I Ran Away to the Mountains to Rediscover My Love for America

On rediscovering my country

I have spent the last several years learning how to really love America. As a kid, I found patriotism to be detrimental to one’s humanity and I once had a phase during which I would refuse to stand for the pledge of allegiance at high-school football games.

Why should I pledge my allegiance to a country that doesn’t care about me? Why is it expected of me by default? Doesn’t that alone sour the notion? My own safety was in jeopardy, by the way, but I didn’t care. Throw your popcorn at me and scream your obscenities. I’m not going to compromise my ideals and pretend to be proud of this exploitative country. I am a citizen of the world before I am an American.

Keep in mind, this was a different America than the one that exists in 2016. This was George W. Bush’s America. The Iraq War America. The Great Recession America. I spent my adolescence angry at our governmental establishments, our reactionary voter base, and our propensity to invade oil-rich countries under the guise of democracy and nation-building. I had zero faith in our establishments, our extreme right-wing governance, and our ineffectual, centrist democratic party. I looked around, yet there was nobody speaking for me.

It all felt so damn fake to me.

How could I believe in our democracy when I sat up all night in the year 2000 and watched Al Gore win the popular vote and still lose the presidency? How could this be? And what the hell is the electoral college?

The way I saw it, the whole process was highly obscure and as undemocratic as the dictators we installed in those third-world countries. We were a nation of bullies, a nation of gun-toting maniacs, and I carried a deep shame with me all throughout my youth about that. The worst part of all, I thought, is that we were duped into believing that we actually had a choice in this madness. The year 2000 was the first time I paid attention to politics and the whole thing felt like such a circus. It was a magic act. It wasn’t real.

This feeling deepened when I noticed our collective inability to understand the mindset of radical extremists. Instead of partly blaming ourselves for engaging in military activity that motivated many to embrace a life of terror, we blamed Muslims as a whole. Our binary was: we always do what is right around the world; these people are pure evil. I felt such shame.

In 2008, alone in my bedroom, I watched Barack Obama improbably win the presidency. I remember seeing all those people crying and hugging one another on TV and thinking that they were all so stupid. I remember writing in my journal that we had a new mascot, a new puppet at the helm, but no new puppeteers.

Even in a moment that portended real change, I was so disillusioned with the politics of my lifetime that I didn’t allow myself a chance to revel in the moment. I felt a happiness about it, admittedly, but I quickly masked that feeling with a few swigs from a Jack Daniels bottle and refused to acknowledge it outright. I convinced myself that nothing would change, that my family would remain in a state of perpetual poverty, and that we would engage in endless war because that was the true fabric of American culture. No one man could change the course of history. We were doomed to be the bullies of the world and I was just another limp-wristed liberal with no alternative solutions. I didn’t even waste my time voting.

When I woke up the next morning, the booze was all gone. That tinge of happiness, though, was still there. I had to stuff it down real deep and this is the very first time I’ve actually admitted to feeling it at all. It was raw and visceral and totally secretive.

Maybe things would move in the right direction.

I was still cynical, but I developed a soft underbelly of hope that day. I wanted to hug somebody, but I was still alone.

Slowly but surely, things actually started to shift in a more progressive direction. Obamacare was introduced and I was able to visit the dentist for the first time in my life. I had a doctor that I could see when I was ill. This was the first time that I felt like, just maybe, the United States really was looking out for me.

I found jobs I could work and I was able to make money for the first time. My mom got promoted to a well-paying job and my dad once again found full-time work. The rise back to middle class was beginning for us and it was exciting.

Then the War in Iraq ended and troops started to come home by the boatload. We established healthy relationships with countries and it certainly felt like we were changing gears dramatically. I no longer worried about my president launching us into catastrophic war at the faintest opportunity. I no longer feared having to dodge a draft.

My gay friends were then allowed to get married. First in a few states and eventually throughout the whole country. I attended my first gay wedding in 2011 and almost cried at the reality I suddenly found myself living in. The cynicism washed away like a piece of refuse in a rain storm. I felt a pride that I had never felt before. We really did turn a page. Better still, my home state of Iowa was one of the first to legalize gay marriage.

I’m still proud of us for that to this very day.

I started photographing Iowa towns in 2014 and started to understand and empathize with those who hold to vastly different political outlooks. The same people that I watched vote for George W. Bush, encourage the war in Iraq, and do about ten-thousand other reprehensible things became my peers almost overnight. These same people voted for Barack Obama. They had gay friends of their own. They acknowledged that the War in Iraq was a gross exercise in futility. It seemed that we were a collectively more empathetic people than we were in 2002.

