What's wrong with neighbors these days?

Do you know your neighbor’s names? Do you speak to them? Would you know if they were dying? Would you care enough to call someone?

If your answer is “no, no, no and okay, maybe,” you are just plain normal today.

We hear their sound systems playing, their cars starting and their domestic disputes, if we live in crowded areas. We catch glimpses of them getting out of cars or taking out the trash, but little more. If we live in a “friendly” neighborhood, we might occasionally lift a hand in a silent wave.

Creative commons image by Chiot’s run of flickr.com

I’m no different. I have always felt connected to the land, plants and animals around wherever I’m living, including to my human neighbors. But in the past few years, my connection to human neighbors has grown thin and distant. As spring opens up the world, I find myself saddened that I don’t know my neighbors.

There is the neighbor across the street who starts their clunky car every day at precisely at 7:00 am. There is the neighbor who always drives in the back and never appears in front of their house, despite having a carefully manicured front fence and raised flower garden. There is the neighbor who grows a fantastic back garden crowded with vegetables and flowers so thick that it reminds me of children’s stories about secret gardens that shut out the world.

I’ve never spoken to any of these neighbors, though I’ve lived here for nearly two years. I’m legally blind, so it’s hard for me to catch them on the street and strike up a not-so-casual conversation, as others who desire neighborly contact might. I wish I had more connections with my neighbors beyond the snippets of their routines that filter out, but my life has been beyond overwhelming with children’s medical crises, so I have made no bold moves.

I feel a certain kinship with the punctual neighbor across the street. I’m sure he or she is working hard, heading out early in that car with the labored engine every morning. But I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t think of me as someone they’d want to know. They don’t have a high front wall or fence, so they have no doubt seen me with my white cane and my kids with intense emotional issues.

The neighbor with the perfect front flowerbeds maintains them by proxy. I have met their fix-it man/gardener. All last summer, he greeted me every evening and we’d exchange a few words while we tended our respective plots. He wasn’t really a neighbor but we both acted like we were.

The only actual neighbor I’ve talked to is one with plenty of trouble of their own. That house has all the signs that someone there struggles with addiction. It is beaten down and in need of repair. There are loud arguments and broken dishes. There is sometimes noxious plastic trash burned in the yard. But there’s also a woman there who occasionally greets me. I once went to that house to give warning in the middle of the night because I could hear water spurting from their side faucet, which had broken. Ever since, we aren’t exactly friends, but we are on—if not speaking term, then at least greeting terms..

A bit further away in the neighborhood, I have encountered only tragedy--loud domestic violence in one house, then the silence after the woman and children fled, and death by overdose at another house. This is all I know of neighbors two years after returning to my small home town in Eastern Oregon.

Rewind thirty years and I was a teenager here desperate to get away. There were many reasons why I originally left, including the scent of opportunity, right-wing local politics, no public transportation and romantic notions about the rest of the world. But back then, it was normal to know you neighbors. I met my future niece’s mother and aunt across the back fence. Even socially awkward and outcast as I was at school, I knew some near neighbors.

Today, I find the contrast disturbing, not just for myself but for society at large. The only person, besides the neighbor’s gardener who has approached me intent upon making connections was a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who occasionally prowl the neighborhood. Neighborly relations have become mechanistic at best—something only minded when you can get something out of it.

When I go for walks around the neighborhood, I’ll often wave to someone out working on a lawn. I don’t make a big production out of it, just a little finger wave and a smile. So far, they give back only silence. I don’t hear neighbors greet one another either. So, it isn’t just that they’re leery of the “blind lady.” There is a feeling of being on edge, of both distrust and apathy.

Back when I was a conflict correspondent for newspapers, I often had to walk through neighborhoods where I didn’t even understand the local language and “gauge the mood” for my editors on the other side of the world. If my job was to report on American small town life today, I would have to describe the atmosphere as one of “discontent and distrust” or “deceptive calm covering simmering resentments.”

