Trump Country May Be Waking UP

[Thirties Child]

17. I know these people. I was born among them, raised among them, raised by them.

In 1968 I was visiting in my small hometown at the top of the Texas Panhandle and, because several of us who had moved away were also back, we had an impromptu class reunion. One woman said she'd let a three-year-old starve to death before she'd give the parents welfare. She got lots of welfare herself, oil depletion allowance, money for not planting wheat, etc. I've never forgotten that party, still cringe when I think about it. I'd just been through the trauma of Martin Luther King's assassination and his funeral in Atlanta. I took my two oldest children to walk in the funeral march and my emotions were raw. At the class party it was me against the class. It's been almost 50 years and my emotions are still raw. However--and this is a big however--I still have feelings for the people of the plains, still understand them, and feel so sad for them, not just for what they lost in the fires, but most of all for what they don't know and don't understand.

I was as conservative as any of them when I went away to college in 1953. I ask myself--ask myself over and over because I don't know the answer--what would I be like if I had stayed, if rock-hard conservatism was the only exposure I had. Sometimes it seems to me that an awful lot of it all comes down to exposure.