A thought about Midwestern values
Walz, community, and a few childhood memories
Since Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as her running mate, I’ve been swallowing my normal aversion to talk of the Midwest and Midwestern values. Usually, I resist the flattening that happens when we treat a large and, honestly, fairly diverse region as if it were one place. I bristle when colleagues I’ve worked with for more than two decades still think I’m from Ohio and, when corrected, tell me it’s all the same anyway. At least until November, I’ll go along with the idea that it’s a homogeneous region and that, even in my part of Indiana, life is more or less like a Golden Girls St Olaf story or a monologue from Prairie Home Companion.
Even if we are more different than we seem from other parts of the country, there was something in Walz’s acceptance speech at the DNC that struck me. He invoked Midwestern values by talking about the importance of community and, at the same time, of staying out of other people’s business. This can obviously seem like a tension, but I do think it gets to something about the way people live, not just in the Midwest, but in small communities everywhere. For what it’s worth, I think it happens within small communities within larger communities, too, things like neighborhoods, at least when they work.
One example that I always come back to is from my hometown. Like a lot of small towns and cities in the 70s and 80s, it wasn’t exactly a welcoming place for queer people. And, yet, there were a handful of queer people leading pretty open and accepted lives in the community. A trans women, who’d gone to high school with my parents and moved out to California, had come back to town and waited tables at one of the rowdiest bar-restaurants in the county. (Her parents lived on my paper route. I remember her father as a bulldog of a man with a mustache that put Wilford Brimley to shame). I can’t imagine the bravery it took to come back home, but I also know that rarely did anyone give her trouble, nor was she misgendered or deadnamed, at least not to her face—people were surely less virtuous in private. That wasn’t, I imagine, because people approved or had been infected by some “woke mind virus” or overcome by “gender ideology.” It was because she was part of our community. We knew her. And, the way she lived her life was, ultimately, her business. Approval or disapproval wasn’t really anything that mattered.
There were also the former schoolteacher who ran an antiques business, the two phys-ed teachers with Navratilova dos who lived just a block from Mom and me and had a whole passel of Shetland sheepdogs, and others. Many of these people weren’t from my hometown—so, it’s not just that they had relatives or connections—but they were part of the community. They had become, as the chant from Freaks has it, “One of us!” However different they might be, they were of us, not assimilated, but accepted. I think it was more than just begrudging tolerance.
In the same way, there were families from Mexico and Sierra Leone and India and Pakistan and Vietnam and other parts of the world. They were strangers, some of whose traditions and religions were different, but they were also our neighbors to be cared about and shared with. There could be community and care even with difference and diversity and disagreement. Hell, my father’s family used regularly to talk at holiday dinners about how the Papacy was Antichrist, but still the little Catholic boy was part of the family.
I could go on about the large community of people with intellectual disabilities, the relatively recent Appalachian migrants, and others. But, what I really mean to say is that there is a vision of community that can be exemplified by the notion of small-town or Midwestern values—even if those names require idealizations—where we care about our neighbors and look out for them, even when we differ or don’t quite understand one another. And, that is possible, even in larger communities.
But, it requires something that much of our contemporary political culture has done its best to destroy: trust. We’re told to fear one another and we sit behind our screens and go on Nextdoor or Facebook or someplace to talk about “strange men in our neighborhood”—in my current neighborhood, this is code for students from the high school two blocks away—or we fret about the “crisis at the border” or the “war zone of America’s cities.” All of that replaces community with fear and trust with suspicion.
We don’t live in a Hobbesian war of all against all, nor do we have to. We can choose something else, and it’s much, much better.