The Two Americas

The term "Two Americas" means different things to different people. A typical bugman who lives in NYC may use it if a local resolution allowing the homeless to shit in the street in front of their four-story walk-up tenement doesn’t pass. "Where else is he going to defecate in the America built by white bigots?" Conversely, a small-town Alabaman may bristle if the idea is floated that their town should host a Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library. "Why do we need drag queens reading to our kids? This isn’t the big city!" Ignoring my obvious bias, it’s clear that one of these situations is different from the other. The bugman’s cultural operating system has been programmed with Progressive fanfic, while the Alabaman is genuinely experiencing the bugman’s worldview encroach upon his "tiny slice of heaven."

As someone who has lived in both NYC and the small-town South, I have formed my own opinion on what the term "Two Americas" should refer to. If people were still allowed to give their honest opinion of others without fear of repercussion (and this would only affect Southerners, right-wingers, etc.), I believe everyone on the side of the true, good, and beautiful would embrace the dialectic and move forward.

True progress can only be made within the parameters you designate and according to the ethos you hold dear. While I believe both the NYC bugman and the Alabaman agree with that statement, it is only the bugman that believes that if they don’t force as many people as they possibly can (aka, everyone) to adopt their worldview, a theoretical genocide is waiting in the wings. Who will be the victims of said genocide doesn’t matter; everything is hypothetical, and tragedy is imminent. You can refer to this type of thinking as high-time preference or psychotic; it doesn’t matter. What is most important is the recognition that this is how the NYC bugman views the world and that even someone who lives 1,000 miles away who thinks differently than him is a threat.

The antithesis of the NYC bugman’s worldview is that of the Alabaman. When confronted about issues that matter the most to him, the Alabaman talks about the pothole in the state road that runs through their town. He mentions that the upcoming festival will bring in people from the surrounding towns. When national politics are brought up, the concern is how it will affect his family, his church, and his town. He doesn’t want or need the NYC bugman to embrace his values. Frankly, if it weren’t for the NYC bugman-diseased tentacles of national politics finding their way into his small town, he would probably only ever address Washington, DC in a passing manner. The Alabaman asks, "How is this going to affect me and those I care about... that which I can control?"

In my thinking, the term “Two Americas” boils down to what has become a trope at this point: those who want to be left alone versus those who will never leave you alone. The average small-town American wakes up in the morning and worries about his world—what he can control and what is most dear to him. The NYC bugman wakes up and worries that the small-town American is concocting some kind of fascist plot to enslave him and his fellow bugpeople. The fact that the small-town American has no real power to do so—and, more importantly, has no desire to do so—means nothing. The small-town American is an existential threat and must be either re-educated or crushed. The Two Americas are order versus chaos and sanity versus insanity. It’s normalcy versus abnormalcy. It’s the ethos upon which America was founded versus a dangerous foreign invader.