I fear that the problem with neighbors in America goes far deeper than just neighborly relations. Increasingly, when I meet other parents at the Little League field or at a school function, a sense of guardedness and exhaustion pervades. I try to reach out with the same friendly gestures that worked years ago, only to be rebuffed with silence or sideways hedging to get some distance.

Is this about the politics? We’re in a deep red zone in an otherwise blue state after all. Maybe my neighbors feel marginalized or maybe there’s something about me—wild red braids? colorfully patterned clothes?—that gives my politics away as controversial. But I suspect that it is more than that. Even when I visit the big blue city, people are professional but there’s often strain in their precisely polite voices and precious little warmth.

What can be done to bring back a sense of community and neighborliness? I have tried the tactic of simply being ultra friendly. I’ve been the one to bring cookies to new neighbors to welcome them to the neighborhood. And I might do something like that again, once my life is less of a rolling crisis. But even when I was doing that a few years ago, the reception was distinctly cold and suspicious.

I don’t believe the solution is simply individuals putting themselves out there and being warm and friendly. That doesn’t hurt, but it won’t change the core of the matter. I’ve seen other nations in times of hopelessness and this is what despair on a large scale feels like. I’ve also seen nations that have recently thrown off tyranny, filled with hope and optimism. And those are the places where I have seen strangers play cards while waiting for busses or neighbors lend a helping hand to the elderly. The level of hope in society is closely tied to neighborliness.

I don’t know how to restore hope to a giant country like the United States. It used to be that people in America believed they were lucky and blessed. Even when our systems were messed up, we seemed to believe they were at least the best that could be had. Now, I hear Americans disparage the services and authorities that hold our communities together, just as Russians or Eastern Europeans do with theirs. It’s a symptom rather than a cause. The systems are not actually any worse than they once were. It’s the optimism that has frayed.

I do know that hope is fostered by connections to nature, by finding small moments of beauty in life, by authentic connections to other humans who are doing something beyond themselves. These are the things I seek for hope and I only know how to keep looking.

And meanwhile, I’ll be the friendly neighborhood oddball who sometimes eats meals on the front porch, waves at people she can’t see, talks to gardeners and listens for anyone in need.

Postcards from American social studies class

It has been a month since I pulled my son out of Czech school mid-week and put him in an American online elementary school. It’s been a month of complete reorientation. I even feel like I have jet lag.

Our living room now looks like a homeschooler lives here. We aren’t technically allowed to homeschool because of Czech authorities, but we have been able to enroll in an American online school, thanks to technology that has only existed for a few years. And even with school online the physical environment is starting to look different.

Now we are surrounded by three US maps (two of them in puzzle form), a daily schedule on the wall, science projects involving balloons, makeshift beakers and lots of rocks, a writing lab and color-coded notebooks with big bold labels in English. This isn’t how Czechs do school. My son’s previous school room had piles of identical gray notebooks—six or more per class—a couple of textbooks and nothing with color or three dimensions.

Image by Arie Farnam

In other rooms of the house, I am packing and stacking boxes. I came here twenty-two years ago with a single backpack, a laptop and equipment to make a documentary film. In a few months, I’ll be going back. One acquires things in twenty-two years—important things… and people. I’ll be heading back with two kids and about ten large boxes full of books, clothes, special dishes, candle-making equipment, herbalist paraphernalia, children’s toys, board games and much smaller electronics.

I’ll still be leaving behind a lot of value—the huge wooden table my Egyptian carpenter friend made for me, my antique sewing machine, my house, my garden, my animals, a husband. This isn’t all celebration. There is a lot of loss and heartache.

This morning I realized for the first time that we will technically meet the definition of refugees. We are leaving because of community harassment and particularly racially motivated physical and psychological attacks on my son, from which authorities refuse to protect us.

Sure, unlike most refugees, we actually have a pre-set safe harbor to go to. We have citizenship and an apartment already waiting, But still… this isn’t how I ever imagined going home.

