I grew up in Mexico, Missouri, but the election makes me wonder if I ever really knew it

[pstokely]

http://www.pitch.com/news/feature-story/article/20845307/i-grew-up-in-mexico-missouri-but-the-election-makes-me-wonder-if-i-ever-really-knew-it

This is what I’m thinking about on the way to Thanksgiving. I’m wondering whether a few days in Mexico will lead me to better understand how some of the people who attended the same public high school I did, and were exposed to the same childhood experiences as me, voted for President-elect Donald Trump.

I know the what’s-going-on-in-rural-America line has lately been well traveled among journalists, among we who make up “the media” that millions of voters mistrust and perceive as out of touch and condescending. But my curiosity isn’t clinical. All year, opening Facebook and hearing from family, what I felt was real and growing alarm. I was baffled at how people I knew could push aside facts and evidence to buy into an infomercial selling a quick fix. The presidential election seems to have turned the Show-Me State in which I was raised into the Show-You State, raising two big middle fingers to crybaby protesters and self-interested liberals and entitlement abusers, even as the disability and farm-subsidy checks keep going out (and getting cashed).

My parents still dwell in my childhood home on the outskirts of Mexico, and my dad works at his job in nearby Kingdom City. This is where Thanksgiving happens. I haven’t lived in Mexico for 18 years, but I was not one of those never-look-back people. After I graduated from college and took my first real job, at the now-defunct Raytown Post in suburban Kansas City — a gig that came complete with verbal abuse from a male-chauvinist editor — I wasn’t unhappy to end up working for my hometown daily newspaper, The Mexico Ledger. I covered city council and school board meetings, spending time in even tinier nearby towns. I wanted to watch out for the disenfranchised, the little guy, the misunderstood. I wrote about a local who was waging a fight against an insurance company. I talked my way into a Valentine’s Day underground cockfighting tournament, around the time that Missouri policymakers were working to ban the activity. Animal-rights groups criticized the article; those who were my sources on the other side wanted to buy me dinner (which, of course, I declined, wondering whether the piece was as objective as I’d intended). I wrote a column about the school district unfairly disbanding a student pep band, and a satirical piece about the vanity, misogyny and “scholarship” of one of the town’s biggest events, the Miss Missouri Pageant.

Four years ago I made good on my duty as senior-class president and planned our 20-year reunion. I knew that some of my classmates held political views much different from mine, but it wasn’t a divisive occasion. We talked about how we’d grown up in a great town.

[WhiteTara]

1. I've been to Mexico Mo and it is just down the road from Paris

but in reality, it is really an armpit community. Downtown shuttered, long dusty streets with nothing at the end and the whites own things and the Mexicans work at the various companies. Ugly and desolate. Sorry if you live there and think it's grand.

[Skittles]

2. I think that is the worse thing about this election

the idea that many Americans voted for that disgusting asshole to be PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES - it is just sickening