Lost cause

Editor’s note: I wrote but never published this in late January 2021, just a few weeks after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and about two years into going low contact with my parents and no contact with my sister. It has taken three years, but I finally feel ready to share it. — Lindsey

On Jan. 6, I was in a video conference call for work when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. I couldn’t take my eyes off Twitter: Reporters were posting horrifying video clips of the crowd overrunning the police and breaking through windows. My first instinct was to hold my panic because those videos weren’t in context. Surely I couldn’t see the full story. Surely this thing I’d feared wasn’t happening.

But then I saw the images of the man parading the Confederate flag through the rotunda.

It felt like a nightmare. It is a nightmare.

That guy could have been any one of the hundreds of neo-Confederate shit-kickers I grew up around — low-information bubbas who are pissed off about everything and they don’t have any idea why. My whole life they’d been saying “The South will rise again” and they meant it, they always meant it, and here was proof that they weren’t just talking shit. They want a white Christian ethnostate, even if some of them don’t think of what they desire using those words. That flag took its place in the rotunda among the other flags of tribalistic, fascistic hatred — Nazi flags, Trump flags, the “don’t tread on me” flag that is brandished almost exclusively by assholes.

I pored over every image and video coming out of the Capitol, looking for familiar faces.

I had to chuckle a little bit. In my heart I knew my dad wouldn’t be part of the crowd because he’s too afraid of Black people and planes to ever travel to D.C.

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When my son was mere days old, his head still producing that intoxicating newborn smell, my family came to meet him. My father wore a Confederate officer’s hat, a complement to his antebellum-inspired bushy gray beard. He produced a Confederate flag blanket, draped it over Holden in his crib, and began taking photos. I was uncomfortable but figured I should, as I had done so many times before, indulge my father this moment to revel in his weird obsession. He beamed looking at his new grandson, a fresh foot soldier in the war against “political correctness.”

Heritage not hate was the official line, but there wasn’t a day that went by where my father couldn’t find an opportunity to be racist or xenophobic in some way. Exasperation at phone operator menus requiring him to select English vs. Spanish, annoyance if he encountered someone with an even vaguely foreign accent, anger when he would see products with instructions in other languages, revulsion toward rap music and Black pop culture, an immovable belief that Barack Obama was both foreign-born and the literal antichrist, horror and anger when my cousin got engaged to a Black man.

Mixed-race marriages were doomed and selfish, he said. Just think of the children produced by such a marriage! They will grow up to be scorned, to be seen as less than by society. It’s just not right to bring mixed-race children into the world, he said.

I’d grown weary over the years of arguing about these things. Even if I could back him into a rhetorical corner, he’d say to me: It’s my opinion. It can’t be racist because it’s my opinion. It was like he was trying to pull the conversational equivalent of playing rock, paper, scissors and then pulling out God, who beats all three.

Holden’s dad was upset that I let my father take those Confederate blanket photos. At the time, I thought it was easier to just let it happen than to make a big deal about it. I was worried about hurting my dad’s feelings. Now I think about that moment all the time, and I cannot believe I just stood by while it happened. I feel humiliated, small, angry.

I could have just said no.

Why didn’t I just say no?

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I haven’t blogged a lot about politics or anything else much since Holden was born. Your time gets siphoned off in unexpected ways when you become a parent. I used to set my keyboard ablaze during the George W. Bush years, chronicling every outrage I could muster and spitting epithets at politicians enabling and accelerating the rot.

The Trump years have been brutal. I’m not sure I could have kept up with writing about the outrages, honestly. They came quickly and constantly: The Muslim ban, the child separation policy and the cages, the corruption, the grifting, the stupid blank-paper props, the judges, the judges, the judges, the constant campaigning, the violence, the paid-off porn stars, the gutting of regulations and unspooling of protective policies meant for the benefit of future generations. The obvious invocation and protection of white supremacy at all costs through policy and both coded and explicit language. The lies, so many goddamned lies, just tiny cuts to the flesh of our daily lives, slice after slice after slice, compromising the structural integrity of our shared reality. Then there was the obvious fascism-sickness in this man, this utterly small man who’d lived his entire life as a malignant cancer, mutating and degrading everything he touched. He played footsie with dictators and obviously wanted that life for himself: A life where there could only be adoring fans and those punished if they did not adore him enough. A life above all accountability.

It’s hard for me to imagine of a more godless man, someone more broken inside, more bereft of basic humanity than Donald Trump. He is the antithesis of Christlike. But the Christians rally for him in a way that has shown clearly that they prize power over kindness, justice, and empathy. The Christian church is hemorrhaging congregants in part because its members’ hypocrisy has been laid bare by this man, who cares for little but power and his own gratification.

Rural white America bought into his shtick with gusto. After eight years of enduring a Black man as president, they wanted their liberal tears and what better way to extract those tears than through the blunt force trauma of a pro wrestling carnival barker-cum-authoritarian who would make everyone — especially the libs — bend the knee eventually?

