There is a certain ambiguity that comes with specificity. Half way through my trip the conversations and moments I most reflect on are not the pro-gun rancher or a climate change denying coal worker. These fit neatly into an existing narrative about the deeply grooved divides between urban and rural or liberal versus conservative. Instead my mind lingers on the NRA member that believes in better gun control and that police need much more training to avoid shooting unarmed civilians. I marvel at the people of color who believe everyone has equal opportunity or support Trump's hard line on immigration. I see more and more that there is no checklist of characteristics that inevitably lead to a prescribed set of beliefs. Nearly everyone has upended some expectation. This is, of course, the point of the trip. Still, it will be a while before I know how to organize these into a new point of view.
Lately when someone says they're glad I'm getting out and seeing 'real America' I ask if they'd like to pinch me to see if I'm real. They usually laugh, caught by their own absurdity. Still, I don't think my quip exactly dissuades them from the nagging belief that I live somewhere less legitimate. I'm getting closer to understanding what some people mean by that. Many people in these counties do work that is vital to the way all of us live. That work is totally visible and in the foreground here but mostly invisible to people in cities. Some think we take that work for granted and live more easily than them off the labor of their bodies. That steak was raised by a guy who almost certainly disagrees with many things someone sitting in Brooklyn eating it thinks. That electricity powering the laptop that reads a digital subscription of The New Yorker may well have been dug out of the ground by someone who wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near New York. At the same time, the GPS tracking software that allows a farmer to cover more ground with less backbreaking labor was probably designed by someone sitting in an urban office who went to one of those liberal elite colleges. Those urban liberals also help cover the cost of infrastructure and subsidies that anti-government-handout conservatives need badly given how spread out populations are in rural areas. Each side, as it were, is benefiting from the other as it judges the other. Each person is ignoring their own contradictions or hypocrisies. I keep catching a glimpse of a way we could be communicating with one other. I can see, for a moment, someone hearing my point of view or taking on board a complication they don't experience where they live. I listen to a worry or value they think is discounted and often hear complications I never thought about. I imagine and offer a kind of compromise position on the issue. I see them leap to embrace it - surprised by any idea that isn't absolutist. I don't know where that goes beyond those rooms, but it makes for some really hopeful moments between strangers. I'm recording nearly every conversation along the way. I'm taking a picture with each person. I'm writing lots of notes to remember the moments and images the audio recorder fails to get. I'm taking some video here and there to capture these places - all of which are truly beautiful. I have no idea what, if anything, to make of all this when I'm through. For now I'm just making connections.
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AuthorScott Illingworth is an Assistant Arts Professor in the Graduate Acting Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and a freelance theatre director. Archives
July 2017
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