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A Dominican priest in Chicago who said he’d spent the day helping a young U.S. citizen who’d been beaten by ICE agents after he was “detained for walking on his own sidewalk on his way to his home” posted some video of tear gas. “America,” he wrote, “we are better than this.”
The irony is that a lot of us have spent our lives convinced that we really were better than this, and now Donald Trump seems hell-bent on proving us wrong. He has declared war on some U.S. cities, where our military is, according to him, supposed to train on those “enemy within” populations that didn’t vote for him. Stephen Miller claims a Trump-appointed judge who ruled that the administration can’t send troops into Portland is part of a “legal insurrection” in the face of a coordinated “terrorist attack” on the federal government. This is why some of us do not necessarily believe that everything and everyone the government labels a terrorist really is one.
Yet those who approve of all that’s happening in this country do not mystify me, and partly that’s because they do not believe that this is what is happening. Frustratingly for some of my friends, I will never agree that this means all Trump supporters are x or are y. And last weekend, in my hometown of Mount Carmel, Illinois, population 7,015, I was reminded why.
I went home to be inducted into my small public high school’s hall of fame there, in red rural southern Illinois, right across the Wabash River from Indiana. Mount Carmel High School is the one everybody in Wabash County attends. When I was in school, we did not have AP classes or test prep, and I only knew one person who even applied to an Ivy League college, though there would have been two if my mom hadn’t kept throwing the applications away faster than I could send away for them.
A lot of us did have talented and hardworking parents and aunts and uncles and neighbors and teachers, though. So what became of our corn–fed selves? My fellow inductees included one guy who flew Air Force One, another who led a staff of 4,000 as director of the National Agricultural Statistics Service, and my genius classmate who went to college on a scholarship for the children of World War II veterans and made some important advances in semiconductor lasers and LEDs. (When I saw him at the event, he said he’d had a very pleasant conversation the previous evening with a woman he’d believed to be me, so he also has a sense of humor.)
Another inductee is an immunologist who had this message for those who came to the high school auditorium to celebrate with us: VACCINATE YOUR KIDS. The high school friend I got to see perform in a hit show on Broadway spoke movingly about the mother who’d adopted him and then, after his dad died just months later, did such a good job raising him on her own. A man who’d been the longtime chair of the modern languages department at Rhodes College in Memphis did a send-up of our Spanish teacher listening to us during language lab and deciding that maybe this wouldn’t be the week she quit smoking after all.
The son of one of my mom’s best friends said he’d always thought of himself as George Bailey from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” sticking around to help keep our own Bedford Falls alive. He’s created jobs, and that’s an accomplishment I appreciate more all the time.
I got to hug people I hadn’t seen since we were in 4-H and Girl Scouts together, and if they gave prizes for kindness, we’d still be at the ceremony, recognizing for instance my little brother’s classmate who got up early last Friday to make sure that his gravesite was decked out in our school colors before I got to town “because something told me he wanted to join in on his sister’s celebration.” I have told a few people about what she did, but haven’t yet gotten it out without crying. She keeps graves looking beautiful every season, not only for him but for many, out of love.
The highlight of my weekend was meeting a man who said that when he’d worked for my father at the ice plant, one night he and some high school friends stole a bunch of 50-pound bags for a party. Somebody saw them, reported a robbery, and the police stopped them and called my dad, who kept them from being arrested.
The next day, the young man was mortified and sure he was fired, but my dad called and said he was not: “You get back to work. I’m sure you’ve learned a valuable lesson.”
They never spoke of it again, and it was because of my dad, the man told me, that he was able to go to college and become an educator himself. He also became the kind of person who knew what it would mean to me to hear all of this, and had gone to the trouble to type out the story. But, like my dad, I’m going to say that he was that person all along.
Years after this incident, one of the other boys who’d been in the car that night was a state’s attorney in Indiana when a speeding ticket for my dad came across his desk. He tore it up and sent it to my father with a note that said, “This is for the ice.”
What an O. Henry ending, one of my friends said. Well, here’s the even bigger one: The same compassionate soul who taught those kids through forgiveness what they would not have learned from a night in jail? The man who I remember getting up in the middle of the night to deliver fuel oil to people who’d called saying they were cold, even though he knew they couldn’t pay? Who so respected women, and took such a dim view of men who cheated on their wives or treated anyone unfairly?
John Henneberger loved Donald Trump, and I’m not going to pretend that anything that’s happened since he died in 2017 would have changed that, either.
There are lots of things I don’t understand, like why trashing medical research isn’t a bigger deal, when I never heard anyone of any political stripe complain that they sure hated all the progress we were making in fighting disease; I thought cancer was everyone’s enemy.
But my dad and others I’ve known all my life are why I never say those who disagree with me about what I see happening in America must be just terrible. I never say it because I know it isn’t true.
And here’s my challenge to those of you who feel as Stephen Miller does that those who disagree with you are “nothing” – actually, worse than nothing, as the “forces of wickedness and evil” tend to be: Is there really no one in your life who might force you to realize that’s not true, either?
If there isn’t anyone in your flesh-and-blood life who sees the world differently, you’re failing at breaking out of the bubble you so confidently accuse others of living inside. In the short run, the decision to remain as pure and sure as you claim others are is all upside – unending waves of praise from the “right” people, and criticism only from total nogoodniks.
But you don’t have to have grown up across from a cornfield to know that this self-indulgent refusal to see our fellow Americans as people rather than “vermin” could be our undoing.
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Melinda Henneberger, RCP
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