How Did You Get Like This?

On Political Polarization

An ex boyfriend once told me the cruelest thing his mother ever said to him was, “Why are you like this?” It was shouted tearfully in a moment of pure exasperation after some not-all-that-bad-totally-normal teenage debauchery. 

“It hurt so bad,” he said. “It’s like she was saying she hated the core of who I was.” 

I remember feeling so tender after he told me this and I am embarrassed to say that even after this shared moment, that phrase still has an uncanny ability to pour out of my mouth when I am at the climax of a fight with a partner, family, or friends. “Why are you like this” has a way of slamming a fight to a screeching halt. Because instead of arguing about who was supposed to do the dishes, or he-said-she-said nonsense, you have suddenly managed in one single phrase to suggest that some essence of this person you are in conflict with (whom you likely dearly love) is utterly despicable to you. There is something powerful and grossly dehumanizing about the phrase.*

*Author’s note: That being said, this phrase is simultaneously extremely funny in the right context and that’s the heckin’ beauty of language

Butler, Pennsylvania

Last week, I traveled home to Western Pennsylvania to visit family and was irked to see so much Trump paraphernalia scattered along the lawns and front porches of otherwise unremarkable homes. I can hold my breath past a Trump 2024 yard sign and have even managed to rein in my eye roll at the eyesore red “MAGA” fan-girl merch. But it’s harder to look beyond the blatant violence of “Fuck Biden” and “Make Liberals Cry Again” flags flown high and proud seemingly on every street corner. So many of them feature images of guns or middle fingers or that weird Trump face where he’s kind of aggressively biting his lower lip, scowling, and raising a fist but taken out of context just looks like he’s struggling through an excruciating bout of constipation. 

I’m not a big fan of violence or punitive justice, but this ultra aggression from the Far Right (or maybe just the Right? The middle Right?) seems odd considering they’ve lost, oh, approximately not one single right in the last decade (ever??), meanwhile women, LGBTQIA+ folks, people of color, AND MORE have lost many rights and would have what I would call a completely reasonable excuse to act violently. 

And even though we (the Left) have a completely reasonable excuse for violence, we’re just over here hanging rainbow flags and reading good-hearted stories to children while dressed gorgeously (apparently a crime now?) and politely asking if we could please maybe have just a little bit of women’s healthcare if they’ve got some time to get around to it. Our entire identity isn’t wrapped around a presidential figure like Biden because, well, we quite frankly still have art and culture and music to tie ourselves to because we haven’t decided it’s all so threatening and frightening that it must be burned or banned. Which is to say we are not whiney little self-victimizing babies claiming everyone is offended by everything nowadays while simultaneously being offended by the simplest things such as a man wearing a dress. THE AUDACITY. 

*Takes deep breath*

And so, even though I was on vacation and trying VERY HARD to take a break from political discourse, I couldn’t help but feel a little zap of cortisol every time I passed one of these unnecessarily aggressive yard signs — which I know is exactly their purpose. I know the goal is to try and rile people like me up until we snap and do something heinously violent just so they (the Right) can say, “See? You’re just as fucked up as us. So join the club, baby.” 

But the truth is, I didn’t want to do something heinous or violent. After the quick flash of cortisol passed through my system, I just felt sad for these people. Which is just another way of saying I’m not mad, I’m disappointed.

What Fox News Ruined

I watched my grandpa grow bitter and mean at the end of his life, consuming Fox News in great heaving gulps the same way the cancer on his pancreas was consuming him from the inside out. I don’t remember many pleasant exchanges with him in those final years. Even when he knew he was staring down the last months of his earthly existence, most conversations (which my family worked INCREDIBLY HARD to make about ANYTHING other than politics) were inevitably tainted with some moment of red faced rage of his own creation at the “damn liberals.” 

A prolific architect, watercolorist, woodworker, and man who once claimed if he could go back and redo his profession, he’d want to be a FASHION DESIGNER, had nothing better to contemplate in his final days than the obviously incredibly personal persecution President Obama was committing against him. 

