July 13’s assassination attempt in Butler, PA, claimed the life of an innocent bystander who died protecting his family and wounded two others in addition to former president Trump. This tragic and shocking event occurred just 110 miles from our offices here in north central West Virginia, and 70 miles from that of Matthew Ferrence, who teaches at nearby Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. In a spirit of reflection and dialog, and with the utmost respect for those whose lives will be forever changed by this tragedy, we offer chapter seven, “Violence,” from Matt’s forthcoming book, I Hate it Here, Please Vote For Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay (August 1, 2024).

I.

I am in high school. It is May, a blessed half day. My friends and I sit at a pizza joint for lunch. We are band kids and swimmers, good students. Seniors.

Another group sits behind us, underclassmen, football jocks. Among them is a class clown who deploys the pull-out–the-chair trick on a backup linebacker. The linebacker falls on his ass, which we don’t see. His drink spills on top of him, which we also don’t see.

But we hear the laughter, turn to view the linebacker haul himself from the ground. The class clown can’t hold back. This is all just so flat out hilarious. The air shifts. The linebacker coldcocks the class clown, who collapses in a heap.

The shock of silence. The aversions of gazes. My friend Andy standing beside me.

“That’s not right,” he says. And the linebacker threatens him.

And Andy again, “That’s not right.”

Things settle. No more punches are thrown. The class clown fetches the linebacker a new drink. Andy sits back down, mutters that none of us stood with him, which is true.

I think about the pizza-house punch often. I think it has a lot to do with why I ran for office. I thought about Andy often while campaigning, the courage of his standing and the cowardice of the rest of us.

I think, most of all, about my own fear. I was not ready, then, to take a punch, literal or figuratively.

* * * 

Throughout the election season of 2020, a jacked-up pickup truck exhaust-bombed the College every afternoon. Main Street runs through the middle of campus, an orientation that stops traffic every hour as students stream across the road.

Maybe that was the truck’s protest as it revved through campus, twin stacks breaking the quiet and rolling coal. Probably not. The protest was a threat, which spawned conversations and suspicions with colleagues about the concern of shit going bad after the election, how we all expected it in some way as autumn arrived. We worried campus would be vulnerable. A target. The College itself told us they had a security plan in the works, just in case.

I wish I could dismiss our fear as paranoia, but at some level, the roaring of a truck’s exhaust was intended to remind us all of the risk of standing up. It meant to stoke the fear of calling attention to ourselves. It confirmed our fear that violence would be the consequence of breaking the local social order.

* * * 

The fundamental vocabulary of politics is steeped in violence.

Political campaigns have “war chests” and “war rooms.”

Metaphors teach us how to make sense of the world, which is itself a mysterious panoply of electric impulse and light. Metaphors teach us how to approach experience, and the language of politics has grown ever more violent.

When everything is pitched battle, when words themselves are sharpened and packed with gunpowder, we are preparing ourselves for further violence.

* * * 

Violence is embedded in our sense of self, of what we call triumph, of how we see fierce as a marker of pride, of who we include and exclude, and how dented doors and broken windows and late-night shouting street arguments are not an aberration of the violence we endure and commit in rural America.

This is what is from here, what stays here, what we make when we decide we are fine with the perpetual violence, personal and communal, that marks our days.

Let me put it this way: Autumn brings us both Election Day and the culmination of high school football season. Fortunes are defined.

* * * 

The poet James Wright writes in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” about football and poverty and rage and the abandonment of the Ohio River Valley, itself not far from where
I live:

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

* * * 

When I was in junior high, playing saxophone in the marching band, sitting in the stands on a Friday night like every fall Friday night, I watched the field with the rest of the hushed crowd while the ambulance rolled onto the grass, and the paramedics cut the jersey off a boy who sat in my homeroom, and they hauled him away, and he was in school the next day laughing that it was just a cracked rib.

II.

Lately, friends have opened serious conversations about learning to shoot guns. For the first time in their lives, they recognize a version of the fevered urgency that animates gun-fetish 2A radicals. When your daily experience is awash in threats of violence, it is perhaps natural to think about having your own violent response. This is, after all, more or less the entire marketing ploy of both the NRA and the GOP.

Since I grew up on a farm shooting groundhogs, and since I worked as the shooting sports director of a Boy Scout camp after college, and since I am identified by my friends as some kind of semiredeemed Appalachian hillbilly, partly because I used to drive a pickup truck and mostly because people not from rural places aren’t really quite sure what being an Appalachian means and slip far too easily into easy cliché misunderstandings, they ask me about guns.

