Season 1 recap: Back before the election, you may recall I posted asking for guidance on whether I had a duty to respond to my very elderly neighbor’s habit of parading around wearing a MAGA hat. Y’all were wise and helpful in advising me not to waste time on a single individual with whom I don’t have a relationship.
Season 2: This morning I’m a little later than usual on my coffeewalk. I’m about to round the corner towards home, when who appears coming towards me in his motorized chair but MAGA Hat Neighbor (MHN) with Wife walking next to him as usual. Sure enough, there’s a suspiciously red blob on his head, and as he approaches I see that he is indeed still very much MHN.
Not only that. As we’re about to pass in the street, he shouts to his wife in his overly-loud hard-of-hearing voice, “HE MUST BE A DEMOCRAT.”
“ME AS WELL,” I shout down at him, glaring.
He pauses his chair. “EH?”
“ME! AS! WELL!”
We stare for a moment and shake our heads simultaneously at each other, strangely in sync in this one way. He restarts his electric engine and I stride on, still arguing with him in my head and questioning what more I should have said. Then I turn the corner and see:
ALWAYS EXERCISING NEIGHBOR (AEN), the not-quite-so-old White dude who these days seems to be forever on the bike or treadmill in his garage with the door up as I walk by.
I shout to him from the street: “You must have given him a look!”
AEN stops running in place and shouts back, “I GAVE HIM A PIECE OF MY MIND! I told him he’s a traitor and I can’t believe he’s still wearing that after they tried to overthrow the government! I’m gonna catch hell from my wife and mother-in-law in there but I had to say something! I know him and he knows me and I told him straight up, as a veteran he has no business wearing that one day more!”
On and on he goes, and it is like music. This old bald White dude just told off his longtime neighbor in no fucking uncertain terms. I thank him for doing what nobody else can do in the same way: interrupt that silent expectation of White complicity, especially man-to-man White complicity.
As for me – I had my hair up today, didn’t look like my usual curly self. I just hope MHN and Wife recognized me. I want them to know. I want to stand with AEN as we stand together with everyone else who actually wants our democracy to fulfill its unkept promises.
Onwards, friends.