At the very end, just a month or two before he died, when I was accepted into graduate school for environmental journalism and offered one of only two teaching assistantships in the entire program, there were no congratulations. Just a glowering, flabbergasted question: Why are you like this?

Cordless Hole Puncher

I packed my bags and hugged my mom goodbye at the Pittsburgh airport on Saturday morning. Even though I’d been home for the longest time since college, a little lump formed in the back of my throat as I realized the long stretch of months until we’d see each other again, how vastly different the world could look by March 2025 when we would hopefully reconnect during her Spring Break.

I carried this strange sadness with me as I boarded my flight and clung to it all the way to Denver where I sat in an uncomfortable faux leather chair waiting for my delayed connection to Grand Junction. I whipped out my laptop and periodically refreshed my news feed, still desperately hoping Biden would step aside as the Democratic nominee while crushing through more than 300 unread emails built up throughout my vacation.

Even though I had on an obtuse pair of noise-canceling headphones and was crouched like a gremlin staring into the blinding blue light of my laptop screen, the man sitting next to me took that very clear body language of “Please don’t bother me” and blew right past it, nudging my arm and motioning for me to take off my headphones.

“Are you waiting on this delayed flight?” he asked. I looked around at the dozens of other people also clearly waiting on this flight, and thought, Jesus fucking Christ, why me?

“Yep,” I responded curtly. “Just waiting to get home to Grand Junction.” He was dressed in a brown button-down Hawaiian shirt and khakis and looked to be in his 60s. His face was deeply tanned, taught, and leathery and his voice was unnecessarily loud.

“Oh, Grand Junction,” he said, not at all taking the hint as I tried to slip my headphones back on. “Where is that exactly?” He pulled out his phone and started Googling. 

He then proceeded to tell me the story of his day (though I did not ask), how his daughter had booked the wrong flight to Aspen and now he had a 4.5-hour layover. He made me look at his daughter’s Instagram account in which she wore one of those stupid influencer flat-brimmed hats and spun around in fake cowboy apparel holding a tiny dog in some kind of massive lodge-like building. Then he asked if I could fix his Instagram account because he was seeing stuff from people he didn’t know and he didn’t know why. He told me his name was Marty and asked why I lived in Grand Junction. Then, after I explained that I moved there because homes were still under $400,000 and I might actually someday be able to buy something, he proceeded to tell me that his daughter was a real estate agent in California and her boyfriend owned the Airbnbs used at Coachella or something and they owned some kind of massive ranch in Aspen. Which is to say, he was telling me they were millionaires — maybe more. And also he was planning to move to Aspen to be closer to her. And also, was I doing work right now?

“Sure am, just trying to knock out some emails before this flight,” I said, again turning back to my computer screen.

“What do you do for work that doesn’t require you to go into an office? Tech or something?” I looked him over and — as I’ve had to for my entire adult life — thought carefully about what I would say next.

“Marty,” I said slowly, “I get the feeling you’re not going to love what I do for work.”

“Try me,” he said.

“I protect federal land from oil and gas development in Alaska,” I said, laying all my cards on the table. 

“No!” he said, raising his hands. “We’d never get along. I’m a big Trump guy. Drill baby drill and all that”

“Well, we were getting along just fine,” I said.

“You know there’s not enough wind and solar to power the country, right?” he asked, completely ignoring my peace offering.

“Actually,” I said, getting defensive, “There IS enough wind and solar, we just need more transmission lines and a nationalized grid. Plus, I’m not anti-nuclear. I think the science is pretty clear that we don’t need to stay on oil and gas.”

“No no, we can’t keep running this country without oil. That’s just not going to happen.”

“Alright,” I said, hoping this would be the end of it. But he kept pushing.

“This is a nonprofit that you work for, yeah? Do you get a salary? How do you get paid if there’s no profit?” He asked.

“Same way as every single other nonprofit in the world,” I said. “Foundations, fundraising, philanthropy, that kind of stuff. You know there are conservative nonprofits too, right?”

“Ohhh so you’re getting paid by George Soros then!” he said as if it was a gotcha.

