A tale from the other side

Once upon a time, I took a trip among the people that are getting a lot of attention today, the sort of people that recently protested and vandalized the capital building. The Trump voters, the qanons. The year was 2009, and Barack Obama had just taken office, and these people were very angry about it.

2009 in many ways seems like a lifetime ago. Iceland told the world precisely where they could stick the fake debt that threatened to sink them. The year of SARS. An outfit called WikiLeaks is starting to release some information uncomfortable to the public, and James Cameron dazzled the world with his shiny new remake of Ferngully.

At the time, I was working in a sleepy office, and a work neighbor of mine was quite conservative, but friendly, and we enjoyed lively debates. I hadn’t quite finished forming, if I ever will, my own personal political beliefs, and bouncing off someone who would argue in good, if wrong, faith I found to be a quite beneficial way to while away the hours working for the man. One day in that late summer, this friend approached me with a proposition - to join him on an arranged bus trip from our town to Washington DC, to participate in the TEA party march on DC. He knew I didn’t see eye to eye with that nascent movement, but I’d never been to our nation’s capital, and it was a quick and cheap bus ride that I figured would at least let me see the sights.

So, on the bus we went. Saw the monuments and fancy marble buildings that signify our ostensibly democratic government, the hill upon which the light of liberty supposedly shines. Saw the march, read the signs from the homemade and questionably spelled to professional organization provided slogans. Chatted with an old woman who would not, under any circumstances, be convinced Obama was a citizen, that old secret muslim trope. Then, after a long day on our feet in the warm sun of DC, we boarded the bus back for the long trip home, a collection of very tired, very white, predominantly middle aged conservatives buzzing about how they accomplished something that day, gathering with others like them from around the country showing the powers that they were angry about the state of the world.

Why write this, you ask? In these dangerous times, people like this present an existential threat. Stealing podiums, beating up peace protesters in the street, why show them mercy or understanding? I write this to tell a story within a story - this bus had a TV, and on the way down to the march, an hour long feature played. I sincerely wish I remember what played, but it told some powerful truths, but instead of black or gays or muslims being to blame, this show got to the heart of the real “shadow state” - the banks, the billionaires, and their media mouthpieces, something we leftists take as an obvious given.

This piece of media caught the attention of the TEA partiers on that bus. Conversations about those rich bastards and how they needed to be taken down a peg were had. It was if they almost got it - what had been stirred up in them enough to make them take this trip was almost seen as the deliberate distraction it was.

Then the bus arrived, and as if a briefly lifted spell suddenly slammed back with full force - Obama and government itself was their enemy again. And maybe, just maybe, that spell can be lifted again, not just for a bus full of privileged midwesterners, but for all.