John in the distance in “Real America.” His grandfather built this bridge 50 years ago.

On Twitter, I follow a lot of anime people and a lot of tech people. Recently, one of the tech people asked, “Can I have my tech feed back?” I can relate to that. Remember when we talked about anime nazis only in the context of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure?

That said, I really loved one person’s response to that tweet: “It turns out your tech feed was really a people feed and those people are going through something more urgent and scary than tech.” What a great way to put it! In the past few weeks, Anime Twitter has gotten decidedly political for the same reason—those anime tweets were coming from people.

My own Twitter output has done a 180 lately. I’ve been tweeting less about anime and more about politics, because that’s where my brain is. Even though I’m certain nobody is following me for my political opinions; I’m certainly not an expert, which is why I tend to talk less and retweet knowledgeable people more.

I wasn’t going to let my mood spill over onto Otaku Journalist though. I had a lot of ideas for today’s post. I was going to write a behind-the-scenes of the My Anime List story. I was going to write about doing an article on somebody you admire without embarrassing yourself. But each time, I couldn’t get past the first paragraph. It’s hard to spend your entire week thinking about one thing, and then switching gears just to be consistent with a theme.

So I put down my computer and went off the grid.

John and I in the back of a pick-up truck.

I spent the weekend in “Real America,” as we’re starting to call it these days. Grant County, West Virginia is significant to me not just because John has family there, but because it’s the “nearest opposite” of my county politically, having gone nearly 90% for Trump. Out of 11,000 people total, it is 98% white, and when you ask people who the black, Hispanic, and Asian residents are, they can name them! The Indian doctor, the black Jones family, and so on. People instantly recognize John and I as “not from around here” from our (lack of) accents. They are friendly because we are white, but they are notoriously wary of outsiders.

Grant County is less than a three-hour drive away, but it’s astoundingly different from DC and its suburbs. People prominently display Confederate flags. You can buy a machete at the gas station rest stop. We saw a restaurant serving “American-style tacos.” A major problem in my grandmother-in-law’s town is that feral cats keep taking over empty houses, which sit side-by-side with the remaining few houses people still live in. There are few jobs. The poverty is obvious. But there’s a lot of pride in what they do have. My father-in-law calls it “hillbilly ingenuity,” the way people here find DIY solutions rather than calling a contractor.

I always thought exploring abandoned houses would be cool, like something out of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. My FIL’s family home certainly has character—his father built the original four rooms, and then they just kept adding on in various architectural styles—but an elaborate haunted house it is not, just sort of moldy and full of junk. It sits on 130 acres of land that include a river and an entire mountain, Cave Mountain, our destination today.

My FIL gave us a heart-stopping ride up the mountain in the back of his pick-up truck. There’s no roads, of course, just well-worn dirt path that includes a traverse over a creaking bridge that his father built 50 years ago. Along the way there are machine graveyards, which include a rusted-shut Oldsmobile, an abandoned sawmill, and a defunct tractor, as well as real graveyards, like the family plot and the bleached-bone ribcages of deer. Once, this was a farm, with cattle and crops. Today, my FIL has repurposed the wooded land to make maple syrup.

Drilling into a healthy maple while my FIL watches.

We spent the weekend tapping trees. To harvest syrup, you go to a maple forest after a frost and drill to where the sap runs, usually just an inch or two inside the tree. There was still snow on the ground but the trees were warm and would start bubbling even before we could get the tap sealed shut. I was on top of a mountain, acres from regular municipal things like the town water supply (you get your own well water out here), but in the cold air I could still hear cars on the highway, on their way to DC. Some bubble.

I was wearing a sweatshirt and two winter coats, but around 4 PM the evening chill was undeniable. We headed back to John’s grandmother’s house and talked about Trump. It was my first time with Internet access all day, and this was when the airport protests were just picking up. We checked Twitter religiously while John’s grandmother voiced her dislike of Trump’s policies. At the same time I’d been communing with nature or whatever, a Somali family was being held with no food at Dulles airport, just two hours away. I think there is no distance that will protect people from the constitutional crisis that is unfolding before us as we watch.

This syrup tap will remain in this tree until March. Then it’ll have nine months to heal again.

I was anxious and upset about the state of my country, and I thought escaping DC to a place where people proudly voted for Trump would make me feel better. But after a week, the excitement that was in this place for Trump before feels more like jittery unease as it becomes more and more apparent that the “swamp” of DC isn’t that far away at all. You can look around at the abandoned houses and lack of jobs and see why people here felt left behind by the increased economic growth our cities experienced. But now it feels out here like Washington is finally going to have an impact on rural America, and not in the way people wanted.

