Finding Meaning when You’re the Liberal Next to the Guy with the “Make Liberals Cry” Hat at the Poll

I stood in line for two hours waiting to vote, standing outside of a horse racing event center, men in cowboy boots and hats, the crowd in masks, tractors passing.  I’d been on the line a few minutes when a poll worker walked past and said to the man behind me:

“Sir, you’ll need to take off your hat.” 

I looked up from the book I was reading a book on vicarious restorative justice and scanned the crowd.  Half the men on this line were wearing cowboy hats or baseball caps, and they weren’t pulling them off.  I turned around.  The man behind me had no mask on.  He wore a turquoise fishing t-shirt, a large silver cross around his neck, and—

“Oh,” I said.  

“Trump.  Pence.  Make Liberals Cry Again.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen this sign in our neighborhood.  It was on lawns and fences, and various people had commented on it on social media.  But it was the first time I’d seen someone wearing it, someone who was looking right at me.  I turned away from the man and started texting my husband and good friends a series of grumpy messages.  “Why does this man want to make me cry?  It’s not a kind thing to make anyone want to cry.”

“Nice hat,” the people in front of me said to the man behind me.

My chest clenched.  My jaw tightened.  The line was long and hadn’t moved—why hadn’t it moved?—and I was stuck between people who clearly had no warm fuzzies for me.  

For the next half hour, I kept texting my like-minded friends, but it wasn’t making me feel any better.  I only felt worse.  I grew more incensed, more exclamation marks and capital letters peppering my messages, and my friends really couldn’t help because they weren’t the ones who could answer the question on his hat.  Only he could do that.

So I put the phone down and turned to face him and said—

“What exactly goes on at this events center?”

“Horse racing.  Livestock shows.  You can buy chickens here sometime.”

“Wow,” I said.  “They don’t have this sort of thing where I come from in New York.”

“I’ve never been to New York.  What’s it like?”

I told him about how easy it was to get pizza delivered and explained what a black and white cookie was, and he smiled.  Said his daughter would like them.  We discovered we had kids the same age.  He told me his family had raised cattle on the same 120,000 acres for over a hundred years and that they now used the land for fracking (“Don’t worry—it only takes six months, and the animals just take a vacation and then come back when it’s done”), that he didn’t want his wife to come out to vote that night because the sun would be shining right in the direction of the line as it set and he didn’t want her to get uncomfortable because she was pregnant.

He talked to me about the cross around his neck, about how he hunts deer and eats what he kills and donates the extra to food pantries.  At one point, we agreed that our local elementary schools were too large and that it would be to the benefit of students to teach them how to cook, balance a checkbook, change a tire.

“How can he be talking to me and also want to make me cry?” I thought. 

I never got to ask the question because it was my turn to cast a ballot.  But here’s meaningful about this event at the events center: From the moment I put my phone down, I felt the anger subside, felt my jaw unclench because it was more comfortable to use those muscles to talk than to ruminate.  Speaking gave me the chance to be an active participant in what was going on instead of someone passive that things were happening to.  It gave me a sense of agency, of empowerment, and it at least helped me get some of the information I wanted.  (By the way, this is also what the restorative justice processes I was reading about are designed to do.)

We hear stories all the time about the value of talking across the divide.  So what was the value in this conversation? While it didn’t last long enough for me the ask the question I really wanted to get answered, it humanized by making the “other” into a person. And as I cast my vote, it occurred to me that humanizing others is something our country desperately needs.