Driving from Trump-hating LA to Trump-loving Prescott, Arizona, stopping along the way, as I periodically do to replenish my body and car fuel in Trump-loving Nowhere America – a Kaylee Keller song – I never cease to be amazed how Nowhere has become in so many ways mainstream America. Empty stores, run down towns, boarded homes and stores, over-crowded rundown mobile home parks, abandoned graffiti-laden houses, junked cars, trucks with no wheels, and down trodden angry Americans – especially Native-Americans. There are many native tribes between LA and Prescott.
I engage these angry populist Americans in political discussions whenever I can in the numerous roadside diners and gas stations I stop at, usually with a question about what do they think of President Trump’s latest tweet, immigration policies, Obamacare, guns or treaties signed between America and local tribes. The disgust for the American government and admiration and support for the president and how he is disrupting the system is mind-blowing. All anyone who doubts the unwavering populist Trump support has to do, is look at the White House and ask, how did Trump get there?
The answer is simple and expressed in the vitriol that spews from the Nowhere people that relate to Trump’s anti-establishment, anti-elitist, anti-lefties, anti-immigrant politics. They believe the blue collar billionaire is looking out for them and taking down those that felled their jobs and lifestyle, believing he will restore both.
Sharing my observations with glassmates – most of whom are Trump supporters — in Prescott, to the lyrics of Stephanie Quale’s Drinking With Dolly, as I looked out at the County Courthouse on Town Plaza Square with the clock that was featured in the Back to The Future movie, I couldn’t help hearing in my mind the tune to the lyrics of the Bob Dylan song When You Gonna Wakeup?
America does need to wake up! It is becoming a third-world country. Crumbling infrastructure, uneducated masses, homeless and gun violence on the rise, opioid epidemic, high taxes, decimated middle class, political corruption and gridlock that only benefits the 1% at the expense of the 99%, and the hits, political and economic, just keep on rolling.
America is angry. Very angry and divided. A Disunited States of America. An America both democratic and republican parties have lost touch with. An America that is Nowhere and that hopefully will come together and start finding itself again in the midterm elections of 2018.
One thought on “Nowhere America”
I believe that you could not be more wrong. By the time that Trump is finally out of the way, America will have lost whatever respect from other nations that it might have once had, and be regarded with contempt by most of the rest of the world.
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