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We’re used to it by now, we’ve been force fed them for well over a decade in this country. We’ve been hooked to the feeding tubes against our wills for 11 years, Lies the only substance in the bags being squeezed down the tube. Lies, the medicine we never asked for but were assaulted with, the slop we ate though we protested. I still see the hands, the knuckles tight around the plastic, I still taste it on the back of my tongue.
We don’t need to get into who started this, who locked us to the chair and tilted our heads back and started the slurry into our throats, I think we all know, instead, we can talk about what we’re eating, what we’re filling the stomachs of our souls with, what we’re so tired of consuming.
Turns out, it’s all made of one thing, one great lie blended down until unrecognizable, and it is this:
The United States of America is defined only by our divides.
This is what we started drinking 11 years ago. This is what we taste when we see our flag flying, when we hear the news update sound on the television, when the NY Times pings our phones. More evidence, we think, this is the way of things, this is truth and we must decide which side we sit upon.
Critically, we stare across at those that decided what we did not and we feel justified in swallowing what we didn’t ask to eat, we find the ways we imagine we’re different, we allow the opinions we’ve been fed to transform themselves into gospel as they are digested. They are not we, we think in the privacies of all our homes, we are not they.
Except we are. I mentioned this last month in my plea before Inauguration Day, we’re the same in so many ways, we’re that funny middle bit that usually only exists in memes of a Venn Diagram, and dammit, we should be defining ourselves this way first. First, before the rest.
A couple of weeks ago, Sarah and I were exhausted and found ourselves falling into the cushions of our couch earlier than usual (Sarah is the boss of when the television is, or is not turned on and most often it’s not on until 8:30 or 9pm) and were in need of something to watch. I don’t know if either of us had anything specific in mind, but we stumbled on a documentary on Netflix that we’d both heard of, but neither had heard much about.
Will & Harper is the very true story, told documentary style, of Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, who became best friends almost immediately after beginning to work together on Saturday Night Live years and years ago. The documentary chronicles their roadtrip across America to “re-introduce” Harper to the country she’d previously only known before coming out as a trans woman.
Harper used to be a prolific traveler on the backroads of America, preferring the seedier bars, the off-the-beaten-path saloons and Route 66 type diners and dives, even often hitchhiking for weeks at a time. Now, she worried that the America she loved was too divided to do that any more, that she wouldn’t be safe visiting those old familiar haunts. Will suggested the journey, and the two made their way from New York to California, documenting it as they went.
Perhaps it was the timing of when we watched it, not long after the election that shook us to our bones and really did plant a seed of fear for the future that’s to come, or perhaps it was the dark mornings and dark evenings and winter weather that can make Montana so unforgiving this time of year, but I think both Sarah and I went into the film expecting the worst of the people they’d encounter on their trip. I think we both thought we’d see that divide we were promised from years of rhetoric and political positioning at campaign rallies and press junkets, I think we thought we’d see the worst of us that all those lies convinced us were true.
The surprising truth was, we didn’t. Sure there were the outliers, the ugly and hateful diatribe that made its way onto the darker cesspools of the internets (why is it ALWAYS Twitter X, always?!) but even that was mostly confined to a short stint of the whole film, and after reading interviews, a short bit of their entire journey. For the most part, we saw the ways we were all the same, all of us that share this sprawling and beautiful country.
We saw compassion given, we saw understanding, we saw those we might have previously assumed (and we all know what happens when we assume—we make an ass out of U and ME) would have led the torch and pitchfork carrying mob against Harper. We saw kindness, we saw laughter, we saw tears, and we saw the realization spread that sometimes the fear and assumptions we carry about others say just as much about our preconceived judgements than they do of those we’re pointing those assumptions at.
When asked about the idea behind the whole thing, Harper said:
“I love the whole country. It’s my country, and I wanted to feel a little safer being in it. And I thought that going across the country with Will Ferrell would help me. That’s the privilege I have knowing Will Ferrell.”
Sure, knowing Will Ferrell, one of the most successful and beloved comics in the business, might help smooth the road, but the divide we were promised, the one we have been routinely taught to fear and mistrust, was supposed to be one of such massive fracture that paving and smoothing alone would never be able to help.
Simply, we didn’t see it.
I know, and if you know me at all by now you’ll understand this as truth, that we are a very divided nation in so many different ways. I know we’re still staring at a lot of problems from very different points of view, very different perspectives, and I know that in a lot of frightening and fundamental ways we are fractured. I know this. But we’re not ONLY this.
Perhaps for the last decade we’ve been predominantly defined by the divides that Trump, that Marjorie Taylor Greene or Boebert or Steve Bannon or the Proud Boys or any other cowardly and nameless white supremacists never stopped shouting about. Perhaps the lie that America is only tree-hugging hippies and redneck racists and nothing in between has been the most popular story—here, and abroad—but dammit, it’s not true. It’s just not true.
It’s more than just the world Will & Harper showed us, it’s more than some BuddhTism (I invented this term for the way I see the world, an amalgam of Buddhism and Autism that makes my strange brain spin) focus that fights so hard to see things through compassionate eyes first, second, and last. It’s something bigger, it’s a calmer viewpoint that I have been realizing is the only antidote to the aforementioned rhetoric. It’s the only way we can actually fight back, the only way we can actually close the divides that do exist.
We can point back where we meet, not where we are split. We can aim our fingertips at the pieces we share instead of the canyons between us. We can find similarities instead of differences, we can refuse to believe the lies, and what’s more, refuse to spread them.
Let them point at what they think does not fit together, the pieces that they hide to never allow our puzzle to be complete, but do not let them convince you it’s all there is.
You can refuse to swallow, still. You can win this hunger strike, this peaceful resistance, and you can demand something better.
If all else, maybe a road trip is in order for you, too. Maybe you need a journey back into the country that is still beautiful, still United in a million different ways.
Maybe.
They point at divides
and say that they define us.
Point back where we meet.
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