And I understood a lot of their concerns, too. I might not have agreed with their conclusions much of the time, but I definitely understood how they got there. The way that I saw it, at the end of the day, we were all in this together. Gay, straight, religious, atheist, whatever — we surely had more in common than our politics or ideologies would lead us to believe and I was proven correct in my adventures to these small towns. I really wasn’t all that much different than any of them. We could disagree and still be friends.

Barack Obama was indeed my own personal Ronald Reagan. The way that conservatives view Reagan as an untouchable model of how Republicans should look and act, I view Obama in that same light. He was the model Democrat in my heart. He helped turn me from an ashamed American to one that found his place in it and discovered pride. I was a proud American for the first time.

Until November 8th, 2016.

I watched Donald Trump’s rallying of the bigots succeed beyond my wildest imagination. I watched him win key state after key state and was reminded every hour of some repugnant thing he said during his campaign run. I was so convinced that we were better than this that I didn’t even give him a chance in the months prior.

“The point is, you can never be too greedy.” — Donald Trump

On the morning of Election Day, I cast my first vote ever. This newfound pride made the experience feel like a civic duty to me and I was happy to do it (though, admittedly, not exactly bursting with excitement over the person I voted for). Iowa then goes red. By 11:30 PM, that old cynical nature of mine reared its ugly head once again and come morning, Donald Trump would be announced as the next President of the United States. What the hell?

That old cynicism returned with a fury over the following days with the news that, yet again, the popular vote did not determine the presidency. As of this writing, Clinton won it by over 2,000,000 votes. I felt just as stupid as the people crying and hugging one another at Obama’s first win in 2008. I couldn’t wash the shame off of me. Voting really doesn’t make a difference, does it?

I started to wonder if all the progress I’d made in my pursuit toward pride in my country was itself an exercise in futility. What did it matter if we could take a couple steps forward if the opposition had bulldozers ready to push us back by a mile in the very next stride? Did all those Obama voters just get cold feet? What happened?

I spent the next week or two silently stewing in my own disbelief. I started to think about all the atrocities committed by my people, dating all the way back to the slaughtering of the indigenous populations. I started to feel even a little gross about believing in Barack Obama as I watched police fire rubber bullets at peaceful protesters in North Dakota to radio silence coming from his administration. Yet again, we were pillaging the land and nobody was doing a damn thing to stop it. Nobody learns their history, I thought to myself.

Shortly after, I made an announcement that Forgotten Iowa would be on hiatus until I felt a little less embarrassed of us. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the rural communities for a while. I always thought that I was meeting people and giving a voice to the voiceless, but I had to contemplate the idea that maybe they were already a little too loud and didn’t need my help.

Then I watched Donald Trump start to fill his cabinet. The most egregious of which, in my opinion, was a woman named Betsy DeVos, appointed as Trump’s education secretary. An elitist that is anti-public school and has dedicated her life to making sure that public school funding gets slashed, DeVos was the antithesis of what I thought that this country needed. Even less education. Great! That wasn’t what got us into this predicament in the first place at all! The cynicism ballooned.

I had to get away before I lost my mind completely. There was this sickness lingering around the outside of my body and I was poisoning myself on negative thoughts. I had to get out of it. So I decided to run away to the mountains.

I just returned home from that trip and wanted to reflect a little on the experience.

It took roughly fourteen hours to reach our hotel in Boulder, Colorado. I was short of breath either by the sheer beauty of my surroundings or the thin, crisp air at 5,400 feet above sea level. I sat on the balcony and had a staring contest with the mountains and decided that I wanted to reach the top of them. I’ll figure it out once I get there.

Boulder is a very pretty city, but it has the same pratfalls that most places do — there are so many homeless people that your head will spin.

I knew the phrase, “Make America Great Again” was all the rage in this country, but I had a hard time pinpointing when that ever was to begin with. A society is only as great as it is to its most unfortunate members, after all, and homelessness has never been a rare sight in America. The cynicism expanded and I was reminded of a Bill Hicks quote that seemed to sum it all up:

When you’re stepping over a guy on the sidewalk…does it ever occur to you to think, ‘Wow, maybe our system doesn’t work?

