on the road back to South Bend | w[h]m pt.5

It’s a 10 hour straight-shot from my great aunt & uncle’s homestead in rural Arkansas to South Bend, Indiana, but my travels have taught me that the best route between two points is rarely the most direct one...

That’s why, on my final why [here] road trip, I decided to chart a long, roundabout path that took me to national historic sites, a national park, and some wonderfully underappreciated cities before making it back to South Bend and eventually, my Grandparents' home in the Wisconsin Dells.

The most notable part of that multi-day drive to South Bend was witnessing historic spring flooding along the Arkansas River at three distinct points - Fort Smith, Pine Bluff and Little Rock - before heading onto Memphis. While most of the world moved on at its usual tempo, I saw how lives were being drastically altered in the southern Heartland thanks to the ill-effects of our iminent climate crisis.

Due to the geographically distributed nature of my work and relationships, I’ve always relied on social media as a way to communicate the experiences I’m having and the perspectives that I hold as a result of them. Generally, this has brought a lot of beautiful and uncommon insights and connections into the world through people’s interactions with what I was sharing, but, especially during the persistent social strife that emerged through much of the 2010s, the forums my posts often created had a tendency to become more and more polarized and volatile leading up to my pilot in 2019.

Such was the case when I tried to share some of my first-hand insights from the historic flooding in Arkansas through Facebook. When a number of more progressive peers engaged with the post, I was met with an acknowledged lack of empathy for a region of the country that they monolithically perceived as a poor, white and bigoted bastion of self-sabotaging Trump supporters. Sure, the communities I encountered include working class whites who vote conservatively, but they also included African-American families who had inhabited the Arkansas Delta since their ancestors had been brought there against their will, Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee families who had been relocated to and settled in Fort Smith, and Latin American migrant families who now work much of the arable land and substantially contribute to our economy today. But the brunt of feedback I received essentially asserted that these folks deserved what was happening to them because of the way their state predominantly voted in federal elections.

It reinforced for me that the climate crisis (and many of our other existential challenges) doesn’t discriminate by race or creed at the end of the day - that occurs when these crises map along manmade systems and structures - and solidarity around these issues would lead to mutually beneficial outcomes for all folks affected by them. I already knew this going into my journey and was even more affirmed by the end of it, but these interactions crystalized that for me. One of the long-term goals of my work is to help people manage the complexity between our disparities and our differences in order to make that solidarity possible - this interaction was exactly why.

A few years later, a derecho - or inland hurricane - would tear its way through northeastern Iowa, leaving communities there displaced and without power for upwards of a week. As a place where members of my extended live, I had a unique insight into the impact and local disaster response, and when a conservative-leaning cousin of mine there took to social media to complain about how the national media had neglected to cover their hardships, I dug a little deeper to realize that Kamala Harris VP announcement had overshadowed and buried the derecho - just as the Queen's funeral services, the migrant flights to Cape Cod, and Trump’s Mar-A-Lago document raid would do for Puerto Rico when Hurricane Fiona crippled the island last September - leaving my cousin justified in her frustration. Indicating a greater failure in the stories we share and consume, and how they relate to the growing mistrust and disdain by disenfranchised and disregarded folks against mainstream news media.

For me, the society we advocate for has to be better for everyone; we don't get to be selective about whose quality of life we seek to improve. Because every time we try to pick and choose, we inherently create an "other" who we risk excluding, demonizing and radicalizing against those communities and efforts in the process. Exclusion can look like many things, but when that “other” loses their sense of belonging to the greater whole, a lot of retaliatory harm can occur.

We’ve seen this through the counter-movements against social justice initiatives - like the conflict between Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, the vehement support of populist demagogues - like Donald Trump and the brand of politician he has paved way for, and voting against one’s self-interest - like climate change-denying policies in flood prone regions of the Mississippi and Arkansas River Delta.

…I reflect on the communities that I saw underwater throughout Arkansas whenever I lose sight of the reality that we’re better struggling together than we are fighting apart in the face of what’s to come.