The ever-intensifying Covid lockdowns here leave us in a limbo where we might as well have already crossed the ocean. A thick blanket of fine sifted snow has fallen and the temperature has been well below freezing.

We haven’t seen neighbors even poke their noses out of doors in days. But we are out and about, feeding animals, sledding, snowboarding, skating on a nearby pond and shoveling snow. It’s a wonderfully quiet and blissfully unthreatening world for a change with only the sounds of neighborhood dogs and a few engines down on the county road.

Our trans-Atlantic transition has already begun. I’ve got the measuring cups out and we’ve been baking—preparing for a world of cups, ounces, pounds, quarts, gallons, feet and inches. My son is justifiably confused.

“Why, Mama, why do Americans do this? Centimeters are lots easier!”

Oh honey, you have no idea.

The complexity isn’t just in units of measure by a long shot. Europeans don’t study fractions much, which are mostly a consequence of weird American units of measure.

And did you know that European and American cursive handwriting differ significantly? No wonder I haven’t been able to read handwriting for the past twenty years! I thought my eyes were just getting worse. But as it turns out, almost all the capital letters are different and many of the lower-case letters are quite different.

Of course, there is the whole language thing. I didn’t get out of home teaching by going for American school, even if the online teachers do actually teach concepts. My son needs vocabulary help roughly every two and a half minutes, and that definitely includes math class.

The most foreign class though is social studies. Czechs do have a somewhat similar class. It is called “homeland studies,” and is completely nationally focused. In fourth grade, American social studies is quite similar actually—just with information about a different country. A few concepts, like how to read an elevation map, are transferable, but all the facts are, of course, different.

Before enrolling in American school, my son could just barely find the United States on a world map, primarily because “Grandma lives there.” (Not to mention a passel of cousins.) But that’s as far as his knowledge of America went—to my dismay. I thought I’d done a half-way decent job, importing hundreds of American children’s books over the years, many of them about American history or regional cultures. But apparently my son assumed these were every bit as much fantasy as the fairytales and let them go in one ear and out the other.

The social studies teacher in our new school is also the weakest of the teachers, in terms of teaching style and even knowledge base. He’s a middle-aged guy from Ohio named Todd, and I was warned by reviewers that this school has a conservative bent.

But even so, I was disturbed when the first lesson was on the hemispheres of the earth and the teacher insisted that the earth has four hemispheres—northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest. “Hemi-sphere” means “half of a ball.” You can’t have four halves of one ball.

Next, the teacher just goofed. He was trying to explain to the kids how landforms have an impact on weather patterns. One of the simplest examples of this comes from my home turf in Eastern Oregon, where the Cascade Mountains block the wet sea air from the Pacific Ocean to the west and force it to rise, cool and dump all of its moisture before continuing on to the eastern part of the state. That’s why Eastern Oregon and Washington are mostly desert.

But Todd from Ohio got his mountain ranges mixed up and insisted that it is the Rocky Mountains that block the wet air from the Pacific, despite the fact that the Rockies don’t really start until you get into Idaho. And he put it on the unit exam.

But those things are non-controversial, just mistakes, that in reality any teacher makes. We just don’t usually have to teach our classes with parents looking in, analyzing and rewinding the video recording to harp on every little thing. So, I wrote to Todd and told him about the issue gently and I don’t hold it against him. (Well, the bit about the earth’s hemispheres counts against him maybe just a smidgen.)

But the real trouble started in the unit titled “Who are Americans?”

First, the teacher proclaimed that all Americans are immigrants. He made a point of calling out any Native American kids watching and specifically denigrating anyone who says Native Americans are not immigrants. He explained the archeological land bridge theory, though he neglected to mention that this is our best guess as to how Native Americans got there. Mostly it was his tone that was irritating at this point.

But then he made a point of insisting that those first migrating humans or pre-humans were also immigrants and thus “all Americans come from immigrants.” First of all, this isn’t technically correct. “Immigration” describes the movement of specific persons from one inhabited country to another inhabited country. An immigrant goes “in” among those already there and does it during their own lifetime.