I realized that I needed to step back from humanity (or up from it, depending on your vantage point). I would get an early night’s sleep and head for the mountains in the morning.

The first thing I had to rationalize is that people voted for Donald Trump despite his rhetoric and not directly because of it. For every one person that loved the idea of imposing a national Muslim registry, there was two or three more that just couldn’t afford their insurance premiums. Some didn’t have faith in Hillary Clinton and I could definitely understand that. I voted for her not in confidence but in retaliation to the opposition. She didn’t exactly stoke a fire in most people. Some just toed the party line (and though I find that morally reprehensible, it’s at least a little better than outright bigotry being a motivator).

There are people on this earth that I love dearly that voted for Donald Trump. People that I knew weren’t racists or bigots or xenophobes. In fact, most of the Trump supporters I knew weren’t those things. There had to be more to it than just hate won and suggesting otherwise felt very intellectually dishonest to me. It certainly wasn’t going to change the course by lumping them all in by the sum of its worst parts. Easily misled maybe, but not bigots outright. This was an important distinction to make.

I remembered going to a Hillary Clinton rally back in December of 2015 and leaving before the speech was over just so monumentally underwhelmed. There were roughly five-hundred souls in the audience that night and she chose to ignore my demographic entirely. She spoke on cures for Parkinson’s Disease and expanded medicare for the elderly (all things I agreed with, by the way), but she intentionally refused to call on a single person under the age of fifty. My girlfriend sat for the whole thing hoping for the opportunity to ask a question herself, but she was outright ignored. The same story applies to every one of my friends that was in the audience that night. My girlfriend entered that building a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter and left it as a detractor.

“She didn’t say a word about our struggles. What about high tuition? What about the lack of entry-level jobs for college graduates? What about the privatized jail systems or the rampant sexism that exists in the workplace? Why did she only talk to the old people? They’re the reason we’re in the mess we’re in!” She was so disenchanted and saddened by her experience. Hell, I wasn’t even a fan and I left depressed about it. Surely, this wasn’t an isolated incident.

Contrast that to the Bernie Sanders rally we attended in January of this year. This man was saying all the things that I had been feeling for years. There was a person standing there that mirrored my beliefs and philosophies to a T. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He spent a career working for the young and hopeless. He was everything that young idealists wanted and we left that place inspired for an American future. We were, of course, lead to believe that Sanders getting the nomination was a Herculean task, an almost impossible suggestion, from every news outlet on TV. Why exactly was it so impossible?

VICE came down to document my Forgotten Iowa project and I even mirrored the mindset.

“I would love a Bernie Sanders presidency, but I don’t see it as feasible.”

I didn’t quite understand why I viewed it as such an impossibility, but there I was…doing exactly what was expected of me. The DNC had already made its mind up on who was going to lead the party. They decided before a single rally was held. Naturally, of course, Bernie Sanders would eventually be robbed of the democratic nomination and we would get Hillary Clinton as a choice instead. The DNC royally screwed this up and I fault them more than any collection of people for the Donald Trump presidency.

This is an important distinction, too, for people that left Clinton rallies uninspired and entered the voting booths even more so if they entered them at all. We weren’t given a choice in our nominee and we were all so pissed off about that. I voted for Hillary Clinton, but I didn’t do it with enthusiasm. I did it begrudgingly. That’s not how you win an election. The writing should have been on the wall right there in that booth.

The steep drive up the mountains is the most exciting thing in the world. The further up you go, the more it begins to feel like you are on a different planet looking at Earth through a microscope. All the people below seem so small and unimportant. The trivial, mundane lives we lead all seem to disappear to a faint dot on an endless stretch of canvas.

“We should build a cabin here and never talk to people again.” I joked.

I sat on a bluff and watched a lone bird fly from clifftop-to-clifftop. He appeared to be completely unencumbered and free from the trivial bullshit I found myself constantly tangled in. I envied him.

My grandmother always used to tell me this thing whenever I was down in the dumps about trying something and failing spectacularly at it. Progress isn’t linear, she’d say. Sometimes you’ll take a step forward and find yourself in a total sprint in no time. Life can get no better in these moments and you will feel absolutely on top of the world. And then you’ll get sucker-punched and dizzily backtrack to your initial take-off point. Sometimes you’ll even backtrack behind it. But progress isn’t a straight line. It’s winding and curvy and you have to walk against the grain of that. You have two choices. You can sit and stew in your own negative thought or you can fight your way back to the sprint.

