“America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution.” As the New Yorker’s David Remnick points out, that’s from the opening paragraph of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the “mandate for leadership” that is guiding the current dismantling of our government.
Reading through last week’s Independent, I had a hard time figuring out which of those two camps the people we wrote about were members of.
Take Jerry Cerasale, who is running for re-election to the Eastham Select Board, for example. He worked in Washington for the U.S. House Committee on the Post Office and Civil Service, which might make the folks at the Heritage Foundation give him the side eye. But he sounds rather reasonable. “We have to keep the town livable, because housing prices are so high here,” he says, adding, “I sit down and I think about what people have to say, and I try to be as fair as I can in looking at it.”
Or take Suzanne Bryan, another Eastham candidate “with really strong viewpoints.” She says, “We need to protect the environment. We need to work on housing. We need to work on climate resilience and value the public library and education.” All that shoring up of things can’t be the agenda of a revolutionary, can it?
Then there’s candidate Brian Earley, who favors “market solutions” and says we ought to live in the “American System,” which was big on tariffs and popular in the 19th century. That sounds anti-woke. But then he talks about homelessness. “We ought to be taking care of our less fortunate,” he says, “the elderly, people who haven’t been able to work, people who are living on the streets.” Does he know Elon Musk would not approve?
A lot of people here have devoted their lives to nature and our environment. Last week we heard from Greg Skomal and Megan Winton, who defend sharks against illegal fishing, and from David Bernstein, who’s worried about staff cuts at the National Seashore. Mike Rathgeber, our fishing columnist, is no fan of government regulation, but he wants the tuna permit rules refined “to protect the guys and gals who do this fishing to pay their mortgages as opposed to the young guns who borrow Daddy’s center console to catch a giant for bragging purposes and photo ops.”
And a lot of other people here are artists, like writer Kevin Fitchett, who finds drama “in why we care about breakages that are small compared to civil war or right whales going extinct.”
In truth, when you actually talk to people and get to know them, it’s not that easy to divide them into two warring factions based on political ideology. The people who live in our small towns, at least — and I suspect in towns and cities all across America — are too varied and complex in their passions to be reduced to such a simple formula.
Isn’t that the real beauty of this nation, our real heritage to be defended?
