My Friends and Neighbors

by Pa Rock
Rural Resident

I waited until this morning to dig through the Missouri election vote totals.  I knew the results would be depressing, but they were even worse than I had anticipated.  Missouri cast around three million votes for president, and Trump took 1,717,974 of those - or 56.8%, and Biden captured 1,253,660 or 41.4%.   The Republican ticket carried every part of the state with three exceptions:  the metropolitan areas of Kansas City and St. Louis and the liberal area around Columbia, the home of the University of Missouri.  The "outstate" rural areas were all extremely red, and the percentages of votes in those areas tilted much more solidly toward Trump.    

As a case in point, my county, Howell (Howl!), cast a little less than 20,000 presidential votes.   Trump and Mother's boy, Mike Pence, garnered 15,174 of those votes or 81.41% of all votes cast for president in the county.  Biden and Kamala Harris pulled only 3,214 votes or 17.24 percent (and one of those was mine!).  The Libertarian pulled a little over one percent, and a few other minor parties got a handful of votes.

Howell County was particularly disappointing, at least to me, because there are educated people living here.   The county has two fairly nice hospitals and several smaller medical clinics, a four year branch of Missouri Southern University in West Plains, and public schools in every community.  In fact, the city of West Plains has one of the better rural school systems in the state.  Yet four out of five Howell County voters cast their ballots for Trump!

I'm concerned that many of my friends and neighbors - and other local residents - still have not processed the fact that Trump actually lost the election - just as Trump himself seems to have not processed his loss either.  The Trump signs are still up in many yards, and yesterday a pickup truck supporting two large Trump flags blew past my house.  What happens when these delusional diehards wake one morning soon to the realization that Trump really did lose - and he is really moving out of the White House?  Will they accept reality and move on,  or will their paranoia and delusions metastasize into something tangible and sinister -  like overt acts of hatred and violence?

Hillary Clinton spent four years being relatively quiet and staying out of the limelight after her loss to Trump in 2016.  The Obamas, as well, kept low profiles at a time when much of the nation would have liked to have seen them voicing opposition as Trump moved openly to destroy all of what President Obama had achieved while in office.  Unfortunately, sitting quietly on the sidelines does not fit the Trump profile, and there is a real possibility that he will work to disrupt a Biden presidency - and one way to do that would be to keep his supporters stirred up and angry.

And his supporters are my friends and neighbors - the people who keep this little community working.  

The future may be unnecessarily - and unfairly - difficult.  Trump will own that, but he won't care - and America will have to live with it.