This weekend, I’ll stay “home” and protest—I have no doubt there will be a demonstration in DC every weekend from now on. Hopefully the feeling that I’m making a difference, or at least trying, will help me write about anime again. The escape that anime gives us is as important now as ever. It’s just that it’s been hard to think about it when every part of my real life is shoving politics in my face. I want you to know that if you need to take a break from it all like I did, it’s totally fine. But you just might discover that no matter how far away you go, there’s still no escaping it. Like it or not, current events are something that affect all of us, whether we take action or not.

7 Comments.

  • I feel sorry for those rural communities honestly. Sometimes, people forget that those voted for Trump are human beings with real problems that are being ignored too. People talk about cities being the future – but if you ask me, cities are isolating for many people. Yeah, you’re all together in one space, but you feel alone at the same time. I read statistics about how antidepressants are on the rise, depression/anxiety is on the rise, no one has a close friend, etc. and I think places like big cities are part of the problem. Rural communities, at the least, are very connected despite having a reputation for being non-inclusive towards anyone not like them (though I should not generalize EVERY rural community).

    If you ask me, nothing will ever make sense as long as humans are humans. I’m also annoyed at the fact that people say Trump is mentally ill, when that puts such an unfair stigma on people like me. It’s like a target put on our back. I’m not him; he’s not me. I don’t want someone coming up to me and say “Oh, you’re crazy? You’re like our stupid President, right? Get away!”

    Unfortunately, psychology and current events are tied together so much. I’ll still read some pieces, but like you, I do want to question some of the sources behind those spin pieces.

    There’s a quote by George Carlin that’s relevant to all of this. Here it is.

    “No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood, improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.”

    • @MangaTherapy:disqus yeah, while for a lot of us in cities we’d like things to “get back to normal,” normal is CRAP in a lot of parts of rural America. So it’s no surprise they wanted change (but not like this!).

      I’m starting to come around to the idea that “back to normal” is not what we should want. Normal wasn’t that great, at least not for everyone. We want to do better than normal.

      Would love to read a post from you about using mental illness as an insult and why that’s crap.

      • Things are never going to be normal again. I mean, I’ll use my love of retro games as an example, Square Enix will never be SquareSoft again (reading that whole Polygon article on FF7’s development made me realize this move). I loved SquareSoft, pre-SE. Final Fantasy won’t be charming to me ever again. I have to get used to that. I realize that there’s companies like ATLUS that are making JRPGs that appeal to a “Japanophile gamer” like me. ATLUS is better than normal (even though they might be like Square Enix at some point).

        I just wonder why people don’t give “better than normal” a chance, although it doesn’t help that stories are get told in a way that drives people apart. Sigh.

        I was thinking about writing about this issue because frankly, geeks seem to be defined by conditions like depression/anxiety. Probably not now, but at some point.

    • Wanted to add to this conversation, because my hubby and I were just discussing it last night. We were noticing one of the biggest miscommunication problems in our current political climate is because MANY city-dwellers have never been to the country and don’t know what it’s like to live there 24/7, your entire life. I was in rural Iowa for 5 years, and the rest of my life I’ve been in the city, but some days I honestly miss the closeness I had with my community of friends in Iowa.

      In the same vein, my husband and I are pro guns, but mostly just for recreation and self-defense… in the country. Why? He grew up on a ranch in California where police response time was 40 min. at best. They were robbed 1-2 times per year; without guns, they would’ve been robbed 4-5 on average. He’s told city-dwellers this before, and they were shocked to hear that things like farms being robbed is a real thing rural families have to deal with. Suddenly, they had a different outlook on whether guns should be banned entirely, or just better regulated and tracked.

      I’m not saying communication between city dwellers and rural dwellers will solve every problem, but it would certainly help for more people to get out of their geographic areas and meet people NOT from those areas.

    • Who wants me? I'm here
      February 4, 2017 7:45 am
  • Yep, you can’t opt out of this nightmare if you live in the US. Trump’s shenanigans will effect our lives whether we choose to worry about it or not.

    I see the problem with labeling him “mentally ill.” We don’t want to promote the stigma. Me, I’m on anti-depressants because my depression is unmanageable without meds. But I’m nothing like TRump. I’m not a liar and I have ethics that give my life meaning.

    Trump’s problems may be connected to some sort of mental disorder, but his worst traits are personality traits. Vindictive and unable to care about anything that isn’t himself are behaviors that might stem from anything – childhood abuse, brain injury, who knows.

    The main point about him is his unfitness for the job of president. I’m sorry that so many people were fooled by him.