The people who crossed the land bridge, if that is indeed how it happened, were not immigrants. They were nomads. They didn’t make the trip all in one lifetime. It took many generations. They didn’t go to live in another country. They just slowly moved around and eventually found themselves on a different continent.

Now, I’m not Native American and I don’t know if Native Americans care whether or not they are considered to be the descendants of immigrants or not. But I do care about the evident reason Todd was making this assertion—to prepare kids to believe that Europeans had every bit as much right to the land of North America as Native Americans did back in the 1400s. That’s a problem.

If that were true any invader could just declare themselves immigrants to any country and might would always make right.

Furthermore, If Todd were right about all Americans being immigrants, it would mean that Europe is a continent of immigrants too… and Asia and Australia as well. The only continent with any claim to having indigenous people would be Africa and all humans would either have to be considered indigenous Africans or African diaspora of various time periods. That is clearly unhelpful and not the meaning of the concepts involved.

This is where the fundamental building blocks of a vast social misunderstandings start—at least some of them. Conservatives in the US have long complained that teaching the facts of US history constitutes the shaming of the white portion of the nation. As a result, I had to learn much of this history outside school from reading and from experiences with people. The primary shame I ever felt over it was that we didn’t learn it in primary school.

This is a political ploy in the classroom. I’ve heard right-wing politicians say the same thing on TV, “we all came as immigrants and we all had the same opportunities.” It’s a comfortable falsehood to shake off uncomfortable feelings that arise from acknowledging historical and present-day injustices.

In the next unit, Todd opened up the topic of the economy of the United States. He defined “free market economics” as “a system where you can make as much money as you want. You decide how much money you will make.”

Creative Commons image by Kath B. of Flickr.com

He never hinted that you don’t just get to say, “Oh, I’d like to make $200,000 please,” and it’s done. Well, I suppose that Todd had that option because he’s an abled white man from a privileged socio-economic background, so maybe he actually thinks that’s an option for everybody. He does point out that he chose to be a teacher, even though it doesn’t pay as much as some other things. But he never hints that not everyone gets to simply point to a dollar amount and choose their salary, as if it is an ice-cream flavor.

Next, Todd addresses America’s political system. America is “unique,” he says, because it is a democracy. He digs deeper into the idea that America is alone in being a democracy when he defines the concept of a political region as “America is a democracy, so that is a political region,” as if the border around the United States was the border around the democratic region of the world.

This, despite the fact that the fairly conservative Pew Research Center found in 2019 that more than half of the countries in the world are now democratic.

And then this morning, a whopper that left me breathless. In discussing America’s borders and neighbors, the teacher claimed that the Mexican-American war was a border dispute over which river should be the border. It was presented as a silly little argument in which the United States proved that the Rio Grande was the right border. In reality the Mexican-American war constituted a massive land-grab on the part of the Americans. It was so unjust that there were quite a few Americans who fought on the Mexican side. And when the United States won anyway, the border was moved and the USA gained 500,000 square miles of territory, increasing the nation’s size by a third. This was no minor squabble over “which river the border should follow.”

One of the ways I deal with the problems with social studies class is to supplement. I brought out the world-map puzzles and eventually my son got the idea of cardinal directions and the hemispheres of the earth. I also got a topographical map of the US. so we could study. the real positions of the mountain ranges and their effects on Eastern Oregon high desert country. And at the moment, we’re reading children’s books about the historical labor movement led by young women in textile mills for a bit of perspective on our economic system. We have books about Native American kids—both present-day and historical—as well.

But now I see the divide in American social studies education in all its glory. To be on the side of facts and history puts me in the position of sounding like I am constantly harping on some injustice or another. This isn’t the choice of those of us who care about our children understanding the real world. I am not in fact against America or focused on complaint and gloom. I don’t even think America is really any more unjust than the vast majority of countries in the world.

