Ghosts don't vote, but haunted people do

On rural America, religion, + Trumpism ... my latest for the Star Tribune

Hi Readers,

Sharing here again my latest column for the Minnesota Star Tribune.

There will be a gift link to the full column at the bottom (please let me know if you have trouble accessing it).

You know you’re getting older when you tell people you’re going to visit family, and then you find yourself at a cemetery.

Recently, I traveled northwest of the Twin Cities about two hours for a gathering of Lutheran pastors. I found myself in the same central Minnesota lake town I’d last visited 14 years ago for my cousin’s funeral.

He died, suddenly, at age 22, almost exactly 11 years after his mom, my aunt, died of cancer at age 42. They now share a gravestone.

And so I found myself telling people, awkwardly, that my plans for our conference break time involved heading to the cemetery, driving down Broadway and into open country after lunch at the local diner, where the senior couple next to me reminisced about grabbing beers from the local dairy’s basement refrigerator at age 15, and smoking cigarettes outside the house at age 14.

“No one cared then,” they laughed, talking about overprotective parents of today, and the lessons learned only by the passage of years, but also the ghosts of the past, and the unintended impacts of so much early drinking and smoking.

On the way to the cemetery I passed Minnesota Teen Challenge, the conservative Christian faith-based drug and alcohol treatment center that has choirs who sing in churches and a record of helping those suffering from addiction, but who has also been criticized for poor treatment of LGBTQ+ and non-Christian participants.

After Teen Challenge I passed numerous Trump/Vance signs, some of them homemade. Some of the Trump signs said: “Take America Back,” and others said “Keep America Great,” which seemed to be contradictory messages.

But the succession of first the conservative Christian drug and alcohol treatment center, followed by the political yard signs, reminded me of the ways in which Trumpism seems to prey on hurting people like a vulture, coming into our rural communities and towns and hoovering up whatever financial resources people have left, plying them with promises of prosperity or at least revenge on those painted as usurpers or enemies.

I couldn’t help but come into this town and be haunted by the memories of my cousin and my aunt. There was the city park where we celebrated his 9th birthday party, a feat his mom somehow managed despite being desperately sick with cancer. Down that road was the house where they lived near the lake, which was constantly being repaired and fixed up, as it goes with older homes, and people who do the work themselves.

These are my family stories, but I’m telling them because I know they aren’t unique. So many of us smile and blithely recount an unmarred, happy youth, concealing behind our smiles the larger stories of American grief and loss, buried on the plains and the prairie, underneath the North Woods and down deep on the Iron Range. Our families share stories of war veterans returning home, or not, or returning home but leaving a part of them behind, in France, or Vietnam, or Korea, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. Of small town teenagers who lost their lives driving home from a town baseball game on an unremarkable June evening. The relative who inherited the family farm but couldn’t make it work. The guns so often celebrated in memories of deer hunting and sharpshooting, that sometimes become a way out of last resort in a moment of lonely despair.

I don’t really believe in ghosts: not in the sense that they show them on ghost hunting shows on TV, lurking in corners and making strange noises late at night. I don’t believe in the manufactured fear that legions of dead Americans will suddenly show up on voting rolls, rising to cast votes in a wild fever dream of “election fraud.”

Ghosts don’t vote. But haunted people do, and who among us can say we aren’t haunted? By unresolved pain and grief and loss. By the inherent economic unfairness of the recent decades of American life: while Wall Street banks got bailouts and ordinary Americans lost their homes because their mom needed cancer treatment they couldn’t afford, or you tried to be the first person in your family to go to college, and now the interest on your student loans means despite making payments faithfully, you owe more than the original balance.

When I return to the small towns and fields of Greater Minnesota and rural America, I feel at once at home, among familiar folks that remind me of my family; and at the same time as I see the proliferation of Trump signs and the growing divide in polling data between urban and suburban voters and the rest of the state, I am haunted by a sense of unresolved pain and anger. …

Read the rest of the column here.

P.S. …

A Few Notes:

First, a huge THANK YOU to all subscribers. I get a little email notification every time someone signs up, and every time I get one, I feel joyful and honored that you want to spend part of your day with this community. I mean it when I say: “I’m listening,” to you as well, and please don’t hesitate to share with me your thoughts + ideas for what you’d like to read in this space.

To PAID SUBSCRIBERS: I am humbled and honored that you’ve chosen to spend part of your limited budget on this newsletter. To borrow words from another newsletter I love, you are directly funding freelance journalism with your subscription, and I have to thank you more than ever for your continued support. Our world’s media and journalism is in a state of crisis, with fewer and fewer billionaires in control of global news outlets, and journalists being either laid off or threatened with violence for their work every single day; with fewer and fewer newsroom positions paying a living wage. I pledge to you to steward your paid subscription faithfully + use it to support honest, hard-working, and LOCAL journalism. One of my goals in this first year is to open this newsletter to other journalists, and pay them a fair wage for their work.

THANK YOU for your support. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.

On free vs. paid-subscriber posts only: My plan right now is that the Friday + Sunday posts, focusing on news + spirituality, in that order, are available for subscribers only (I am going to continue sharing a sample, with a line where the paywall cuts off for our paid subscriber community). My plan is that the Tuesday blog-style posts will always be free, to enable as much access as possible, while creating a smaller and more intimate experience for paid subscribers, who are also able to comment and share in community in fuller ways.

Free Trial: Substack always offers a free week-long trial subscription to this newsletter, so you can get a taste of the Friday + Sunday posts and see if you’d like to subscribe!

If a paid subscription is a hardship for you, but you’d like access to the Friday + Sunday posts: PLEASE do not hesitate to reach out. I will be happy to provide a complimentary subscription for you.