The mountains are the perfect literal representation to that mentality and I thought about that as we ascended two-hundred feet and then immediately descended three-hundred before reaching another hill. Progress isn’t linear and neither were the mountains.

Time will tell, I suppose, but I am certain of one thing. Donald Trump’s presidency is going to build a whole new generation of open-minded people. There will be some freshman in high-school just as disenfranchised by all this as I was back in 2004. He will only have life experience with a Trump presidency the same way that I did with George W. Bush. Kids today don’t know that America. They don’t know an America that isn’t lead by Barack Obama and the democratic party. My peers should know better and I do admittedly have a hard time coming to terms with that, but the young Trump supporters have to get a pass from me. And they are going to discover first-hand what it means to be wrong. It will be a huge life lesson for them. Growing pains.

Our only hope is that Trump’s term is a short one and the democratic party learns from their mistakes in 2016. I don’t expect this to be a difficult reality considering he hasn’t even taken office yet and has already done some ridiculously boneheaded things. Those manufacturing jobs Trump promised aren’t going to magically reappear. It’s no longer a reality of Trump Vs Clinton and who will steer the country in the right direction. This is solely on Trump now to make his impossible campaign promises a reality. When he doesn’t, the people that voted for him will notice and act accordingly. The one thing that Donald Trump did right during his campaign was empathize with the common man. He did it in a disgusting way and ignited otherwise dormant fires in small, bigoted circles, but he still did it. He made false promises about bringing manufacturing back to America. Clinton’s big fault was that she tried to tell the truth. In another four years, we will have gained perspective and realized that she was right. They aren’t coming back and it’s time to learn new trades. It’s a sad reality, but it is the reality.

The only thing we cannot do is give up. That much I am certain of. Don’t lose your pride or love for America just because we’ve taken a step back (and eventually, probably, a footrace to the bottom). We need to keep fighting the good fight and this all starts from within. We need to make sure that nobody is robbed from their rightful place at the head of the nomination. Instead of accepting what we are given, we need to learn how to fight fire with fire. That’s precisely why the GOP is so much more effective than the Democrats. We try to work with them and they try to steamroll over us. No longer can we afford to play nice-guy politics. No more toting the party lines. We need to dismantle the party and rebuild it as the real part of the people. The line has been blurred far too much with corporatism and that needs to end yesterday.

You want to have real discussions on fiscal responsibility and the allocation of funds? I’m okay with that. But we can’t sit here and let the worst parts of this country speak for us. Call the alt-right what they are: neo-nazis. That goes for conservatives and liberals alike. Don’t let them hide behind a bland, inoffensive term when they have radical and offensives beliefs by both of our standards. Quit playing the game by their rules. Throw their rules into the garbage where they belong.

And please, for the love of God, don’t get so holier-than-thou when you are proven correct. When we are on the brink of another recession, when the jobs haven’t come back, and when the disparity between the mega-rich and mega-poor continues to grow — don’t take pride in being correct. Don’t say, “I told you so” or “You should have listened, you deserve this” even though you did tell them so and they might deserve it. All this is going to accomplish is having people feel even more alienated by you and they are likely to vote for Trump again just to spite you. Intellectualism is good. Arrogance is not. Don’t think for a second that the spite vote isn’t powerful. Many voted for Trump this time around just because they found your holier-than-thou attitude to be annoying. Even I am guilty of this. I probably caused a few people to vote for Trump myself. It wasn’t a vote in confidence for them either. It was a vote in fuck you.

Sit back and watch as a new generation of kids grows up with a Republican president. Watch what it does to their development and their scope on the world around them. Nothing builds empathy quite like a Republican president. We are likely to sit witness to some big atrocities and some of them are likely to be domestic atrocities. Women will lose healthcare and be forced to conceive. Mexicans will be rounded up and deported, ripped from their families and lives. Muslims will be tallied and registered. Stop-and-Frisk is going to come back to our cities. All of these things will be terrible and awful and is going to enrage us beyond our wildest beliefs.

But what we must do, what is most important to do is actually quite simple: fight it like hell. Remember what it was like to be proud of your country and keep striving for those ideals. Cynicism is the worst, most despicable trait that exists in mankind. Don’t be overcome with it. Don’t let it define you. Don’t let the bastards win again.

Learn your god damn lesson, too.

And if all else fails, just take a drive to the highest mountain possible. America is beautiful indeed, we just have some dark spots here and there.

Be the light.