Taking a break from America
It’s hard to put a finger on the exact moment America lost its soul. I usually point to the Sandy Hook shooting.
By MONICA BIDDIX
GUEST COLUMNIST
I originally wrote this post on Friday, September 27, 2024 as Hurricane Helene was obliterating my ancestral homeland in western North Carolina. I predict that Hurricane Helene will be the most deadly hurricane in United States history. And the aftermath that followed the storm confirmed what I already knew. There are nefarious forces attempting to upend American democracy.
While people in western North Carolina were digging bodies out of rubble, bad actors were perpetuating lies that the government was coming to seize their land for lithium. Simultaneously, I was being flooded with ads sponsored by Elon Musk to invest in lithium on Twitter (I will never refer to it by its new name).
My Twitter account is linked to my cell phone’s 828 area code which covers all of western North Carolina. While many of my left-leaning friends left Twitter, I didn’t because I don’t believe in having my head in the sand. What I observed on the platform last week frightened me.
It got so bad that FEMA in North Carolina had to add a rumor vs. fact page to its website. Folks, absolutely none of this is normal.
I have no idea why everyone in America is walking around like everything is okay. Things in the United States are far from okay, and they have been far from okay for quite some time.
It’s hard to put a finger on the exact moment America lost its soul. I usually point to the Sandy Hook shooting. Children being gunned down is neither a “fact of life” nor indicative of a functioning civilization, let alone the supposed “greatest country in the world.”
I just got off the phone with my nearest Wells Fargo branch in Baltimore, Maryland. My pesos are ready for pick-up. For four of the last five years, I have spent the latter months of the year in Sayulita, Mexico.
My first extended trip was five years ago in 2019, when I stayed for 28 days after literally traveling around Iowa for almost three years straight. That trip to Sayulita changed my life.
It was before Covid forever transformed how we live, and I didn’t have a care in the world despite walking away from a well-paying job with no future prospects.
It didn’t matter to me. I was still in my 30s before I had gone through the painful days of the pandemic and prior to the attack on our democracy on January 6th. I fell in love with a place in Mexico that I now call my adopted home.
Last year, after the most traumatic incident of my professional career, I took off around mid-October and stayed in Mexico through the end of 2023. That trip changed my life as well for different reasons.
I am now packing to leave again, and this time it feels different because this time I don’t know exactly when I will be coming back and what the state of the country will be when I return.
When it comes to politics, I am not an alarmist. I grew up in a staunchly conservative household and consider myself to be a moderate Democrat. And right now, I am terrified for our country. I am terrified not because I watch MSNBC all day or pay attention to all the memes I see on social media but because I was a trained historian years before I stumbled into the political arena.
When I was nine years old, my fourth grade class had to learn all the words to “I’m Proud to be an American,” so we could send a videotape to the troops serving in Desert Storm, which now seems like a silly gesture.
I’m sure the last thing any of the soldiers in Iraq wanted to view was a bunch fourth graders crooning Lee Greenwood.
In the third grade, I memorized all of the state capitals, for some reason Des Moines stuck out to me. In the ninth grade, I memorized all of the United States Presidents in order. I was clearly fascinated by American history.
I remember once reading a textbook claiming that if you were born in the United States, it was the equivalent of winning the lottery. And at the time, in the 1990s, that was certainly true.
Unlike much of the world’s population, I’ve never known poverty or hunger (and I hope I never do). And I am keenly aware that my life and my bank account are richer because I had the privilege of being born into middle-class White America.
My initial plan for life was to become a history professor and teach at a local community college. I earned my Master’s degree in History from the College of Charleston and then pretended to go to Vanderbilt to pursue my Ph.D. for about six weeks before abandoning that venture.
Needless to say I have read MANY, MANY PAGES of American, European and World History. And that alone, not my political leanings, is why I am terrified for the state of our nation right now and flabbergasted as to why more people are not concerned.
Was no one else paying attention when we were taught about 1930s Germany? Book bans. Inflammatory propaganda. Dissemination of misinformation. Does any of this sound familiar to anyone else?
When Biden was still running for re-election, my anxiety was super high as I was giving Trump a 75% chance of winning the election.
Back in May, I started keeping a fairly regular journal entitled “The Final Days of American Democracy.” I hope I never have to publish it. And for a minute, I thought maybe Harris and Walz could energize the populace and bring people to their senses.
However, after spending much of September in three, key swing states (Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina), I am back to being as terrified as I was five months ago.
This isn’t 2012 when I knew the world would not crumble if Mitt Romney was elected President. It isn’t even 2016 when we didn’t think Trump would get elected but if he did we hoped he would “Act Presidential.”
January 6th happened. And I am aware of the talking points of the right. “It was the same thing as Black Lives Matter protests.”
No. No, it was not. It was an attempted coup orchestrated by Trump, and I have no idea why more Americans are not appalled by his actions on that day. We don’t really talk about the assassination attempts on then Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, do we?
I spent a weekend last month at the Arizona State Fair in a nonpartisan capacity. And I know State Fairs tend to attract more conservative-leaning folks, but what I saw was alarming.
I sometimes joke that as a rabid, North Carolina basketball fan that I am a member of a cult. Granted, it is the closest thing to a cult that I belong to but if a negative story came out about Roy Williams, Michael Jordan, or heaven forbid, Dean Smith, that proved they were malevolent individuals, I would believe it.