But when teachers strip out any sign of the injustices of the past and focus on the myth of glorious European “Founding Fathers,” it makes it hard for facts to come across as anything else.

I find myself longing for a social studies class that would just teach the facts and the story of the country and its many peoples with integrity in the first place. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to homeschool my kids early on, a dream I gave up on due to bureaucracy, special educational needs and the wishes of my children. That’s why I have all these picture and story books on historical, geographic and social matters.

To counteract the sense that even my. blog posts are often a litany of complaints in a world of unrelenting hardship and injustice, I let myself dream about the way I would teach social studies.

We’d build maps where the equator was actually in the middle of the map, rather than in the lower third. We’d sing the oceans and continents. We’d make food from various countries. We’d mix the same paints to get the various shades of brown that color all the peoples of the earth, including those of very light-brown hue. We’d read real or realistic fictional stories about children in different countries.

When we turned, as we eventually must in an American school, to a more in-depth exploration of the United States, we would first spend quite a long time on the first several thousand years of American history and study the physical regions of the country in that context. We would have to search to find child-friendly books and materials on Native American civilizations and we would study their many discoveries and the development of mature democracy in some of them.

Then we would move on to all the history that came after and the nation of immigrants that largely replaced those civilizations. We would study the stories of those immigrants, including real stories of children in those times. We would not look away from hardship, desperation or exploitation. We would see how even good intentions sometimes brought tragedy and not all intentions were good. We would look at how people in the past viewed those of other groups and how that influenced what they did.

We would look at the founding of the United States and the Constitution as significant events, but not as the all-defining, most important events they became in the social studies of my childhood. We would look at exactly who designed the Constitution and why and how they hoped it would work and what worked and what didn’t and how it has been changed and whether or not it now works better. We wouldn’t be looking for saints or devils but rather at people, who were shaped by their times and circumstances.

As we moved toward more recent history, we would have more stories of real people to work with. We’d break down myths and tell the stories with nuance. Rosa Parks would take her rightful place as a savvy, planful activist, rather than just someone who was too tired.

We would learn that there are rarely easy answers, and that while there are sometimes people with dishonorable intentions, most people throughout history took the actions that seemed right from their own perspective at that time. And yes, this would mean in the end that we would not be able to cover everything in one year, because nuance takes a little while, but we could cover it all in the end, since we wouldn’t spend every year repeating the same tired myths.

I hope—I have reason to hope from what I haver read—that there are schools in America that now teach social studies more like this. I have no illusions that we are returning to a country that is truly safer or gentler than the one we are leaving. We are simply going because we must go, due to clear and present danger, and that is the place we can find safe harbor just now.

Post election blues over seeing red

Please forgive my mixing of puns. It isn’t that I don’t take this seriously. My nerves are as frayed as those of many of my readers. But coming up with a title that wouldn’t drive my readers away screaming wasn’t easy.

A title is supposed to tell you why you should read a particular post, but it is often hard to put into a catchy phrase. Why look back at this messy and painful election? Why dwell on a future that is still uncertain? Trump lost. Sometimes that feels like the only thing that matters.

But this really was a vote about the soul of the nation. And we’ve got to look at that soul, once it’s bared. Otherwise, we’ll end up having to go through the same painful things again and again and again. That’s why I didn’t give in to the strong temptation to write about herbs instead. So, bear with me if you are in need of some steadying or even if you just want a space to bounce your thoughts off of.

We finally got a moment of celebration, but it is likely to be very brief. I hear and read people all across America and in other countries marveling that so many American voters were still willing to vote for that uncouth, hateful and psychologically unhealthy man. We were all well aware that he still had supporters, but it seemed like many people had dropped their support for him.

It doesn’t surprise me that fundamentalist Christians didn’t change their tune, regardless of their posturing about “character” and “values” when it comes to other politicians. It doesn’t even surprise me that some Hispanic voters went for Trump. It is time America realized that this is a very diverse group of citizens with widely differing interests. And the Democrats did take them for granted and ignore them after all.

