Republican Lawmaker From Nevada Sends Christmas Card Featuring Fully Armed Family
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"Republicans For Revolution," A Study In Anarchic Apocalypticism
"The Politics Of Horror In Conservative Evangelicalism"
2009 Outstanding Academic Title
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Hillsborough, North Carolina
As a volunteer for Hillary Clinton's campaign, I spent three hours this afternoon registering voters - come as they may. (I did this same work for Barack Obama.)
Initially, my partner and I stood on the canopied sidewalk outside The Dollar Store in Hillsborough, North Carolina's north-end strip mall.
After 45 minutes, the owner of the adjacent pool hall, a sour white guy with dead eyes, asked us to stop talking to his customers.
According to pre-existing protocol, we immediately complied.
Another 45 minutes passed before an employee of The Dollar Store -- an unsmiling white woman -- approached with the same request. (If this "good ol' girl" votes at all, I imagine her supporting candidates committed to the existing minimum wage of $7.25)
We then moved to Hillsborough's West End Business District, a smaller strip mall anchored by Hillsborough Barbeque --- a holistic health center on one side, Mystery Brewing Company's retail pub on the other.
At this location, no one asked us to stop our registration effort: in fact, the owner of the holistic health center (on whose bench Denise and I had been sitting) thanked us for our service as he locked up for the day.
At both strip malls, black people flashed welcoming smiles and generally wanted to know what we were up to, whereas white people (admittedly a "mixed bag") held out a "rejecting hand" as they approached, avoided eye contact and were often surly as if we had "some nerve" providing a public service.
By the end of the day, I registered three voters, one of them a young, white, working-class Bernie supporter who said he probably wouldn't vote in November.
Filling out his form, he added, "If I do vote, it certainly won't be for Hillary; probably Trump."
How many young people have been conditioned to treat politics as a form of amusement in which their chief responsibility (if they have any at all...) is to "vote someone off the island?"
Trump Models His Campaign After "Professional" Wrestling
Throughout my "shift," I pondered Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone," a socio-political treatise chronicling the decline of American culture in direct relationship to Americans' lessening involvement with civic and religious institutions.
Compendium Of Pax Posts About Donald Trump
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Putnam sees a lock-step relationship between people becoming more isolated in the hunkered-down confines of their personal lives while loneliness, defensivenss and open hostility become more common.
Emblematically, "bowling" -- a team sport for most of the 20th century -- has become an increasingly solitary pastime.
Here is the text of "Bowling Alone" - http://archive.realtor.org/sites/default/files/BowlingAlone.pdf
And here are two useful summaries.
Bowling Alone
Wikipedia
"Bowling Alone's" Robert Putnam And Obama's Economic-Mobility Speech
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/12/bowling-alones-robert-putman-and-obamas.html
Many white people - particularly those who are uneducated and undereducated - have reason to be angry.
They have even more reason to be angry at themselves for assuming white privilege and high-paying, undemanding rust-belt jobs are their birthright.
Now, with Cowboy Capitalism moved to greener pastures, they lash out at the loss of "their world" when they should lash out at their own know-nothing indolence.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Stupid People Don't Know They're Stupid
And now, rather than do necessary work to remedy the fallout of their own irresponsibility, "good Christians" think Jesus is on his way to "make it all better" even though "he did nothing" when The Dark Ages visited Europe with a political and cultural black hole in the immediate wake of Christianity's victory over the entire Roman Empire --- a darkness that lasted 650 years.
"Faith, Hope, Charity And Divine Desperation"
Then there is this "No Go" domain for uneducated white people:
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