Midwest Futures

In this deep, clotted, night-black, dirt-black dark, who even knows for sure who they are, who I am? Or who we might yet be?

can also cause you to think of those other selves: that poorer self, that queerer self, that darker self, that privileged self, that self who is kind of racist and watches too much TV but who has lost his mobility working at the refinery and whose body is full of flame retardant, that self who is a wheelchair-bound black lesbian, also full of flame retardant. It can tell you that you must try to care for all those selves as though they were you—as though you were made from the same soil and headed back to it.

Every human is so many other humans—and you feel that in the Midwest, wandering through those squares, among those people who, on paper, could have been you.

In my religious tradition, we are told to love our enemies. We are not told to pretend we have none. The reason is obvious: once you’ve named your enemies as such, the duty of loving them stands out clearly, named and unavoidable.

The persons we call corporations have no role in figuring out a role for the Midwest in a warmed planet; they can only mismanage things further, and they’ll try. We cannot avoid dealing with them, but we can’t leave things to them, or trust the operations of rational self-interest to discover the solution.

So Trump argues, in his (let us say) impressionist style, that the American future consists only in locking down our possession of what we already have. Where the humanist says, “Let’s build the best society we can, out of whoever happens to show up,” Trump says, in effect, “America for the People Already Here.”

Trump panders to, but he does not represent, the voters of the Midwest. But Trump is the candidate who best represents the right-wing response to the climate crisis.

Owing to a basically phlegmatic temperament, and the fear of hurting my parents, I made it to college without committing suicide.

this is the unbearable truth of the Midwest, of America. The picture-postcard city where neighbors pitch in during a storm and the sundown town are the same place. The Minneapolis that welcomes immigrants and the Minneapolis that allows its police to beat the poor are the same place. The Michigan that helped beat the Confederacy and the Michigan where white people lock their car doors while drifting through Saginaw are the same place. One does not disprove the other. One is not the underbelly of the other. One will not finally triumph over the other. We have to reckon with both simultaneously; or we must admit to being both simultaneously.

To have a history is to be made of many alive wriggling moldy embarrassments that preexisted you and over which you have no control.