A Walk Through My Bubble

The view from the bubble on Election Day

The view from my bubble on Election Day

I knew I lived in a bubble. Northern California, where “organic or non-organic?” is a question asked more frequently at a grocery store than “paper or plastic?” since everyone carries an NPR tote bag for groceries. Also, we banned plastic bags, twice. So over the past six months, while I saw a total of three pro-Trump signs in the region, I knew I was getting a skewed view of the election in the city where I’ve lived for almost twenty years. But how skewed, I had no idea. None.

My husband tried to prepare me. “We have twice as a high a percentage of immigrants as any other state in the country,” he reminded me. One in four of the country’s immigrants live in California, in fact. Oakland, the city where I live, has one of the biggest LGBT populations in the country. And while gentrification and the tech worker onslaught is certainly affecting the housing market, we still have a thriving black community in the 5-1-0, not to mention Asian and Latino communities.

That’s not the case everywhere else. I forgot. That’s on me.

I stumbled around the house in shock on Wednesday like most everyone I knew, my stomach tied in knots. I decided that afternoon I’d walk up to the little village near us to buy some groceries. (Northern California hippie life, man; I thought I’d save some gas and get some exercise while buying my organic yams and almond milk that I’d carry home in my nylon back pack.)

As I made the trek up and back to the store, I found myself sharing furtive glances at strangers, all of us acting like we were filing into or out of a funeral. A tiny grimace of shared pain, an effort to project sympathy. In the grocery store, I hugged a married lesbian friend who has teenage kids, but we didn’t talk much. What do you say?

I kept walking. And at some point I began to picture what my bubble would look like if someone took away all the things that make it a bubble. If someone removed the minorities, the immigrants, the queer community, anyone who doesn’t look like me, who looks like all those middle class white women who helped put Trump over the top. What if you could peel people off, like one of those anatomy reference books that show a drawing of a human body and allow you to pull back transparent pages with major organs or circulatory systems.

I walked past a baseball diamond where two guys from the elementary school after-care program organized a fierce game of kickball. Big black guys with long dread locks, trying to tame the squirrel herd that is a mixed age elementary school sports program. I’ve met both those men before, when my daughter was a CIT in their summer program; you couldn’t imagine more gentle, positive, fun guys for your kids to spend their afternoons with. They’d be gone, as would ¾ of the children waiting in line to kick the ball (and for some reason chanting Vanilla Ice raps.)

The two short Asian security guards who work at competing banks in the village but meet up on the corner to chat in their native languages in the afternoon: gone.

My lesbian friend in the grocery store – gone. And with her the Latina checker with whom I trade a lot of recipe ideas; the old Ethiopian man who carefully took the change she gave him and placed it into a collection box for the local food bank; the Asian mom with two kids placing items into her shopping cart and patiently listening as they unspooled their school day to her. Seventy-five percent of quartet of middle school girls watching an iPhone video and giggling outside the frozen yogurt store, which would also be gone because its owners are minority.

Take all that vibrancy and diversity away and who would be left in my village?

Me. White hetero Nancy. Plus my white friend Kathleen who runs the bookstore, and the white middle school girl outside the nonexistent froyo store. Unless of course she turns out to be gay.

What I wish is that I could invite some people who live in very different parts of the country than I do into my bubble, to see for themselves that living among people unlike me isn’t scary. I don’t feel threatened. I am a minority in some places I go, and that’s ok. I sometimes don’t understand what people are talking about near me because I don’t speak their language. But I presume that, like me, they’re completely self-absorbed and I’m very likely NOT their Topic A. Gays and lesbians? Especially as I get older, I fail to understand why doubling your chances to get flirted with is a bad thing.

Of course, opening the bubble works both ways. I need a better understanding of what I so dreadfully misunderstood up until now. I found this article extremely enlightening. I forced myself to read the blog post of young relative of my husband’s who is adamantly pro-Trump. I won’t link to the post, because he is also anti-immigrant despite the fact that his immigrant uncle, my father-in-law, supported this young man’s extended family in myriad ways during his life. But I will keep reading stuff like it. To better understand the anger, because how do you address the root of a problem if you’re unwilling to dig in the dirt?

And I’ll keep fighting, inside my bubble and out, to protect and project the values with which we have tried to raise our teenage daughters: respect for others, a love of learning, hard work, honesty, and kindness.

And gratitude at the good fortune that lets us live where we do.

One day. I still want to believe it.