I Believe in Flyover Country

I saw them getting on the bus, a long time ago now.

They were two Latin gentlemen; they had warm dark tan skin and black hair. They were talking to each other in rapid Spanish that I couldn’t follow well even though I studied Spanish for years– by their accent, I think they were Mexican. I didn’t know them to talk to, but I knew them as people who lived in town and rode the bus most evenings. Everyone on the bus knew them. There aren’t a large number of immigrants in Steubenville, but there are some.

The next person to get on the bus was a white woman, a woman from right here in Steubenville by her accent. The kind of person you’d call a townie. She had bleached blond hair and faded jeans. She also had a baby with her in the stroller, but strollers aren’t allowed on the bus unless they’re folded up. The driver reminded her of the rule. She took the baby out of the stroller and folded it. Then one of the Mexican men offered, through gestures, to hold it for her so she could keep her hands on her baby and her groceries, and she nodded politely. The man held her stroller for her until her stop, when she gratefully put the baby back into it.

She smiled warmly and thanked him in the worst pronounced Spanish I’ve ever heard, Spanish with an impenetrable Steubenville accent. “Gloss-y-us, Sen-your.”

I have that small, unimportant memory bouncing around in my head today. I desperately want to talk about how townies you might dismiss as horrible people get along with immigrants.

This week, I’ve been writing and writing about the situation in Springfield, Ohio. I’ve been watching it go from bad to worse. I’m sick with worry about the immigrants who did nothing except accept jobs they were offered. I’m furious with people who keep spreading horrendous unfounded rumors. They’re trying to expand the conspiracy theory. I saw one provocateur sharing a TikTok of what was obviously two small hens being roasted on a barbecue grill, and claiming it was footage of cats being cooked in Dayton, the next city over from Springfield. There have been three straight days of bomb threats in Springfield, terrorizing hospitals and schools. The Proud Boys seem to have made an appearance, marching through a parking lot. One Springfield pastor showed off a photo of the KKK recruitment fliers that he found near his church. J. D. Vance has moved on from saying the immigrants eat cats, and is claiming they’re diseased with AIDS. Donald Trump, himself a rapist, is ranting about immigrants “raping and sodomizing” people. And that is so horrendous I’m at a loss for words. It’s right out of the Nazi playbook. They’re not even pretending anymore. They are the most despicable of men.

I have seen the residents of Springfield, not the Haitian residents but the others, the natural born Americans, Black and White, speaking out in defense of their immigrant  neighbors and rallying Springfield to stand up for justice against this stochastic violence, and I’m proud of them.

I’ve seen people who I’d not expected to speak up, including a great many Christian pastors of all denominations and even some conservative politicians, denounce the lies, and I’m glad.

I’ve had some very strange people on the right-wing side of things referring to me as a “elite” and assuming I’m a patronizing armchair liberal from California or New York because I’m speaking against the injustice. I’m not. I grew up in Columbus which is the Midwestern part of Ohio and now live in Steubenville, which is the Appalachian part.

I’ve also seen many to the left of these far right wing people– that is, centrists, liberals, actual leftists, bewildered people from overseas who don’t understand why this is happening, people who considered themselves Republicans until sometime after 2016– dismissing the residents of Springfield and Ohio in general as a bunch of racist yokels. And I think that that is making the problem worse.

You have to understand that here in Flyover Country, especially Ohio where the districts are so scrambled and the vote is so suppressed that it’s hard to make our voices heard, everybody knows a J. D. Vance. Everyone knows a snotty upstart who thinks he’s better than we are because he managed to get some money. And everybody knows those other people, the ones who spread rumors about immigrants and Black people and other marginalized groups to get them hurt because they resent them even though they’re just as poor and unlucky and despised by the Vances of the world and we all ought to work together for justice. Those people do exist. They’re not just a stereotype, they’re real. And we loathe them. We might give the neighbor who acts like that a  nod if we see them when we take out the trash, but we’re not friends. They might go to our church but we wish they wouldn’t. When we accidentally make eye contact with them at the grocery store, we pretend we were looking at the item behind them. They ain’t good people.  I’m not sure whether the good people outnumber the bad, but in my experience, I’m hopeful that we do.

There are plenty of other people, people with the same accent and looks and lack of good opportunities as the nasty racists you talk about, who love our immigrant and poor and other marginalized neighbors and get along with them, and work together with them, and say “gloss-y-us sen-your.” There are people like Ms. B and Jimmy the Mechanic and the Grandma of the Baker Street Irregulars  here in the Appalachian part of Ohio, and people like Holly the Witch and her partner and her social justice loving friends in the urban Midwestern part, and like the people who are speaking out against this nightmare in Springfield, and they do so much for justice. I’ve tried to tell you about the good they do, but you don’t know the half of it. I could never say it all.  And I’m trying to be like them and do good as well.

If you write us off, you’re writing off the people who have been fighting this fight for the longest time.

And I hope that all of us decent people in Flyover Country, whether we’ve been doing a little or a lot or a whole heck of a lot to fight injustice, can fight much harder right now until we’ve defeated the white supremacists and made this a much better country.

I think we can do it. We’re stronger than they are, and there are a lot of us.

I believe in us.