Everyday Life in Middletown: A Diary
I drank too much wine last night. I also ate more jalapeño Cheetos than a person should eat in one sitting. The news that no police officers would be charged for the murder of Breonna Taylor, despite the remarkable and unrelenting calls for accountability from across the country, especially in Louisville, over the last 200+ days since her death tipped me over an already precarious emotional edge. Also, Trump is refusing to state that he would ensure a smooth transition if not elected in November; the COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc on our everyday lives and relationships; wild fires have charred over five million acres in California, Washington, and Oregon (my home of 7 years in graduate school); and RGB. It’s too much. Straight outta dystopia. I’m glad I don’t have to teach or attend meetings today.
I can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to awake to gunfire and die, just like that. I can’t stop thinking about the eight minutes and 46 seconds that Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck, or being seen as a threat for talking on my cell phone (Stephon Clark) or playing with a toy gun (Tamir Rice). Or fleeing my house from wild fires, set by someone showing off at a gender reveal party for their baby?! Dystopic indeed. The list goes on and on and on and on and on. I play the scenes in my head over and over again.
When Trump was elected, I was in a daze for a long while. I likened my experience to what I imagine life in the former Yugoslavia was like in the years leading up to the wars of the 1990s that would result in more than 200,000 deaths (similar to the number of people who have died from the preventable COVID-19 virus in the U.S.) and the bloody breakup of one country into seven independent nations. In November 2016, I walked around Muncie wondering which of the people I passed on the street, in the grocery store, my child’s school, voted for Trump. About half of voters did. Many still support him, after everything. I study, read, try to put on my researcher’s hat to understand why people support authoritarian leaders, not only Trump but the those who support and defend him and his business cronies, those who put profit over people. I tell myself that if we don’t understand them, we will not be able to change them, challenge them, achieve a different kind of future than what we are seeing now. I try to focus on the positive, such as the hundreds of thousands of people who have been taking to the streets for Black lives, especially this summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, or the pussy-hat-wearing women’s rights marches that happened when Trump was first elected (and which feels like a lifetime ago). Young people are standing against gun violence and for the environment. Will they vote? Will their votes be counted?
I experience time differently now, since the pandemic. Everything has slowed down. I used to always feel rushed. I rushed my kid to school, rushed to class and meetings, rushed home to make dinner, rushed to get my kid to swimming lessons at the YMCA on time or to a monthly neighborhood meeting. I rushed through washing dishes so I could spend a little time with my kid before bed, and so that I could relax after she fell asleep and not rush to bed. Since March, I don’t rush. I saunter to my desk and sit down. Because I rush less, move less, drive less, and speak with fewer people, I do more other things. I have a little garden, four 4×4 foot raised beds wrapped in deer fencing to keep critters out. This garden has brought me joy and pride. I visited my garden three times today because today was an especially hard day. I have grown tomatoes, zucchini, hot and sweet peppers, tomatillos, cucumbers, carrots, lettuce, squash, basil and other herbs. The beets, broccoli, fennel, and artichokes didn’t make it. In the backyard, I planted wild flowers and, in the front yard, native flower species such as Black-eyed Susans and echinacea, as well as nasturtiums, which are edible flowers and add color to salads. I have long enjoyed cooking and made time to do it, even before the pandemic, but now I have more time to cook, and I have embraced it.
My kid woke up inexplicably happy this morning. It’s nice to see her so happy. For better and worse, her mood affects my mood. Today, she is helping me shoulder heavy grief and fear. Though she went to bed late (per usual) and got up early, she is rollerblading around the house, popping in and out of her school Zoom classes with exuberance, in between lecturing me on how I need to try more new things. She missed 10 minutes of class because she was lecturing me on the benefits of rollerblading. She started rollerblading in April and tried it twice before quitting because we insisted she blade on the bike path, not sidewalks or city streets. That’s when we were trying to avoid all people all of the time, when most people around here were scared of the virus. In April, she only wanted to rollerblade in the center of town, where she was likely to see people. She is extroverted and the virus has been hard on her. In April, she refused to rollerblade on the bike path, or anywhere for five months, until she saw a friend rollerblading a few weeks ago. Now she is lecturing me on rollerblading’s benefits and begging me to take her to the bike path, which is smooth and easy to roll on (and which we told her in April). I took her to the skate park this afternoon where she rolled around as I read for class and soaked in the sun. I didn’t do things like that before the pandemic.