Of course, it is true that I know how to shoot guns, and I have shot them, and I have killed animals and eaten them, and I have generally participated in a rural culture alien and sometimes disturbing to folks who did not grow up in places where a skinned deer hanging from the backyard walnut tree is no big deal.

So far, I have not showed any of these friends how to shoot. I do not, in fact, own any guns. Not at the moment.

During my campaign, however, I thought about asking my father for one of my old guns. When the white supremacists started paying attention to me online, when the general threats that sadly come with the territory of being a rural Democrat started feeling real, I wondered if I should retrieve my .30-40 Krag, just in case.

* * * 

The boy who was punched was like us: scrawny, maybe a little gawky, funny. He wasn’t a jock himself though he was on the football team. Later, he’d start acting in school plays, and if the sorting of high schools had more flexibility, he would have been sitting with us.

But he wasn’t sitting with us. In fact, he was out of place, or maybe just didn’t quite understand his place. He’d fashioned a fit, I guess. Class clown, jester, the funny jock who wasn’t really a jock. At the pizza joint, he miscalculated. Maybe a half-day giddiness got the best of him.

I remember the hush, that moment when the air changes. A pause. No one quite knows what has happened or what will. Let’s leave it there for a moment: a linebacker sitting on the floor, a paper cup of cheap pizza joint pop frozen in flight. A cascade of liquid and ice. The face of the linebacker is a shocked grimace, then slowly narrowed to anger. The class clown is gleeful, lightness still flickering in his eyes at the moment the frame speeds back to life.

One punch. A slapping noise, really, less resonant than what you hear in movies. The class clown is on the floor, holding his jaw. The linebacker stands over him, wide hipped and solid. Cocked for another, if he needs it.

“That’s not right,” Andy says, standing too.

I don’t remember the act of his standing, but for thirty years I have seen him standing tall. He was a solid boy, tall and muscled and quick to flash anger. He faces the table of jocks. The rest of us look at our pizza.

“That’s not right,” Andy says again.

* * * 

We carry the wounds of high school with us forever.

There’s nothing brilliant in that statement because we’ve all gone through it. Our bodies and minds shift from kid to not-kid while expectations of our future gather around us. The alleged grown-ups of our lives apply the pressure of social order, voiced as anxieties about permanent records or getting into a good college or getting a good job or getting through whatever phase has become the mode of cultural panic.

Adolescence carries so much weight. Too much. You never want to be the freak, and you almost always feel like you are.

Sometimes our personal freakishness leads to garden variety hurt, the kind that helps us grow. Sometimes the hurt is deep and lasting. Except it isn’t the freakishness that hurts. It’s the discipline against freakishness, the atmosphere of threat and exposure. Again, I offer no deep wisdom. We all went to high school.

We also all live the rest of our lives in the wake of high school, which likely created foundational cracks that make it impossible to get the roofline of our adultness to fully square up. So we keep trying over and over again to fix an amorphous flaw, return to moments without knowing we’re doing it, and try to walk in a different direction.

But what did Thoreau say, about paths? About how quickly he’d worn one in the grass outside his shack? Our habit, maybe even instinct, is to repeat the paths we know. That means we spend our lives witnessing the reverberating storms of adolescent anger, always facing the choice to sit or stand up when someone gets punched in the face for breaking the unwritten codes of social hierarchy.

III.

I consider, now, the shared paths between my state rep and me. Catholic kids. Small town kids. Rural kids. Kids who maybe didn’t go far enough away for college. Kids who probably both worried about catching the eye of bullies.

My state rep is a dark mirror, an anti-me as much as I am an anti-him. He hates poets, and I am a writer. He attacks teachers, and I a professor. He rails against funding things he sees as frivolous. I rail against the inhumane nature of spending priorities that allow poverty to flourish.

The hardest truth: I see my state rep, and I understand my state rep, because I have known my state rep all my life, and I could have easily become the same kind of person. It’s a frightening admission, considering the narrow margins between right wing zealot and not: different dominance, different group, different high school balance, different parents. I was lucky.

I grew up as a socially conservative Catholic kid in a rural high school. I remember answering “Ronald Reagan” when our civics teacher asked which US presidents could be defined as truly great. I remember the teacher chuckling, saying “maybe,” but leaving it at that.

I know better now, and I should have understood better then, but I did not. It’s hard to understand the gravity of rural conservatism when you’re a kid, particularly when the historic righteousness of Republicanism sticks to its contemporary soullessness.

