This post, or essay, if you will, falls under the part of my blog’s subtitle that contains the “other stuff.” It isn’t specifically about my condition, except in the sense that yesterday my world changed to include a lot more fear about the future, as a disabled older woman dependent on Social Security and Medicare. But I felt the need to say it, and this is my forum. It seemed better here than on my art blog, even though colors are involved. Hell, maybe I’ll post it there, too. Anyway…

I have been thinking about the traditional demographics of our country as most people perceive them, and I find some things incredibly puzzling.

We have a mythos that says the people who live in the middle and the Midwest of our United States are nice “normal” folk with families and barbecues and dogs, who go to church on Sundays, raise big families, help their neighbors, volunteer for their small-town fire departments…in other words, the “salt of the earth.” Our Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, was selected for precisely this reason, this aura of normalcy, as a counterbalance to Kamala Harris, who, while coming across as perfectly nice, also has the legacy of being a prosecutor and attorney general in a gay city in the big, liberal state of California. Also, let’s face it, salt is white, which is a significant component of all those folks, and Harris tested parameters, being Black, Asian, and oh, female.

That same mythos also categorizes the people who live in those big cities—notably New York and Los Angeles, but also Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Houston—as single, childless, career-mad people who can be cold and distant, who have never met their neighbors, let alone looked out for them, and live a somewhat soulless existence accumulating wealth and indulging themselves in whatever makes them happy, whether it’s takeout and expensive booze, unfettered sexual hook-ups, spa days, fancy homes, or whatever. The cities are home to the artists who live alone in lofts, the day traders who value money above people, the realtors making a quick buck on insanely pricey real estate—the self-centered, if you will. They also harbor the biggest homeless populations, rack up the biggest crime statistics, create the most smog…in short, in America, the city dwellers are considered inferior in many ways to the country dwellers, at least if you base your opinion on a religious or moralistic world-view. Which, apparently, much of America does, in a twisted, self-helpful kind of way.

But because of the last 10 years of fraught politics in America, I am looking at those views with a jaundiced eye and saying hey…wait a minute! because if we were able to get rid of the Electoral College, which unfairly allocates much higher percentages of votes per capita to the rural states than it does to the urban ones, and instead used the one-person-one-vote system that we all kinda believed we had until Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but George Bush became president, we would see the true make-up of our rural vs. urban landscape.

Here is the truth that I have seen evolving before my eyes, and I never quite put it together until the past year of truly outrageous and beyond-the-pale behavior by the Republican candidate—now our 47^th president—held up that red-state-blue-state map and I really started thinking about who lives where.

People have tried to characterize Trump followers as outliers—crazy stupid fanatics who will vote for him no matter what crimes or sins he commits because he appeals to all their hidden desires for domination and revenge. There is, indeed, a faction of his followers that conform to that profile. But as much as 40 percent of the country (maybe more?) has not only voted for him at least twice but has now, again, elected him President—and you can’t tar all of them with that brush.

You could call them innocent, or ignorant, or brainwashed, but basically they have shown that they will believe anything he tells them and will vote for him because of one of three issues about which they agree with him: abortion, xenophobia, or money. Either they are against letting women make the decision about whether they are able or willing to be mothers; they are wildly racist, fearing and hating anyone who doesn’t look or behave like them; or they believe his lies about his ability—the Republican party’s ability—to improve their finances, despite abundant evidence to the contrary since the 1930s. So basically, they are either voting for something they deem a moral issue that must be imposed on everyone, regardless of our beliefs, or they are voting out of rampant self-interest, whether it’s to keep bloodlines pure or keep money in their pockets.

One of the issues that’s been around for at least 100 years, although it crystallized during the reign of Ronald Reagan, is the idea that the government has no role in taking care of its citizens, and the Republicans characterize anything that smacks of protectionism as socialism or communism and relentlessly vote it out. This is the hill on which the Republicans will die. Their theory is that if you let people keep more of their money, they won’t need a handout or a bailout, because they will be capable of taking care of themselves.

This makes no provision for bad luck, bad economies, pandemics, natural disasters; give everyone a $3K per year tax cut and they’re set, boy howdy. This would be fine, in theory, if all those people turned around and selflessly spent that tax cut on their less fortunate neighbors, but for every Jimmy Carter out there you can find ten thousand who wouldn’t lift a finger for a stranger, especially if they aren’t “Amurrican,” which is to say, white, straight, middle-class, Christian. I’m not saying that every Republican can be characterized in this way, but there is a reason “it’s the economy, stupid!” is a familiar refrain in elections.

Democrats, on the other hand, believe in things like civil rights for all, even if you are black, gay, female, or Buddhist. They support healthcare for everyone, because people don’t “deserve” to be sick or well depending on whether or not they can pay. They believe in safety nets for the least fortunate among us. They believe that creating jobs shouldn’t just be left to out-of-touch billionaires whose obsession with the bottom line precludes the welfare of their employees. They believe in spending money on things like infrastructure, and I’m not talking about walls to keep people out of the country, but highways to carry them across it. Democrats want to pay taxes to fund schools and the arts, even if they have no children and never darken the door of the opera or the museum, because they see those things not just as beneficial to everyone but as precursors for a better future for the country as a whole. They want to lift things up for everyone, not by handing them a few extra dollars but by making sure that there are not just opportunities but also support.

Here is the puzzle, then: If we actually lived in a one-person-one-vote society, the Democrats would win every election (if they bothered to vote, that is), because there are more of them. And where do they live? Why, the biggest populations of Democrats live in the soulless cities, among those characterized as corrupt and self-centered. If you look at that red and blue map, the blue states are a fringe of high-density people on the outskirts, while the center is solidly red. And those blue states consist of the most racially and sexually diverse, the least religious, the most tolerant, and the most helpful people in our country. They may not bring a hot dish to someone whose spouse has died (although some of them do), but many are certainly willing to put all of that accumulated “wealth” (in my case, a $25 donation here or there) to work by supporting the systems that hold up a lot more people than one bereaved family. They want things like student loan forgiveness and public schools (with art and music programs) and cheap insulin for diabetics and programs that integrate new immigrants into our population—all those things that have, at one time or another, been demonized by the Republican party and the people who vote with them.

So the question in my mind is, how do you explode that mythos that has ruled this country for at least a hundred years, maybe more, and somehow explain the fundamental difference in philosophy between the two sides? And how do you convince half of your population that it’s not just doing the right thing for the most people but that it’s in their own self-interest to embrace empathy and tolerance instead of holding out for so-called religious purity and a $3K tax break? How do you get people to pull their heads out of their asses and see that it’s more important for hundreds of thousands of people to be able to afford their insulin or for the polar bear to survive than it is to have cheap gas at the pump? And how do you change their worldview so that instead of believing what the latest popular politician tells them, they look for people to put in office who embrace the idea that elected representatives are supposed to be “for the people” in the most helpful and least damaging of ways?

I wish I knew how to answer that.