Spending more time with my child and partner has been a silver lining that I am trying to embrace because this has not been our history. N and I met 10 years ago this fall. Ten years! For most of those years, we have lived 100 miles apart, a distance too far for either of us to commute daily, but manageable on weekends and breaks. A lives with me and attends school in Muncie. N also has three kids from his first marriage. A and I lived with N and the elder kids for one year five years ago, when I had a sabbatical. But now the elder three are out of the house (one out of college, one in college, and one in boarding school) so the vibe is different in the house. We three have spent a few weeks together at most, without the elder kids around. Outdoor playdates for A with friends and neighbors both here and in Muncie has saved her–and us–from many a meltdown. That and a yoga swing I bought her that she swings on incessantly.
We live in Ohio now and visit our Muncie house occasionally to check on things and visit friends for socially distanced social hours. We joke that we have a time share in Muncie, just like “Gerry” (or is it “Gary”?) on Parks and Rec. There are pros and cons to these arrangements. It’s a relief to live with my partner, to have a regular co-parent and adult company, not to mention help with cooking, cleaning, yardwork and laundry. I can go running or biking whenever I want! However, I have a smaller community of friends here than I do in Muncie, a community built around parenting and teaching. Nevertheless, I do have friends here and most of them are not academics, which is a refreshing change. I do sometimes feel disconnected and that I am not doing enough here. N has been shepherding his nonprofit organization and nature preserve through a divorce with its longtime owner (a college) to its new owner, the organization’s friend group. This divorce was long in coming but sped up by the pandemic. His devotion to this organization is admirable but he works a lot. He worked especially long hours during his furlough but the break is finally final now.
There are many things to love and miss about Muncie: my house, our friends, my office, and especially the sense of community. I know many good people working hard to make Muncie better and they inspire me to do more. Yellow Springs is smaller and it’s more of a destination town than Muncie with lots of locally-owned stores, artists, restaurants, and coffeeshops, a high per capita of people with PhDs and life experiences that have taken them all over the world, not to mention the Glen Helen. It’s a progressive oasis in a sea of conservative Ohioans with Trump signs on their lawns and barns. There is a strong sense of community in Yellow Springs as well, but less a sense of urgency to improve Yellow Springs and the world compared to Muncie because, it seems, there is less to improve. Even so, we long to escape. I was supposed to go to New York City in March for my first invited talk about my forthcoming book. Cancelled. N was supposed to go visit a friend in Scotland in May. Cancelled. I was supposed to go to Eugene, Oregon, where I got my PhD, to receive training for my Fulbright to Bosnia. Cancelled and cancelled. A loves visiting my family in Minnesota every year: her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. We opted not to go this year.
And yet. My family members are all healthy (my cousins tested positive for Covid-19 but only got mild symptoms). We are not hunted by police like Black and Brown people in this country. Though N was furloughed, he received unemployment benefits, so we have not suffered financially like so many others have and will. I get to live with my partner full-time. I have friends. In March, I started running again. By May, I was running 6-7 miles a few times a week, which considerably staved off the ever-growing anxiety. Then I got planar fasciitis and had to stop running. I bought a new bike and started biking 15 miles a few times a week and doing Pilates, which doesn’t ease my anxiety in the same way as running but it’s better than nothing. Lately, though, I’ve been biking once maybe twice per week. My anxiety is high and motivation to cook, bike, or socialize is low. The closer the election gets, the worse I feel. I went biking today, though. 16 miles. I felt like I was biking in sand as I tried to peddle away the anxiety and think about our plan.
I lived in post-war Bosnia from 1998-2000. I arrived three years after the 1992-95 war, which shocked the world with scales of violence not seen in Europe since World War II. In my everyday life in Bosnia, people spoke of three time periods: before the war, during the war, and after the war. “It felt like peace one day and war the next,” they told me. I thought to myself, “Surely there were signs. There were journalists, politicians, professors and teachers, peers, who saw that the country was moving in a different direction. Surely there were feelings of discomfort, people sounding the alarms.” Of course there were, but what is the best way to prepare for war? Some left before the war began. Others took to the streets in protest. Mothers took buses to parliament to protest their sons being sent to the front lines of their own country. Men and women joined the different (para)military groups and still others did little but wait and cling to the hope that everything would be okay. Surely, they thought, neighbors would not turn against neighbors? Those who had come of age during communism explained the shock of living a comfortable life, a normal life (normalan život), where one didn’t think about politics or next month’s bills; they went on vacations to the coast every summer and drank coffee with neighbors of different ethnicities whom you called friend. Then, in the blink of an eye, there was chaos, hunger, ethnic cleansing, uncertainty, and unspeakable forms of violence. Children lost their youth if not their lives. Parents lost their children. Adults lost everything they had worked for and then some. As one woman said, “You have no idea what it’s like to go from here [signaling high], to here [signaling low].” And I didn’t. In the 1990s, when I was in my 20s, I too had a comfortable life, a “normal life.” I had never known hunger. I had a relatively good childhood, a good education, good friends, parents who loved me, and citizenship in the most powerful country in the world. I chose to engage in politics, but my life did not seem to depend on it. I imagined losing all of this and empathized with the feelings of loss that Bosnians described to me, but until I moved to Muncie, Indiana, I had never owned my own home. I lived in 18 different places in 18 years, bouncing from rental to rental, state to state, country to country. I chose a life of education, service, and travel but did not seek disposable income or rootedness and home ownership. I bought my first car at the age of 28 and I moved like a professional mover. Until 2010, I did not have a long-term relationship or children. I did what I wanted when I wanted while maintaining connections to my family in Minnesota and friends around the world.
