Just An Observation
- Lucian@going2paris.net
- Nov 6, 2020
- 2 min read
Tropic, Utah
November 6, 2020
I have seen one Black person in the past three weeks. Ninty-five (at least) percent of the people I see at campgrounds are white. I’ve seen Hispanics working construction and service jobs.
It got me thinking. (Which explains my thirst for glucose.)
Some/many of the issues I care about don’t resonate in places like Utah because the folks here don’t have the same experience as me. Take BLM - and remove the visceral reaction that acronym causes some. First, in Utah the first thought that will come to mind is Bureau of Land Management. Second, there are so few Blacks in Utah that there probably aren’t enough to have a BLM rally. And I wonder if Utah Blacks can even relate to say Baltimore or Charlottesville Blacks.
In many ways we are a heterogeneous country yet we - at least me- assume we are homogeneous. The issues we have in big cities probably don’t mean much to people in Tropic, Utah. My craving for a fillet of grilled salmon on a bed of spinach with mango salsa doesn’t play here where the local deli is the packaged turkey and American cheese on white bread in the refrigerator section of the convenience store. (By the way, the sandwich is best eaten before November 19th.) I’m just guessing that most people here don’t read the NYT or the WSJ. They probably don’t watch Fox News either. They are too busy working on the farm or riding their ATV — being outside. What affects them here is tourism — people coming to Bryce. And they come every summer.
I haven’t expressed myself clearly here. It probably comes back to assumptions. I assumed all 350 million of us had more in common. We don’t. That’s why I can read the Constitution (which I admit I am doing now having not for too long) and have a different understanding than the next person.
So when folks say we are divided, part of that division comes from the fact that we don’t have as much in common as I might have assumed.
This lack of commonality has been present in this country from the start. The subsistence farmer and herder trying to scratch a living in the rocky soil of New England had precious little in common with the farmer-for-market in the mid-Atlantic on the rich soil of PA & NJ, who had little in common with the subsistence farmer on the sandy VA Tidewater soil, as with the Georgia red clay . . . and none of them had much in common with the plantation owner growing tobacco or cotton for market sale.
What we DID have in common was the shared freedom of being left alone to live our lives and worship our God as we saw fit. We di…