I've been thinking about moving for some time now. My current abode has excellent location--can't have it much better, relative to grocery, pharmacy, and other advantages, even with and maybe especially because of the pandemic--so the precise area in which I might move becomes quite important.
But I'm not moving to Marathon County. I'd be an outsider, and a liberal, and that seems to be a bad idea at this point.
The county's government made it a point to declare that it's not a community for all last week, which means that it feels that it might be a good idea to bar someone it doesn't like from joining it or at least living within its boundaries. It didn't say exactly who, but of course, it doesn't have to.
Seems that a bunch of people--one can safely assume that they're white--concluded that such a declaration meant that Marathon was a racist county. Let's explore that assumption a bit.
One possible conclusion is that such an accusation is accurate. If so, that wouldn't make Marathon much different from most other counties, including those with a whole lot more minorities living in them than it has, with 91 percent of its citizens white.
What it wants to do, above all, is avoid the shame of being called racist. So it won't take that on at all. It'll brush that aside. It'll easily acquiesce to what Tim Scott, U.S. Senator from South Carolina, said the other day after Biden's address to Congress: America isn't a racist country.
Oh? No vestiges left after slavery and the Civil War? Everything was okay then? And since? No demonstrations, no lynchings no structural racism? Don't feel bad, Republicans. It's okay. What does anybody else know anyhow?
If you pulled someone from that county aside, though, and mentioned some information that would lead them to conclude racist inclinations, you'd probably get agreement, as long as:
- It would be kept quiet, that is, out of media;
- They wouldn't have to admit it at some kind of gathering; and
- You would promise not to tell anyone else so as to identify them with liberals.
Kind of like the same mentality that was violated by Liz Cheney when she insisted on telling the truth about the 2020 election and insisting that other Republicans do the same, out loud. It's okay to admit that things aren't perfect, that America isn't living up to its reputation, that things need to be improved, as long as it's done under someone's breath so that someone else needn't take any responsibility for it.
That's the core problem: That America is going to be great again but we need to ignore, not fix, our core issues to get to that point. It's kind of like the attitude that ex- and his minions took about migrants from Central America: we'll fix that later, just ignore it and keep declaring that we're improving things. Except, with a growing number of people arriving, the problem's getting worse instead of better, and the baggage is getting heavier instead of lighter.
Said Fareed Zakaria on his show "GPS," several weeks ago: in 1950, the population of the U.S. was ten percent minority--a true minority. Today, it's forty-one percent and rising (nowhere near that in Marathon County). Our ex- was trying to hold it back, at least from getting to majority status with increasing speed, or doing so in a way that people could actually see and experience.
That minorities actually present will continue to marry and bear children, and eclipse whites quite naturally, is an issue not discussed (and, with Republican insistence against abortion, a result to be brought about sooner, not later, as stupidly hypocritical as that is). It's a mentality for 1960, not sixty years later. It's not the fact of integration that's difficult, it's the admission of the fact, in spite of everything that surrounds.
Those who protest Marathon County being "a community for all," fall into that same category, and can, because of geography, continue to act ostrich-like. The minority individuals who live there now know that they cannot, and will not, admit that the world, their world, is changing and that they're still all right in spite of it, that their lifestyles haven't been somehow poisoned, that interaction need not be temporary or superficial.
It is, in a sense, an addictive behavior that's easy to fall back on. And such behaviors can end only starting with one event: an admission of a problem. Without it, such cancers only grow.
There's nothing falling apart in Marathon County that wasn't wrong in the first place--like real respect, and true tolerance, and admitting actual reality, things lacking for people other than white. Too many there, too, have fallen into the same wish: that a fantasyland has always existed and always will exist, despite what's clearly in front of them. It no longer shocks, but it does sadden.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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