But what both surprises and dismays me is the gains Trump made among white women. I stand stunned. What could possibly possess more than half of white female voters to support a man who has made his opinion that women are objects and only valuable if they please men very clear? How could MORE of these women support him this time after having to endure his sewage-mouth for so long?

It’s been through a battle and the war ain’t over. Creative Commons image by John M. Cropper

This is part of the sickness we have found in the nation’s soul. One of the ways I try to comprehend this soul is by reading Christian bloggers to get a perspective that is definitely outside my bubble. One of those I read on occasion is Kieth Giles, who grew up in a right-wing, white Christian environment in Texas. He’s made the mental trip across the big divide in America and while I still may not agree with him on lots of things, his perspective on what makes Republican voters tick is invaluable.

“Republican Christians tend to care about the unborn, the traditional family, and the right to bear arms,” he wrote in a recent post. “Therefore, they vote for Republican candidates who at least ‘say’ they care about overturning abortion laws, defending traditional definitions of marriage [anti-gay marriage, etc.], and protecting the Second Amendment.”

Add to this that many right-wing, white Christians have been surrounded by a highly charged bubble of constant media messaging on these three topics and what you have is a deeply passionate response. They don’t just care about abortion. They are torn apart by the thought of innocent babies being killed. They don’t just dislike the idea of gay sex, they fervently believe that traditional families are the last defenders of all that is good in this messed up world. And feeling under threat, they truly fear gun snatchers.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard any of this, but it is maybe the first time I’ve sat down and taken a good hard look at the emotions behind it. I always kind of figured that anti-abortion activists didn’t really care about the babies. They just cared about controlling what they see as “loose women.” They cared about punishing those they saw as breaking religious purity laws. That was what I believed.

But what this election and its fallout are telling us is that the leaders may have started the movement that way. The pundits who push the propaganda may be coming from that cynical perspective, but many white women are buying the message about protecting babies on a deep and emotional level.

The same goes for the issue of the “traditional family.” Now, I really don’t doubt that there is an element of hate mongering going on here. A lot of people have gotten caught up in the us-and-them game. People who abide by gender norms are on one side and those who don’t are on the other. Just like with sports teams, a lot of people can get whipped up into a frenzy of antagonism over something that doesn’t need to take over a person’s identity. But what I am seeing now is that there is also a deeper emotional element.

We can all relate to the root emotion—the overwhelming anxiety over the troubles in our world. Whether you are focused on climate change, pervasive racism, vast inequity and the finite nature of the earth’s resources or the loss of authentic opportunities, disconnection from spirit, fractious tribalism, endless consumerism or the addictive pitfalls of substances and entertainment, the world really looks like it’s going to hell in a hand basket a good share of the time. Our biggest differences aren’t usually in what we think the problems are but in what we think the solutions are.

Many women have subscribed to the idea that family is the one good thing in all that mess. Despite any unpleasantness, micro-aggressions, suppression of spirit or acrimony in family life, it is still the one thing we can really hang on to. My mother and I recently came to the same conclusion in one of our long, meandering discussions on life, politics and the meaning of the universe. So, we aren’t really that far away from these women either.

But the Trump supporting women have absorbed a worldview that narrows family to a very traditional model. And given the threatening pressures from outside and that sense that family is our only real haven, their attachment to that traditional view of family is authentically passionate.

How exactly that leads them to enthusiastically support Trump, rather than supporting him with the kind of resigned frustration that so many progressives feel for the Democrats, I can’t say. That is a mystery the Christian bloggers have yet to reveal.

I have tried my damnedest to be understanding in all this. I’m not writing people off as hateful and authoritarian just because their primary issues have to do with things that seem at first glance to be mainly about limiting someone else’s autonomy, whether that’s the ability of women to make crucial life choices or the rights of everyone to form loving relationships in the way that is most natural for them. I’m making the effort to see the heart behind these stances.