My friends all left town for college, to places that count as prestigious. I stayed home at the state university, because it was free, and because I was afraid to leave, and because I have always loved where I am from even when I hate it. Maybe I have always sensed, and therefore refused, the bullshit narratives of rural America that your only chance comes if you leave it. We are hollowed by these departures. We’re left with the dynamics of our learned violence, and those who stay face a difficult choice. Do we throw down with the people who favor the system we’ve got, that works only for a few? Or do we work to build a different world?

I mean this in a generous way: Politicians like my state rep legislate in a way they believe will save their communities. They are wrong but they—how do you really say this?—mean well. They do. They think they understand the nation and themselves, even though their actions are almost always described by their role as puncher or punched. They are either bully or victim to a bully.

I cannot pretend to see any goodness in their sort of -political philosophy -because such politicians, and such voters, are blinded by the sirens of American economic vio-lence. So many of us have been harmed by the dynamics of the American economy, and instead of fighting to rework that system, so many wind up simply trying to get on the winning side of harm.

They wobble up -after being punched and fetch a new pop for the puncher. Too many spend their lives tearing down the same -people their own bullies tear down, and too many elected officials spend their days figuring out how to stay on their bullies’ good sides. I cannot imagine a more miserable curse. But I also understand how easy it would be to accept it as your fate.

* * * 

We act on our wounds. That’s how narratives work, on the pages of a novel and in our lives. High school wounds us all. I joke about that with my writing students often, that now’s the time to refashion the hurt. Write the wounds. Rewrite them. Use them to imagine different outcomes, to assess how our wounds can lead to certain ways of thinking, that we need not accept our ongoing harm as inevitable. I share with my students what I see as a beautiful truth, that writing gives us a chance to reshape the trajectory of our wounding. We don’t have to stay in the path offered to us.

* * * 

High schools shape American culture, too much, and this is politics at work. We fetishize the experience on film, on the page, and in our shared sense of what it means to be an American. This shape has an even greater power in rural America, where high schools often become the center of all social and cultural expression. It’s where you go on Friday night, your entire life. It’s where you find your sense of identity forever. If you want to know the power dynamic of any local politics, look at who ranks at the top of the heap in the local high schools.

Because the glory of high school is written in violence. I mean that literally. High school is the place where we learn to sort ourselves to the standard of violence. Swaggers and pickup trucks. An eye always searching for threat, perceived or otherwise. You wanna go?, the prevailing question of our hallways, the preening chest-pumping question one dude offers another, sometimes in jest, often not, fists balled up.

Our champions are those who withstand pain, and even more, those who inflict it. We learn to accept the legacy of pain handed to us, and we are taught that no one should complain about the pain they experience. Be tough. That has political implications. Cultural ones. Personal ones. High school is where we learn to submit our bodies to the purposes of economy and fight like hell to make sure that never changes. Rarely do we stand against it, risking our own chin in declaring what is not right.

Try looking at your own politicians through the lens of high school social order. I bet you see something. Try looking at the momentum of MAGA, the devotion to Trump, the now-overt hatred that consumes the GOP and is metastasizing from rural America to all of it, and think about how high school prepared us to accept this. January 6 was, in a sense, akin to the ritualized violence of a high school pep rally. Only it was real, and terrifying, and a threat to the democratic stability Americans take as permanent and unshakeable.

IV.

Rage is our directed violence. And in high school, we learn to rage. We learn the value of it, the way other boys cower at those who have the rage. We sort ourselves not through what we offer to others but in how we can preserve ourselves in the face of the ever–present threat of violence. Maybe we become the class clown, who makes the mistake of pulling out the wrong chair, and we receive the decking we have been trained to accept as our due. Maybe we become the troubled, violent, scared jock, who has to throw the punch if he wants to maintain status as empowered. Maybe we run for school board and decide to ban books that dream a different world into existence because we are afraid to accept the reality of violence inflicted upon us, the violence of limitation, of atrophied imagination, the violence that turned us into fleshy vessels of bigotry and hatred.

In high school, we learn that violence and the consumption of bodies is our purpose in life. I don’t exaggerate. This is high school in the Rust Belt and Appalachia and the Midwest and the Northeast and across rural America. In high school, we learn it is better to punch first.

V.

A different way, perhaps, can be found in places like Ross Gay’s remarkable book of “essayettes,” The Book of Delights. Gay describes his writing of this book as a practice of developing “a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”

Few essays have struck me more powerfully than these. The Book of Delights is a masterfully casual book, honed with structural brilliance that seems like a series of off-the-cuff knock-you-on-your-ass observations about the delight of being. It arrived in 2019, in the middle of our Trumpian nightmare, exactly when we needed it and precisely when I wasn’t ready to recognize how to leverage delight into the realm of, say, a candidacy.