I wasn’t surprised when my parents boarded the Trump train. They’ve reliably voted Republican since the Clinton sex scandal in the 1990s. And they hate Hillary Clinton. Hate. But it was when they started talking about Donald Trump as the righteous choice, the path forward illuminated by God, that was difficult to swallow. We had had an actual family man in the White House for eight years — a churchgoing do-gooder married to his longtime sweetheart — and he was the literal devil to them. My dad told me with great relish on dozens of occasions that Obama was bound to get shot, everyone hated him so much. But then a nonbelieving, grifting, lying, rapey, adulterous “businessman” (who actually has tanked every business he’s been involved with) came along and swept Christians off their feet? Uh, okay. My mother once tweeted that Donald Trump was “dynamic and interesting” because he’s not like all those other politicians. Then her social media posts got more radical. Trump was fighting literal demons in the Democratic party. Literal demons.

My parents and I had never been able to comfortably talk about politics but it became impossible once Trump was the Republican frontrunner in 2016. My dad believed whole-heartedly that Hillary Clinton personally oversaw a child sex ring. I wasn’t able to dissuade him from any of the lies or grifts, big or small. It was all just bullshit, and both my parents ate it up. My sister too. They were radicalized by living in their bubble and consuming unfettered lies from Fox News and whatever right-wing disinformation machines were pumping nonsense into their social media feeds.

I lost them.

Or, more accurately, they were lost.

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I paused while writing this post to confess to my husband that I am ready to be done with them, to cut off all future possibility of reconciliation because they cannot be saved and our relationship cannot be salvaged. And because they don’t seem interested in having a relationship with me. The best my dad can do, apparently, is send the occasional rambling text message accusing me of tearing the family apart and telling me my mother is ready to die.

Richard, always pragmatic and thoughtful, cautions against the nuclear option. He spent many years not interacting with his own father very much, and he has regrets about that. But he said he understood and would support whatever decision I made about that.

“Putting time and energy into having a relationship with you is the best thing I’ve ever done with my life,” he said. “I think other people should take that time and energy too, because you’re wonderful.”

I take this small gift from him and I hold it close to me so that I can believe it too.

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I was raised on a diet of lies. My formative education was of course a mess of Eurocentric, jingoistic, whitewashed propaganda. The education I got at home and in my community was flush with Lost Cause mythology. We went to Civil War battlefields and museums on vacation. My dad had a period-appropriate brass horn he’d use to call us downstairs in the morning. He enjoyed traveling the Southeast to LARP as a re-enactor and I went and watched him in “battle” a few times. My parents renewed their vows in full Confederate regalia. Those things were sort of kooky — novelties I could roll my eyes at but ultimately abide, because family, amirite?!. Our house was decked out with artwork depicting Civil War scenes — giant paintings chronicling epic battles and heroic depictions of the generals and soldiers who fought so bravely against Northern aggression. The rebel flag was on everything — pillows, throws, magnets, commemorative plates, burlap sacks draped over rusted milk urns with cotton sprigs sticking out (yes, really). It was ugly to my eyes so I just worked harder to try and take photos from angles where you couldn’t see all that mess.

Underneath the kooky performative stuff was a real undercurrent of harmful misinformation. My dad fancied himself a scholar of Civil War history and preached until his face was red that the war had been fought over the concept of states’ rights, as if that concept exists in a vacuum, disconnected from the context: States’ rights to uphold an economic system dependent on chattel slavery of Africans. He railed that Abraham Lincoln was the worst president of all time and talked about how a lot of enslaved people were happy and had benevolent masters who took care of them as if they were family. He told us that Black soldiers took up arms against the Northern army — a true testament to how the South had been unfairly maligned for how it treated African Americans. He taught us that those who fought for the South were noble folk doing what was right for their communities, for their families. He was ecstatic when he came into possession of a tin portrait of our familial link to the Confederate Army. Private Green, a distant cousin of ours, had fought bravely for the South, we were told.

Without a flinch of irony, my father kept a Confederate flag and an American flag raised on the same pole in our yard. He loved America, somehow, and considered himself a real patriot, unlike immigrants, homosexuals, welfare moms, feminists, and ungodly secular humanists. He stockpiled guns and ammo because some day we’d be in another war and he was going to be ready. He was going to be a hero.

In high school I learned how to use Geocities to build webpages. I was so proud of this new skill that somehow I ended up making a website for my father’s chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I can’t remember if I offered or he asked, but I did it. That led to me message boards where people were debating the Confederate flag and the legacy of the Confederacy. I posted several times in defense of the flag because I felt like people were attacking my father, who I believed to be rough around the edges but well meaning. I wanted to stand up for him, for our legacy as oft-persecuted and mocked Southerners.

It’s about heritage not hate, I said. I insisted that people who interpreted the flag as anything other than a historical relic commemorating Southern folks’ ancestors were deliberately trying to find something to be offended about. I said just because people felt hurt by it didn’t make it a hurtful thing on its face. I had no concept of how I was centering white people exclusively in my definition of “Southern people.” I completely overlooked how talking about “Southern heritage” in terms of the Confederate flag erased the experience of Black Southerners who’d grown up in the shadow of that flag, subject to state-sanctioned brutality while being told that the Constitution covered all Americans.

