The Culture Cozy

It struck me the other day, as I was scrolling through Facebook, that my friends who have dared not to move past their family of origin culture are the ones who are enamored with Trump. It’s a well known fact that the “less-educated” are statistically more apt to be Trumpers. But I never connected the dots in real time.

And then it struck me as I was scrolling. My girlfriend Debbie from 6th grade, back in Fruitville, shared some trump propaganda on my feed. Debbie has never left the life we led back in Fruitville. I don’t mean that she didn’t move, I mean that she stayed in the backwoods persona of the Florida girl. She never left the old neighborhood and the old culture.

Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash

Now it is true that the not-educated white people have a reason to be disenchanted with politics as usual. America is in the worst place it has been in a hundred years, both politically and economically. I am with them on the idea of getting rid of the same old rhetoric that has controlled our congress for a hundred years.

Trump is not the answer and to think he is the answer is to be an anti-intellectual. Debbie is the kind of person to vote for Trump because no one has ever crossed her path in any way that challenged her way of life. Whatever beliefs her mom and dad passed down are still stuck there in her and her family’s head. They are resisting computers, they are still fishing in the Everglades and they are all still beer drinkers or pot smokers. They don’t like reading, except maybe the newspaper, and never made it past high school in any meaningful way. She lives in the Fruitville culture cozy. There are a lot of people who are satisfied with life as it is. There is nothing wrong with this culture, it is simply stagnant. Thinking doesn’t happen, it’s a culture of thoughting. Everything I think of today, I also thought of yesterday.

I began thinking about some of my other friends who publish Trump propaganda and realized there was this common thread. They are culture complacent and culture cozy. And as is true to form, not college graduates either. They stayed in the same place, no matter how many years past high school they are. Some are literally, in the same place, they…