Margotlog: My Grandmother and the Election

Margotlog: Stunned - My Grandmother and the Election

     Like many of us I went to bed after voting Tuesday, thinking I'd wake up to "Hillary Clinton as President." The result unnerved me so much that I walked around the rest of the day stunned. Passing a few very quiet souls downtown and in my Lex-Ham, St. Paul neighborhood, I hazarded a "How are you?" Their looks said it all. "Surviving," I told a few who beat me to the question. "Surviving."
    Over the last day and a half, I've also been writing suppositions and tidbits about my North Dakota grandmother Augusta Olein. The only child of North Dakota Swedish immigrants to be born in this country, Augusta had a quiet graciousness about her. The few photograhs that remain show a stately, white-haired woman with a bit of jewelry or lace at her neck. It's her handfull of letters that suggest quite a bit more.
     She writes to "Mousie," the young woman who will eventually become my mother. Augusta's loose-limped script spreads across white envelopes, to a Minneapolis address on 13th Avenue, near the University of Minnesota. It's Feb or March or May of 1928, on the cusp of what will become a full-fledged agricultural, then worldwide depression. Augusta notes that "the teachers haven't been paid." She's talking about the two teachers who rent rooms in the family's large North Dakota house. When Augusta's last children, my mother and her twin brother, went off to college, the house felt so empty that Augusta had a nervous breakdown. Not only did she then start taking in teachers as boarders, but eventually my mother's twin brother, Bud, returned to live at home and work for his father's many enterprises.
     Augusta writes about expenses: "Buy a new dress," she urges Mousie. "Get a color you like. Spend as much as $35, but if you can find a nice one for less, that would be dandy" What I hear is the indulgence of a beloved daughter by a mother who now has a small income of her own--the two school teachers' rent money. I don't know what kind of dress Mousie bought, but I do hear that Buddy, her brother, brushed his hair before leaving for the train to visit Mousie in Minneapolis. He wasn't giving up on returning to college yet. "Bud put his comb and brush back on the kitchen shelf where the usually sit," writes August. "I hope he could comb his hair before the two of you set off together. Have Bud buy a comb at a drug store, if you can."
     There is so much we may never know about people whose choices affect us profoundly. I was so sure that Hillary Clinton would be the choice of a majority of American voters. So sure that I did not pause to consider what drew so many to support Trump. There were a few hints: My husband's brother who has never had much money, and now lives quite happily in a Baton Rouge black neighborhood, said to me a few days before the election, "I'm going to miss Trump."
     "You can't be serious," I protested, thinking of Lester's early agitation for equal rights, his summer spent in Mississippi participating in voter registration drives, his lifelong love of Black Music.
     "Yes I am," Lester insisted. "I'm not going to vote for him, but I find him very entertaining."
     This I dismissed as a very back-handed compliment.

     Today, I'm calmer and more resigned. I've also begun to ask that crucial question: what do so many people want that they think Trump can provide? There are probably a million and one answers, some of them negative--the many ways that Hillary gets stuck in people's craw. But an article in The Nation written by a Brit who survived Brexit made me recognize what I had previously slid over: Millions of people are not making it. As Gary Younge says about the calls to "Remain" in the European Union: "From Tony Blair to David Cameron, people who had stiffed working people in a range of ways now insisted they alone could save them" (Nov. 14, 2016, p. 10). "The people" weren't having it.
     I imagine Fran's brother Lester, joining Trump to thumb his nose at Wall Street, where Lester has absolutely nothing at stake. I imagine a former school teacher in the middle of Minnesota cheering. She's been living on around $1000 a month, and supporting a retarded daughter and her infant son. There's the displaced Iron Range workers who want what most of us environmentalists hope fervently to prevent--a revival of the mining industry.
     I don't for a minute think Trump is a life-saver, but he's a real alternative to a status quo from which millions of Americans are not profiting. If building a wall between the US and Mexico means anything beyond xenophobia, it means keeping the jobs available for native born workers. Ditto for NAFTA. If you aren't making enough to live on, it sticks in your craw to hear that some jobs that could be performed here are being purposefully shipped overseas or across the border. Plus, it's one belly laugh after another to hear Mr. T. disembowel the privileged, shimmy up to women who can't resist him, and blow hot and cold about the power elite. It's enough to make a white, mad dog laugh. It's enough to drive droves of white men to be outright gleeful and mean about the one sure sense of power they have--They are not Mexican or Somali or Syrian. They can out-shoot, out-mock, our-strip most women alive. Hatred or denigration of women is one of a negledted white male's most cementing certainty. That, and the confidence that he's "carrying."
      It's enough to make a body weep, if it doesn't drive us all to drink.
     Note: this morning, as my husband and I slowy made our way through the StarTribune, we found toward the back of section 1, four full-page ads for liquor of all kinds. This is unprecedented. "Yup," says the Man of the House to the three cats and one woman, "Yup, they'll be boozing tonight."
     He's probably right. Some boozing out of desperation; others out of "thank God, there's finally hope."