“It must be nice to live in a country where you don’t have to worry about politics,” Bosnians told me, “to not have to worry about war.” “America,” they told me, “is exceptional.” “You in America do not understand the kinds of people we have here, what they are capable of.” “I don’t,” I said, “but there are people in the United States who do understand. Native Americans, Black Americans, Latinx: they understand trauma, contemporary and intergenerational. Poor people who are evicted from their homes by police officers. Children who grow up hungry. They understand.” I argued that I was privileged and that Bosnians in Bosnia would only meet those of us who were privileged enough to travel internationally. I explained structural inequalities in housing, healthcare, education, and policing. In 2000, after George W. Bush was elected, I decided to return to the United States, though I knew I would return to Bosnia someday.
In November 2016, I suddenly understood the potential for the kinds of loss that Bosnians described. In 2010, I got a stable job at Ball State University and met my life partner. In 2011, I bought my first home and my second car, and in 2012, I had my daughter. The moment I found out I was pregnant, I felt more power and responsibility than I had ever felt. The moment I gave birth, I experienced new levels of fear, grief, and love. In November 2016, I began imagining the kinds of structural loss that Bosnians had described to me all those years ago. I had become a middle-class, white professor who was rooted in the Muncie community. As early as the women’s marches in 2017, I began wondering if Trump and his party would turn the military against its own citizens. I tried to keep those thoughts to myself because when I shared them, I was met with blank stares or eye rolls. Surely I was exaggerating, seeing things that were not there, making too comparisons between countries that were too different.
I wanted to put a Black Lives Matter sign on my lawn for years. Maybe one of those “I don’t care where you’re from, you’re my neighbor” signs. Some indication that I was a good person, on the right side. I used to consider myself an activist, a change-maker, someone willing to shake the boat, speak up for equality. But in 2016 I wasn’t ready to display my politics on my lawn in Muncie. Indiana is deeply conservative. Not everyone in Indiana is conservative, but it’s considered a solid red state, the first one to go for Trump in 2016. At least a few times a year, pickup trucks display confederate flags as they drive through our campus terrorizing Black people, Jews, liberals, and anyone who doesn’t identify as a white supremacist. Trump emboldened these people and I am afraid of the violence that white supremacists and other Trump voters are capable of. We saw it in Charlottesville. We saw it in South Carolina. We see it in every state by police officers who act as judge, jury, and executioner.
I know Trump supporters. When I speak to them, they probably don’t know that while we’re talking, I am thinking about pre-war Bosnia, about neighbors sipping sweet, strong coffee with neighbors, and wonder how this will play out. In the last four years, I have traveled back to Bosnia as well as to Canada (Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver), Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, D.C., San Juan, Boston, Santa Fe, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and more. In those cities, my eyes soak in the colorful murals, yard signs, and window displays for social justice and diversity. I pause and think wryly, “I’m not in Muncie anymore,” and daydream about leaving my job to live in a more progressive place. Over the years, though, more yard signs, murals, and marches have appeared in Muncie. I finally put a Black Lives Matter sign on my lawn (along with my Redistricting Now! and neighborhood association signs). People are fighting to make Muncie better. I am fighting to make Muncie better (though I feel like I could do more). I am inspired, if not also exhausted by, the kinds of transformation that education brings.
This is not about Trump, about one man, though his influence is great. There is no army of one. This is about the kind of nation we want to see, the kind of communities we want to live in, one driven by capital or by people, by inequality or equity, by individualism or a common good, by competition or cooperation. Some, but not all, of these categories are mutually exclusive. Everyday supporters, mothers who raise their children to hate, fathers who bully their sons, Republicans who protect an immoral, narcissistic president, people (people of faith even) who stay silent in the face in inequality and violence, need to choose. We are approaching a temporal shift in the county: before Trump, during Trump, and after the election of 2016. Where is the dividing line, the day when chronic political instability and corruption becomes war? We might have already passed it.