Maybe, I admit, a political candidacy can never be delightful. Maybe politics itself is doomed for the muck. Or, rather, maybe campaigning has become so consumed by the muck that a delightful candidate can never rise above the mire. I am not, to be clear, calling myself delightful.

* * * 

I resent the hatred that has blossomed inside of me. I hate the despair and sense of inevitable doom that is the lasting residue of my campaign. I want to be positive, and I want to tell you it will be okay. I want to tell you that if we keep trying, things will get better. But right now, I do not believe that.

* * * 

I don’t remember who said it, though I wish I could because they deserve credit, but someone recently explained how they recognized despair as a comforting laziness. It’s easier to be angry than not. It feels better to be disillusioned at the daily drip of political fury than to do the harder work of finding shards of hope among that broken glass.

Maybe this is, for me, a turning point even though I am suspicious of hope these days. Things are bad, and it is far too easy to ignore the bad and call that hope.

We need antidotes, and I doubt those will be found in politics. Certainly, they will not be found in the strategizing of politicians, who always seek the easiest pathways. We get what we already have in politics, which is governed by the powerful inertia of the status quo. Violence is easy and familiar. Hope is difficult and foreign.

* * * 

James Wright, then, writes about politics, too. He describes how we learn to destroy ourselves. He describes how that seems to matter, how personal destruction might yield mutual salvation or, rather, that we are conditioned to act as if it does.

Therefore, Wright could have written: At the beginning of November we gallop terribly against each other, ashamed to imagine a world better than the one we’ve been given.

This has nothing to do with high school, or maybe it does.

This has nothing to do with the pizza joint punch, or maybe it does.

This has nothing to do with poetry as an antidote to violence.

Or, conversely, poetry is everything.

* * * 

The poetry of my corner of rural America:

The VP of the Allegheny College Dems, a trans woman who writes beautiful stories and thinks more deeply than almost anyone I know, who volunteered her time at the downtown Democratic HQ, even though walking there meant she’d be cat–called by leering assholes on the way.

The high school girl who organized a local Black Lives Matter march, who led us as the pickup trucks circled, coal-rolling our quiet protest, who kept us together when the jeering asshole shouted “all lives matter” while we lay silent in Meadville’s central Diamond for the same amount of time George Floyd could not breathe.

The hundred folks who showed up to a political meet-and-greet in February, before Covid shut down in-person campaigning, who opened their checkbooks to help the fight against right-wing domination. And the hundred who showed up to an Erie backyard at the end of summer once we could gather again. And the fifty who showed up in the sweltering bay of a local tool and die shop in Meadville. Each of them declaring, through their presence, the validity of their claim to exist right here. Each of them demanding better than what we’re given.

The gender-fluid local medium who lingered after one of my online town hall events to ask questions about how I successfully curled my mustache. Good wax is the answer, and that’s poetry itself.

The Black preacher who invited me into his house when I was gathering candidacy petitions, interrupting his own Sunday family dinner to pour me a giant mug of coffee in one of his to-go cups because it was cold outside. Very.

The high school English teacher, in a neighboring school district, who stood up to her homophobic board by standing up for her LGBTQ+ students who were being told, through policy, that they don’t matter. She paid the price, took heat from neighbors and the board, until her job was no longer tenable, maybe not even safe. But she took the punches, and kept standing up. “These kids,” she told me in a message, “they deserve better, and they know it.” They’re the reason she has hope for the future.

Those kids.

The old codger lift operator at a local ski hill, where our older son was taking snowboard lessons, who pulled a mitten off his own hand because he noticed I’d lost one of mine, and how it is really actually true the people of northwestern Pennsylvania, like people all across rural America, will literally give you the shirt (mitten) off their own backs (hands).

These are delights and joys and signs of hope even when the hope itself feels thin. This is our hardest work, I think, the cultivation of the muscles of delight. I mean this politically. When so many of us suffer, and when so many of us can so easily fall prey to the easiest mechanisms of fear-mongering political action, and when so many of us fear the repetition of the learned violence of our lives, it seems impossible to risk beauty and hope.

We must risk it anyway. Beauty is our only hope. It’s easy to be angry. It’s easy to feel the siren song of hatred and despair. But we must never give up our goodness, which is embedded in the poetry of our presence here in rural America.

* * * 

A writing exercise:

1. Describe your high school self.

2. Describe the dominant group of your high school.

3. Describe the dominant politics of your hometown.

4. Write a letter to this younger version of yourself. Tell them what life can be. Tell them the dreams they are allowed to have. Tell them they should never give up on goodness.

5. Never give up on goodness.