I was born and raised in Nebraska, and my wife grew up on a farm her brother and father still live on. It's four miles away from Westboro, MO, a town whose population has sunk below 200 many years ago. Before being pulled to the Washington, D.C. area because of my work a few years back, my wife and I had never lived in a town over the size of 200,000, and we're still most at home when hanging out with the family and friends back home at small-town cafes and restaurants that were favorite haunts as we were growing up. My brother is a Methodist minister serving a church in Lincoln now, but I miss the days when we could drive out to visit him in churches in places like Mullen, North Platte and Broken Bow, Nebraska.
I go through all this biographical background as a way of getting to this point: while I appreciated Sarah Palin's tribute to small-town values at one point in her speech, the values she exhibited in the rest of the speech were not the ones I recognized from the small towns I know. Her sarcasm, even downright nastiness at times, is not representative of the people I grew up with and still love.
My wife, although she loves her small-town roots as I do, always reminds me not to romanticize small-town America. It is true, people sometimes gossip too much about each other there, and I've known some cruel and close-minded folks who live in small towns, just like there are cruel and close-minded folks everywhere you go. But I grew up in a family, church, and community where we were taught to look out for each other, to be kind to one another, to help out the families in our community who were down on their luck. The Sarah Palin I saw last night had a mean streak a mile wide. If me or my brothers and sisters would have been as sarcastic and demeaning to someone as Sarah Palin was last night, my mom would have sent us to our room. I know that Palin was just trying to be funny when she compared herself to a pit bull, but she was just about as nasty as one, and in the dog-loving families I know from small-town America, people generally prefer dogs that will play well with kids and neighbors. And the community organizers that Palin made so much fun of the folks who organized the potluck suppers at church and the Lions Club charities, the ones who really made those small towns go.
Many of my family and friends in small-town America are Republicans, but they're generally not this kind of mean Republican. The modern Republican party likes to call itself the party of Reagan, and Reagan did remind me of a lot of those small-town folks I know and liked- I disagreed with their politics, but they had a friendliness and warmth that I appreciated. Palin and the modern Republican party reminds me a lot more of Nixon, with that dark, resentful streak, more likely to stick a knife in their neighbor's back than give them a helping hand.
I feel like this election is coming down to a choice between candidates who wants to lift the country up and have them look to the future with hope and optimism, and a party that wants to drag us back to the resentments and fears of the past.
The Sarah Palin of last night, who claims to be the ultimate representative of small-town America, is anything but, because the small-town folks I know actually look out for each other.