I felt very smug about my rhetorical prowess on those message boards. I was parroting the bullshit I had been taught and it made my dad proud to see me doing battle on his behalf. I was maybe 16 years old and my parents’ pride was my chief currency.

I undoubtedly caused harm to people of color by participating in those arguments and perpetuating misinformation. I feel a lot of unresolved shame about that. And I’m sure I have done untold harm moving through the world and having to unlearn hateful ideology bit by bit. But I’m determined to use my mistakes as fuel to do better, to break cycles that need to be broken.

Every now and again I see a headline about another Confederate statue coming down and I wonder if to my dad it seems that the entire world is ending. It’s petty but I smile.

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It’s been two years since I set foot in my parents’ home, where I lived from about age 10 until I went away to college at 18. It is the house that contains my baby book and mementos, childhood videos and photo albums, old clothes and toys. My cats are there (assuming they are still alive*). Sometimes I think about all the pieces of me I left in that house that I will never get back, and I feel deeply sad and tired.

The last day I saw my father in person, he got into an altercation with my husband (which I have written about on this blog) but he also ranted and raved — apropos of absolutely nothing — about Black women and how disgusting they are. How that’s why Black men prefer white women, the implication being that even Black men (who are lesser humans by definition, in his opinion) won’t settle for Black women.

It’s my opinion. It can’t be racist because it’s my opinion.

I pushed back, however impotently one can push back against a brick wall.

When we left that day I wondered if I’d ever be back.

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I don’t know what’s going to happen this week or beyond regarding the insurrectionists who staged a putsch at the Capitol. This was always the plan and Trump has laid the groundwork for it through words and actions since day one. If you were paying attention, you knew it was coming. He’s said all along he would never trust an election he lost. And now he has gone all in on the big lie and people are dead, which is tragic enough, but people are still pissed off and ready to fight for this lie for the foreseeable future. The cult seems ready to overthrow the democratically elected government for him.

This is fascism. It’s propped up and accelerated by a coalition of cynical and power-hungry Republicans, Christian nationalists, Nazis and neo-Confederates, QAnon nutbars, and everyday Meemaws and Papaws who have been radicalized by a steady diet of disinformation and garbage online and on Fox News and Newsmax.

I peeked at my mom’s Twitter feed today and it confirmed my worst fears: That she’s fully in the cult. My mother, the sweet and smart retired RN who taught me to love wordplay, is posting memes about how social distancing mandates are akin to Hitler’s activities. At 2 a.m. a few days after the insurrection, she tweeted: “NEW PARTY FORMING! We must disassociate ourselves with Godless Democrats and spineless turncoat RINOs. If you love God, family, and country, you qualify.”

I have been mourning the growing chasm between me and my family for years but seeing my mother slip into the disinformation abyss like this is painful. I think constantly about what more I could have done to help any of them stay connected to reality.

Sometimes I remember things like the time they came to Holden’s first birthday party right before the 2012 election and stole the Obama sign out of my yard. I think about all the times my father has decried my education and told me (in not these exact words, but close) that going to college made me into some bleeding heart idiot who would wake up a Republican some day once I came to my senses. I think about how he texted me out of the blue back in August that the things I posted on social media were condemning my soul to Hell, and how he’d be contacting legislators about bills to “defund colleges that teach socialism” (the implication being that my mass comm degree from MTSU somehow radicalized me rather than, say, exposed me to diverse viewpoints that helped me contextualize a complicated world and armed me with skills that have kept me employed and out of their hair for my entire adult life). How my sister talked to me like absolute garbage when she learned I had gotten an abortion several years ago. How on my wedding day my dad tried to talk to me about giving my life to Jesus and when I told him I didn’t have time for that talk — that I had to go and set up my own wedding — he gave me the silent treatment for the entire day. Even up to the moment when he walked me down the aisle, which was a ritual I had only included in the wedding (vs. me walking alone down the aisle) because I knew it would hurt his feelings if I didn’t give him that honor. I spent time at my wedding in the bathroom crying because my dad was giving me the cold shoulder.

I think about how my family told me all the time, starting when I was very little, that I was too much of a pushover. “You let people run all over you, Lindsey” was a familiar refrain. I was too sensitive, too in my head, too soft and easily wounded.

They were right. After all, I had been letting them run all over me my whole life.

But my sensitivity was never a weakness. My softness was never a shortcoming.

These things are important parts of who I am. They are what make me a good observer, someone who notices details and patterns. When I was younger, these things kept me safe. My sensitivity helped me anticipate the volatile moods around me so I could shrink into the shadows or come into the light accordingly. My softness helped my heart and mind stay open to wonder and new experiences, new wisdom.

But most importantly, these parts of me help me see through artifice and connect the dots between love and justice, even when it’s painful. Especially when it’s painful.

And I’m not ashamed of that. I’m grateful for who I am, even if it doesn’t align with how the people who have known me longest but know me least see me.

* Jack and Sally have now both passed away. RIP Gingerballs and Freckleface.