When I need to understand what is happening in America these days, I don’t watch the news, I read the farmer and author  Wendell Berry. He explains it all in his poems and essays.

“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Agrarian Essays

I have my own idea of Election, 2018, my own Guide, which I will pass along to you, quietly and for free. Take it or leave it.

I know what I need to know, I don’t need any more news or projections or polls.  I will turn on the news next Wednesday morning and learn what I need to learn and face my future with good will and an open mind.

As many of you know, my reaction to the increasingly toxic world of politics was to launch the Army Of Good two years ago.

We have done ourselves proud, and I thank you.

I have learned a lot in those intervening two  years, and with your help, done a lot of good. It has grounded me and kept my hopeful and peaceful, or at least, as peaceful as someone like me gets.

I’m just getting started, and I hope this work continues well beyond elections and for the rest of my life.

I have done almost no arguing about politics, sent no nasty messages on Facebook or Twitter. I am quite proud of that too. I don’t wring my hands much or lament the future.

I do  care. I plan to vote this election, and I consider it a private matter, not something I really care to air on Facebook or Twitter. Politics is personal for me, not something I need to fight about.

I know who I’m going to vote for, from U.S. Senate to local congressperson to state assembly to town judge, and I really have little interest in all of the last-minute posturing and frenzy, all the noise coming from the outside world, the world of money, power and greed..

My best  advice to anyone who might ask is to do the same thing.  All will be revealed. I’ve got a new Michael Connolly mystery to read, and a sizzling novel about World War I.

I have a movie I want to see with Maria this weekend, Bingo to call at the Mansion, and a chapter for my next book to write. I have a big fish tank to clean, dogs to train, blog posts to write, photos to take.

If I have learned anything in the past two years, it is this, and I will share it:

I am learning how to listen. A good friend of mine who lives in Boston told me the other day that she can’t imagine how it was that Donald Trump got to be President.

I’ve heard this before, and I told her the same thing I told her. Don’t be mad or frightened about it, and don’t blame the people who voted for him, they are not ignorant and enraged racists, not the ones I know and live with.

If you lived in the country as I do, in the lost and parallel nation some so contemptuously call Rural America, you will understand in a second why Mr.  Trump is our President.

I call rural America the Hollow Country, life here has been hallowed out – no jobs, no kids to stay here, no local pharmacy, clothing store, family restaurant, no money for teachers or schools, no money to treat the horrific waves of addicts and suicides, no downtowns with businesses, no hope for the farmers, for the kids, for the men and women who are so proud and want so much to work.

Almost of our cities in “rural America” are a shambles, Main Streets boarded up,  the only work is part-time work for peanuts, or health care work for pennies.  We have been deemed inefficient and out of touch with the new world order. For a generation, people have watched all of the jobs melt away like mercury.

And it’s been like that a long time. Progressive people – I hope I am one – might stop feeling so anxious and ask themselves why,  if they are so caring and human,  could they not know what is happening here, or do anything about it?

Aren’t progressives supposed to care about everyone?

“A community,” wrote Wendell Berry,” is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which the come and go among themselves.”

Community has been dying here for decades now, and nobody cared. I asked my friend why she didn’t care about the casualties that are everywhere here. Every family has suffered, lost a job, a house, a farm, a child, a brother or son, a shop, a calling, a livelihood.

I am not a supporter of our President, but I understand where he came from and why people love him so much. “I know he can be a jerk,” Ed Gulley told me a few months before he died, “but he seems to somehow know what has happened to us.  This is a miracle to us. We know what he’s like. That’s enough.”

There is nothing in it for me to hate or be angry or contemptuous of other people, or to demonize the other side. It is not what I need, it is not what my country needs. I am awakened now to what it means to be a patriot, to care, to work on behalf of the idea of community, this is partly why I am doing a broadcast for a tiny radio station in Bennington, Vt.

I will face the future with an open mind and an open heart on Wednesday. I will do my part, but quietly. I don’t need Fox News or CNN to tell me what to think.

I will do what I can to listen and learn, and look to stand with people who have big hearts and want to use their new powers to do good. When my neighbor has a job a gain after 20 years of mowing lawns, and his children can stay in our town and find work, and there is someplace to get help for the scourge of opiods that is killing so many of my neighbor’s children, the store come back to Main Street, and the jobs return to the country, and the farmers can survive on their land again, then I think our country will begin to heal and , we shall begin to be one again, to regain our trust in one another, find the freedom to come and go among ourselves in peace and safety.

It will take a lot of work and a long time, and I may not get to see the end of the it. But I am happy to work for it, this chapter starts with my vote on Tuesday.