NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS:
The Wildest Fire
by Patricia Vaccarino
A few fires are burning out of control in my own neck of the woods. My home in downtown Seattle is a fifteen minute walk to the controversial Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), a hot spot for the Black Lives Matter Protests. My other home on the north coast of Oregon has been deluged with smoke from the wildfires. The notion of fire has an odd way of reminding me of hatred, the burning of America, and my childhood friend Donna Donato.*
Donna Donato is nobody special. Nobody famous. We were Italian girls, white working-class, and went to the same Catholic high school in Yonkers. Our fathers were uneducated and worked with their hands. We thought we were middle-class because our mothers didn’t work outside the home, and we had washing machines and back yards instead of concrete stoops in front of walk-up tenements. Right out of high school, Donna married a Yonkers guy. I left and made a break for it, traveling to see America, bound for the West Coast, where I’ve seen the wildest fires you can imagine.
There is a lot of hate in the air right now, spewing from fires raging out of control. One underlying cause for the hatred is coming from the white working-class. The white working-class has always been largely uneducated and conservative—people I know well because I grew up with them. The same opinions they spouted in the 1970s during my childhood are the same types of opinions that the white working-class voice today—except nowadays they are often expressed in a meme or a tweet.
America is burning up with hatred. Trump does everything he can to fan the flames of hatred. Trump is not a Christian. Trump is not a genuine conservative. Nor is he a genuine nationalist. He’s an opportunist who fans the flames of hatred to stay in power. There is nothing new about fanning the flames of hatred. The lessons I have learned from my past experiences, coupled with my knowledge of history, have made me fearful of people with evil intentions, and especially of people in leadership positions who incite us to hate one another.
For a long time, it seemed unthinkable that any president could use force to take control over America’s democracy. The U.S. military takes an oath to the U.S. Constitution, not to the president. It’s always been inconceivable that any president, including Trump, could deploy U.S. troops to fight for his own personal interests, and especially to win an ill-gotten election. But things have changed. The American government is now steeped in politics based on hatred. Once hatred is embedded in a large group of people, anything can happen. The inevitable outcome is violence.