And I still find the soul of the nation in peril.

I will allow that a moral, thinking person can feel strongly about protecting babies or saving the traditional family. But in either case, Donald Trump doesn’t look like a choice to promote those causes. His actions are about as much for the traditional family as a gay stripper might be. And he clearly is happy to endanger the lives of immigrant babies.

Guns? Well, I guess it is legit to say he isn’t out to snatch the guns of rural and suburban white folks. But I have a hard time seeing defending one’s guns as an issue with heart.

Now pundits ask us to “come together” and heal the divide in our country. That would be a lot easier if the other side had concerns that were not focused on controlling or harming other people. The common ground isn’t there, because that is a deal breaker for most of us.

There is one thing I think we can find comfort in, despite the lack of a clear “blue wave” in the election. There was a sand bar in the way.

What this election showed about America, yet again, was that the majority has always been far more progressive than the politicians. And the political status quo is maintained by several anti-democratic mechanisms. One is the winner-take-all voting system where everyone has to vote for one of two major candidates or have their vote effectively turned against their interests. Another is the Senate system that gives preference to states with low population and thus primarily to rural, conservative states.

And most egregiously there is the Electoral College which was specifically designed to protect the institution of slavery and prejudice elections in favor of rural, conservative voters at the expense of urban, progressive voters.

Among my English-as-a-second-language students are adult professionals from the Czech Republic who mostly came of age around the time of the Velvet Revolution, when young activists overthrew the totalitarian Communist regime. They believed that America was the guiding light of democracy and now they come to me confused. Their Czech-language media has started to describe the US Electoral College for the first time and they are alarmed.

“How did the American election system get broken?” they ask.

“It didn’t,” I explain. “It’s working exactly the way it was meant to.”

I give them a history lesson—with grammar and pronunciation points in English to make sure class time is used well. The Electoral College is working just as it did two hundred years ago to extend the lifetime of the American slavery system far past the time when slavery was abandoned by Canada, Britain and Western Europe. It achieved this by weighting votes to give greater voice to rural conservatives. And it is still doing that today.

The fact is that a lot of people still voted for Trump, but more than four million more voted for Biden, a lack-luster candidate if there ever was one. In any country with a modern democracy it would not have been considered a close race. It might not have been a blue wave, but that also might be because of the artificial sandbars set up to make sure we never see a blue wave and the widespread voter suppression that acted as a flood break.

On Tuesday, November 10, I finally received my mail-in ballot for the 2020 election. I usually receive my ballot a month earlier than that and receive it automatically. This time new voter suppression rules by the Trump administration meant that I had to specifically request my ballot in the summer. Then, the Trump administration sabotaged the US Post Office so that even though my county elections office mailed the ballot two months ago, it still arrived a week after it had to be physically back in Oregon five thousand miles away.

This is voter suppression at work. It isn’t generally considered “election fraud” but it is fraud’s sneakier cousin.

I was lucky. I got caught up in only the fringes of voter suppression efforts and my county office was ready and eager to help. They had a backup system to allow me to vote via email and even though it took specific attention to a single voter, they made it possible for me to cast my vote legally and securely. But the point is that I was certainly not the only one hit by voter suppression measures and in many cases that cost Biden and Congressional Democrats votes, because these measures were made to impact groups that were expected to vote against Trump.

People in other western democracies look at the images of Americans waiting in line for hours with masks and umbrellas to vote in the United States and they shake their heads in bewildered sympathy. That is the kind of treatment voters get in Belarus. That is how regimes behave when they know the voters are not their friends.

So, despite the fact that I am disappointed and even ashamed that 55 percent of white women voted for Trump… again, I know that the soul of the nation is still there. It is tattered and torn from way too many battles, but despite a rigged, weighted voting system and voter suppression directed at voters expected to be less than enthusiastic for Trump, such as people who use mail-in ballots, we’re still here.