Is this a road map for hope that our country might get past Trumpism?

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

An interesting article that gives some insight into Trumpism's appeal to rural America and how we just might be able to get past it.

In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism
Why didn’t the Republican red wave materialize in the midterms? The life of Cody Johnson offers one answer.

As he pulled into the parking lot of Beulahland Baptist Church on Election Day last month, nearly everything about Cody Johnson suggested he would vote a certain way.

He was White. He was 33. He was an electrician with no college degree. He had a beard and a used pickup with 151,000 miles, and he was angry at what the country was becoming. Most of all, he was from northwest Georgia, a swath of rural America where people who looked like him had voted in large majorities to send Donald Trump to the White House and Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress, many of them swept up in the emotional appeal at the heart of the Trump movement, which Greene now deployed in her own rallies.

-snip-

But what was most insulting to him of all was the assumption that he would go along with all of it because of how he looked and where he lived. He started to feel like a spy. He had neighbors who made him aware of a bar near his house that was supposedly a gathering place for people in the white nationalist movement. He got a Facebook invitation to join some militia group, which he blocked. He had White co-workers who flagrantly used the n-word and made racist comments to him, and he came to enjoy their shock when he told them to cut it out.

“It was disgusting that people might think I was okay with that,” he said. “I decided I wasn’t going to just let it slide. Because if you let it slide, you become complicit, and complicity turns into guilt, and guilt turns into shame, and shame turns into fear, and I don’t want to live in fear.”

https://wapo.st/3FLutMd

[70sEraVet]

1. Thanks much for that article, DPR.

Those of us DUers living in small rural communities, particularly in the South, know that man's isolation.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

4. Right?

I live in a rural town in a very blue state and see some of the same things-but nowhere like what this guy had to deal with growing up and living as an adult. Quite a guy to be able to see the light through all of the interference. It’s one thing to have convictions-quite another to live them when all around you are hostile to your thinking-even if that thinking is merely being a decent human being.

[scarletlib]

2. 1st takeaway: A teacher and a book opened his mind and eyes.

That’s why they are so afraid of the power of books.

[The Unmitigated Gall]

3. A loving grandmother...

A kindly teacher and librarian,

And fantastic fortune in finding two great books.

Tolkien’s works were about small people doing great things because they are the right thing to do, and persevering right to the end.

RWE is about thinking for yourself, standing for your principles rather than following the crowd.

I’d get a couple of beers with this guy any day and twice on Sunday.

[crickets]

5. Stories like this do give me hope.

What a great read. Here's hoping there are more of the quiet thinkers like Cody Johnson out there deciding to push for change rather than put up with the way things are.