It would crush me but if there was enough evidence to support the claim, I would believe it because I am of sound mind and judgment.
Die-hard Trump supporters ignore evidence and facts because they have been brainwashed by Fox News and other conservative media outlets. It’s easy to fall victim to false senses of reality. I was brainwashed most of my life.
For over 40 years, I was programmed by American popular culture that as a woman the only way I could ever be happy was to get married and have children no matter what. I was led to believe that if I wasn’t young, thin, and beautiful that I would never amount to anything in American society. It is incredibly easy to fall victim to false narratives.
Trump was absolutely, 100% correct in 2016 when he said he could “shoot someone” and not lose supporters. He is the definition of a demagogue, and his staunch supporters follow him as if he were the second coming of Christ. Why do you think the man is selling Bibles?
This morning, I received a text alert. “Breaking The Left Pushes to Weaken Election Security! High Risk of Voter Fraud. Call Now to Stop The Left.”
Making false claims about an upcoming election is not a sign of a healthy, strong democracy. It is a textbook sign of a declining hegemony on the brink of collapse.
And that is why I am packing my bags because I know that even if Trump loses fair and square, he is not simply going away and will not do so quietly.
Trump may be running on the Republican ticket, but he is not a Republican. Mitt Romney is a Republican. Mike Pence is a Republican. Liz Cheney is a Republican. I am one of the few Democrats who draw an important distinction between what has become known as “MAGA” and being a Republican.
Trump has his base, the people who treat him like a religious savior. They buy his Bibles and wear his hats and frankly, many of them donate money to him that should probably go toward feeding their families. But, this race is entirely too close for his base to be the only factor in the election.
For whatever reason, Trump is getting a fair share of Independents as well. So, what are they thinking? Is the brand of Democrats so bad that they don’t want to be associated with “a liberal”? Are they White people who see their centuries of power and dominance in jeopardy and aren’t about to vote for a Black woman? Or do they see this as a “normal election” and think, “Meh, things weren’t so bad under Trump”?
We have normalized so many horrific things in this country that we’ve forgotten how great this country really used to be.
Our country has serious flaws including complicated race relations that have never been fully addressed, let alone resolved, and institutional misogyny that is so ingratiated into our society that movies like “Barbie” and “On the Basis of Sex” don’t even begin to scratch the surface of upending the patriarchy.
I no longer recognize the country in which I was born. Has this country been this ugly all along, and Trump just brought it to the surface and normalized it? It’s all still a little unclear.
What is crystal clear is that American democracy is hanging on by a thread.
And again, I would not feel as strongly if January 6th hadn’t happened. But, it did, and there are right-wing entities that are already sowing the seeds of fraud and distrust in our elections process. I do not envy the jobs of any Secretaries of States right now.
This country doesn’t value knowledge or encourage reading anymore, let alone thinking for oneself and living beyond the conditioning of popular culture.
We only care about keeping up with the neighbors, how nice of a car we drive, how big our house is, how much money our husband makes, how hot our wife is, and how many likes we get on our Instagram.
And maybe therein lies the root of the problem. Somewhere along the way, Americans became so self-involved, focusing on materialism and their own egos, that they stopped paying attention to what really matters.
One of my favorite Jimmy Buffett lines is from a song titled, “Cowboy in the Jungle”. Buffett sings, “What he lacked in ambition, he made up with intuition.”
If you are reading this it means I’ve made it to the jungle of Sayulita to watch the final month leading up to Election Day play out and the aftermath. I’ve always trusted my intuition and for the sake of my country, I hope my intuition is off the mark this time.
I hope my home country can snap out of it and return to its senses. If not, “Fly away, straight ahead, come what may.”
(Monica Biddix is the founding principal of Workhorse Strategies, a boutique political consulting firm with wins across the country. She spent almost a decade traversing the state of Iowa, living and working in Cresco, Riceville, Cedar Rapids, and Des Moines while managing campaigns at every level, from state legislative to presidential campaigns.
Monica first moved to Iowa in 2012, where she spearheaded incumbent State Senator Mary Jo Wilhelm’s re-election campaign - a 126-vote-win margin that secured the Democratic majority in the Iowa State Senate.
As Communications Director for the Iowa Democratic Party in 2016, Monica fielded state and national press inquiries as the primary on-the-record spokesperson. She served as a communications consultant for Admiral Mike Franken’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2022.
In 2019, she was featured in the Des Moines Register as one of the unprecedented number of female state directors leading presidential campaigns.)
(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )
This is a great essay, Monica. I agree with you about Sandy Hook. When Congress could not even pass a bill that would require something as innocuous as background checks after 20 first graders and 7 teachers were slaughtered in their classrooms 10 days before Christmas I knew we had lost our soul. What has happened to us? How in the hell did so many people stand by and watch a madman become the POTUS? How did the republican party stand by and watch him create a scam about voter fraud that lead to an insurrection? How did republican legislators across our country pass laws that make it harder for people to practice their citizenship right to vote - to make it next to impossible for way too many people? They are hellbent on establishing a minority ruling class in our country. I cannot believe that I am even typing that statement to describe the United States of America. I do believe we are on the cusp of that nightmare.
How in the hell can 48% of people in our country still think this man should be the next president? I am afraid for our country. I will vote for VP Harris to become our next president. I pray that at least 52% of voters will do the same.
Amen, Doug. Let’s start presenting data, and stop name calling - both sides