Interstitial: The Increasingly Untenable Position of a Listening Between

A luxury it is to reside here between things, more or less, temporarily. As a writing teacher, I get to stand back and take apart images and arguments in the news to show them for their fallacious underbellies without getting too wrapped up in the content, without taking a side. It's more about "how?" than "what?". I have to say the fallacies are rampant on all sides. So are the legitimate gripes. My particular devils have to do with the split in (mostly) white America, between the groups that went to college or didn't, between the ones who stayed in the hometown and those who moved to bigger cities, and especially those who see owning any kind of gun you want as a right and those who see them almost exclusively as tools of police and military. I straddle both worlds and pay a price for that. On one side are the "nutcase" gun totin', holy rollers who are pissed to the gills at globalism and the "elites." On the other are the secular, globe-trotting, craft beer drinking, urbanite yuppies and hipsters who wouldn't touch a gun if it crawled into bed with them. And the gun thing is only part of a deeper divide. The rednecks up there, bummin' and pining for the jobs that went to Korea and China want my blood for having jumped ship and gotten a degree and left my country music, pick-up drinking sessions behind. The Academy, while having provided something of a livelihood, has not exactly embraced me either. I am more at home with criminals than muckity mucks in regalia. It's true that I no longer own a gun, but I do understand the appeal, the feeling of being spurned, the nose bent out of shape of being left with opioids and Bud Light in the Rust Belt. Downward mobility sucks. At the same time I can't see blaming immigrants and liberals for all the problems. Nobody wants to admit that the growing gap between those at the tippy top and the rest of us yawns deeper and wider by the day. That's taboo. Hard work to deal with too. It's an injustice that's going to need all of us working together. I wonder if Trump and his goons are fueling the divide, or if it's just human nature to want to have an enemy, someone to look down on, to feel better about yourself. People, it seems, would rather be damned close-minded, cloistered, and angry. So I hang here all by my lonesome in this rapidly disappearing middle: middle class, middle age, middle intelligence, mid-riff bulge. The teeter is tottering and I'll have to slide one way or the other I guess, as the lines get drawn, leaving nobody here in the no man's land of trying to entertain a thing called dialogue, a respectful back-and-forth, an attempt to see and hear the many sides.