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I grew up riding my bicycle on county highways in rural northern Wisconsin. You had to watch out for teen drivers racing around blind corners. The roar of an approaching motor meant you should dive into the ditch.
Teenagers are equal parts youthful strength, delusions of immortality, and confused sexual energy. They aren’t the example that should form the basis of a society. And yet…
The rusty pickup trucks driven by middle aged men posed an even greater threat. They embodied deeply rooted anger and sexual frustration.
They pulled up slow and said, “Hey! Where are you headed? Want a ride? Why won’t you answer me? I’m being nice to you!”
It’s better to ignore them than ask to be left alone. If they pulled in front of you to stop, brake lights blazing, we learned to turn and sprint away as fast as possible.
Growing up, my daily reality played out against a backdrop of perpetual terror. We never paused to question it. Heart pounding, we hit those pedals with all the strength our churning legs could muster.
We didn’t think of it as abuse. It was just country life.
How could I have guessed that the willfully ignorant would insist on running things forever?
All of my friends lived ten miles away. We’d make arrangements on the landline the night before as The Muppet Show played in the background. That was adult programming then. In the morning, we’d head out the door and meet each other on the road.
We talked about the things kids talk about.
“How was the ride?”
“Hot! But I got here. What should we do?”
“How about some swimming?”
“Sounds good. Did you see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom yet?
“Yeah! I liked the part where…”
We’d fall into our imaginations and reenact our favorite scenes. We thought nothing of it as we sent our minds a million miles away. Why were we so good at leaving our bodies behind?
We had already learned to escape.
Most of my nostalgia comes from flights of fancy rather than actual experiences. Many reflections that bring a smile are from moments that never even happened.
I learned a lot growing up rural. I rode my bicycle through a toxic conservative philosophy that is responsible for every bad choice in human history. If you orient yourself correctly, you can see how all those bad decisions form a straight line.
It’s the line we’re walking.
As an adult, I’ve mainly learned to sidestep the obstacles awful people have placed in my path. Why is the righteous path the winding road?
Avoidance.
This is what we learn. We don’t oppose the forces of evil head on. Instead, we’re content to go around. There’s too much risk in direct conflict. There’s too much that can be lost.
When I was a teen cyclist, I was vulnerable.
It’s in your vulnerable stages that you learn the truth. You should be mindful in those moments because you will be vulnerable again.
As kids, we thought we were tough but we were completely without protection. Out in the country, rural bars were the only place to stop for water. These are the places where the locals go to drink at 9AM on a Wednesday. You wouldn’t think bars a million miles from nowhere could stay open, but they do. They’re watering holes for the agricultural mafia.
Don’t laugh.
Don’t underestimate them.
These are the people who got a convicted felon elected.
After enduring enough unpleasant side eye brought on by crippling thirst, my friends and I all saved up for additional water bottle cages.
Children instinctively know when danger lurks even if they can’t specifically identify the threat.
We were boys, so we assumed we wouldn’t be the targets of assault. We didn’t know that the scent of vulnerability, not gender, is the fragrance that draws out the monsters.
They look for easy targets, like teens on bicycles in the middle of nowhere.
In 1989, Jacob Wetterling went missing while riding his bicycle. He lived near me and he was about my age, the story shook us all deeply.
Who had taken him?
What was out there?
I think the lesson here is that evil creatures walk among us, but their numbers are small. It only seems like there are more of them because the impact of their transgressions is so devastating. In many ways, they’ve learned to tilt the scales to their advantage.
Their votes count for more than ours.
We went to the wagon bridge to swim. The water was slow there. The bridge was a relic with metal beams that went impossibly high. Older kids would climb to the top and jump into the water. It was exciting to be in the presence of high school juniors and seniors, but they always scared us too.
“Hey kids,” they’d say.
I didn’t like it when they talked to us. They always smirked. They tried to make fools of us to impress their girlfriends. Why didn’t it ever impress their girlfriends to be nice?
Later we’d discover that the girlfriends didn’t have much influence on them.
The ones without girlfriends were scarier still.
We learned it was better to slink around and spy on them from the bushes. This seemed completely natural. We were like animals, eager to hide and quick to startle.
As adults, we still hide. I don’t put political signs in my yard or on my vehicle because I know that will only invite attacks.
School was something you survived.
A kind of madness takes over boys as they hit adolescence. They’re allowed to run wild in small towns, and that behavior is even celebrated. Rural areas have a mechanism in place for covering up the inevitable consequences of excessive white male indulgence.
Our whole legal system follows this pattern.
Old white men look upon the antics of boys and remember their own “glory days.” This perversion of the concept is what’s considered “reflecting on life” in the United States. The loftiest ambition for most small town kids is making the varsity team.
Pregnant girls walking the high school hallways are shunned. The boys skip around freely in the socially approved haze of denial.
“Don’t talk badly about him, he scored five touchdowns!”
They’re so entitled that they resent the concept of a blood test. They’ll go to war over the idea of an abortion.
“We must celebrate the boys who create more children to defend the fatherland!”
The mothers are treated like chattel.
American small towns are the nursery for a dead end philosophy. They don’t want change. They don’t want progress. They’re obsessed with tradition and they’re fixated on restoring a past that never existed.
If you don’t vote the way they want, they find a way to discard the ballot, or they redraw the district to erase your vote, or, if the vote is counted, they march on the Capitol.
As a teen, I rode my bicycle through the landscape of rural American fascism. When powerful forces perceive you as weak, they reveal the truth about themselves.
Touchdowns, high-speed chases, and government mandated pregnancies are literally the only thing places like that have to offer.
The town where I grew up is virtually unchanged from what it was thirty years ago. It’s perpetually trapped in the false glory of high school excess. Varsity sports represent the pinnacle of human achievement. If somebody from our town won a Nobel prize, the notification wouldn’t even make the local paper.
If you try riding your bicycle through a rural town, you’ll get beer bottles thrown at you, or you’ll get run over. The last thing you’ll see will be a Republican bumper sticker with the name Pence scratched out. It’s shameful that any community should become a time capsule of reverence for the worst examples of human behavior.
That’s small town American life.
Self-indulgence is always tempting, but strength fades. This is the truth the rural mindset can’t seem to perceive. The logical choice is to use our strength to create a soft landing spot for the vulnerable because, with the passage of time, we all evolve from prey to predators and back again to prey.
I’ve covered many miles traveling inside the rural American mindset. It’s the mindset of fascism. It’s the mindset that’s responsible for every mistake our country has ever made. We offer our reverence to all the wrong things.
We need to turn the corner and learn to save our celebrations for examples of wisdom, intelligence, compassion, diversity, equality, inclusion, tolerance, and maturity.
It’s time for America to grow up and leave its adolescence behind.
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