“I’m pretty sure George Soros has no idea who we are or what we do,” I said. But he was like a hound locked on a scent. I could see his vision narrow. It was just me and him in that airport and he was going to hunt me down.

“It’s just those damn liberals…” he started, then paused, “Well, I guess you’re probably a liberal, huh?”

His phone rang and I could see on the caller ID that it was his daughter. He snapped the phone up to his ear. “I’ll call you back,” he said without even saying hello. “I’m talking to someone at the airport.”

I felt suddenly in the crosshairs. He slipped his phone into his pocket and took a moment to look me over, as if he hadn’t actually seen me before now.

“I gotta ask,” he said, shaking his head, “You just seem so normal. How’d you get like this?”

I could have asked, “Like what?” but I didn’t have the energy. I knew exactly what he meant. What I really wanted to know, what I should have said was, how did YOU get like THIS? So scared and frightened of the world? So certain someone is always out to get you? Always ready to pounce, knife (or gun) at the ready? WHO HURT YOU?

I momentarily became my 20-year-old self, desperate for approval. I tried to quickly formulate a response that would make me sound rational, challenging his clear misconception that we “damn liberals” were crazy, perhaps even not quite human — which is ironic because of all the words I use to identify myself, “liberal” probably doesn’t even make the top 10. In fact, unlike Marty here, I RARELY think about my political affiliation because being a human filled with compassion and curiosity generally takes center stage. Still, I found myself suddenly feeling as though I had to defend my humanity. 

“I spent a lot of time outside as a kid,” I said, though that wasn’t exactly true. I tried again. “I think we move too fast, we need to slow down and think about impacts…” he cut me off.

“You know, Trump’s a real clean water guy. He gets it. He wants there to be clean water. He’s got a great platform for the environment. These regulations though, they’re killing American businesses. All our businesses are failing now because of Biden’s regulations.”

“Okay,” I said. And then I let out a small, silent prayer asking for this conversation to be over. And the airport god answered that prayer immediately, announcing over the crackling speakers that my flight was finally boarding.

This was my moment to say something punchy. I could walk away through my gate and he could not follow me. I could say anything I wanted. I could make conservatives cry again.

But instead, I just said, “Have fun in Aspen. It’s a beautiful time of year.”

I walked down the airplane aisle looking for my seat, tears spilling onto my face for reasons I didn’t entirely understand. The young man in front of me wore army fatigues and a black t-shirt with a picture of an AK-47 that said, “Since anything can be anything now, this is just a cordless hole puncher.” I stifled a small sob.

Just 40 minutes later, we touched down in Grand Junction and I opened my phone to discover a stream of texts. My mom reached out, “Trump was shot in Butler.” I read the text several times, not understanding. I’d just been in Butler. What was she saying? Then a friend called. I pulled the phone close to my face. 

“Was Trump just shot in Butler?” I asked him. I was speaking low, fearful of the man sitting next to me, assuming his conservative views. 

“Yes! Isn’t that where you just were?” my friend asked.

“Yes, like just there. My plane just landed. What the fuck is happening?”

“He’s not dead. It just grazed his ear.” I sighed. 

“What a bummer,” I said without skipping a beat. Without really knowing what I was saying. I hung up so as not to incite a riot.

I texted a dozen people as I walked off the plane. I refreshed the news over and over again, hoping in some small way that they were misreporting the incident. A not insignificant part of me wished he had just fucking died, wished the cordless hole puncher had actually punched a hole.

“See? You’re just as fucked up as us. So join the club, baby.” 

I helped an old woman pull her bags off the carousel. I loaded my own bags onto a cart and wheeled everything out into the desert sun. A few dozen women held up signs that said, “Welcome home, soldier!” And there was the young man in the AK-47 shirt, embraced by all this love.

There was also my partner, whom I hadn’t seen in two weeks, grinning wide as he pulled up to the curb. And the solidified waves of rolling stone that comprise Colorado National Monument gleaming like a vast escape on the horizon. This was home and it was also displacement. All I could think as we wound through the desert back to the coziness of our little townhouse was, how the hell did we get like this?