felt; I can remember that in the 1992 election that only four of my fellow officers in a one hundred officer department had voted for Clinton.

He refused to vote because we live in a Red State that would undoubtedly vote red again, so he felt as if his vote would be a waste of time, stating that he didn’t think the Electoral College was fair. I had to agree with him on that, though I couldn’t agree that it was wasting his time to vote.

I told him that if every person who felt that way had decided to vote anyway, it might have been enough to swing it the other way. And, if not, voting wouldn’t do any harm and one would have the satisfaction of at least having voiced their opinion. I even asked him to vote just to humor me. He wouldn’t do it and the results of this election, combined with the irregularities over absentee ballots and provisional ballots, isn’t likely to change his mind any time soon.

However, I have hope. In the twenty years I’ve lived here, the population has changed dramatically as people have moved here from all over the country, which may some day make this state blue if the trend continues. Right now, I’d be willing to settle for purple.