Blue Guy? Red State? Discuss.

I’m one of those pointy-headed elitist East-Coast liberals who apparently pissed people off enough in 2016 to cost Hillary Clinton the election and install the most manifestly incompetent and dangerous president in our history.  To be completely accurate, I’m not actually from the East-Coast. I was born and raised in Toledo, which used to be the punch line for a lot of jokes about places where you can find your cause of death officially listed as boredom.  But no one ever talks about commie pinko Midwest liberals, so I’ve self-aligned with all those disreputable New Yorkers and Bostonians.  Also, I tend to talk faster than most folks here, who can make short declarative sentences and simple right turns into major life epochs, so I’m often asked if I’m from New York, but I’m not. It’s just that I can make the leap from noun to verb to object without having to call a committee meeting.

I ended up in Bloomington, Indiana by employing a circuitous route through Chicago, Houston, Chicago again, then Champaign,  and finally home sweet home, where my wife and I raised our sons and have spent the biggest part of our adult lives.  At first I thought landing here involved angering the gods to the point where they didn’t need to send me to hell, but figured I’d gain significant benefit by some experience in purgatory.  It turns out I wasn’t completely wrong, but I couldn’t initially see the view of heaven from here, and the view is pretty spectacular.  The other side of that coin, the part that at times is hard to reconcile, is where the whole “Blue Guy in a Red State” comes in.

The people of Indiana are basically good decent folk who care about their homes and their children and each other.  They live for high school basketball and football, spend Memorial Day weekends with a quarter million like-minded people watching South American millionaires drive in circles at high speeds, and have an abiding love of pork products of all kinds.  They also overwhelmingly love their lord, Jesus.  Vice President Mike Pence, previously the governor of the Hoosier state, once famously declared, “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican…in that order.”

Therein lies some of my issues.  For one thing, I’m not just an elitist liberal, I’m an agnostic Jew (with occasional episodes of purely magical thinking).  When I first started as the radiologist at Greene County General Hospital, I seriously don’t think most of the people I encountered had ever seen an actual Jew before.  It took me a good year to convince them I wasn’t hiding horns under my buzz cut, and I didn’t sup on Christian babies at my evening meal.

It goes without saying that most Hoosiers enthusiastically pulled the lever for Donald J. Trump on November 8.  It was with considerable chagrin and not insignificant anger that I saw Trump’s clown-like face with a large red “Indiana” and a larger red check mark above it the very first thing when I tuned in to MSNBC that fateful night. Right there in the middle of the US map, was a big solid red Indiana…before even Mississsippi or Alabama weighed in .  And at the same time, I imagined myself as a tiny imperceptible point of blue just a bit south of state’s center on that map.

There you have it.  Blue Guy in a Red State.  I’ve got some stuff to say.  Stay tuned.