One young lady at a raucous bar explained: “I did the right thing, but I’m not going to let a bunch of Republicans screw up my summer.” I assume she meant ‘by not getting vaccinated,’ since Republicans hold no power at the Federal level and even at the state level only control a legislature whose power has been largely usurped by the governor and the courts.
7 comments:
You give her a lot of credit. Sounds more like 'that tribe over there is casting evil spells and destroying our crops' to me
I've lived in this area since 1975 between WNC and the upstate of SC. Ashville has been artsy-fartsy, hippy dippy since before then. Ashville is basically an eastern version of San Francisco. Just about everyone I've ever known from Ashville is a stone cold progressive.
If it hadn't been for a Republican named Donald Trump, she and others wouldn't have the vaccine available at all.
I missed the artsy-fartsy (hey, it spellchecks asrty-fartsy--how cool is that?) raucous bars in Asheville the few times I have been through.
Cousin Eddie
I'm with Christopher B - she seems to have contorted herself intellectually in order to preserve her preferred enemies.
@ Mike Guenther. We have some experience in the area. Son #3 went to North Greenville, back just before it became "University." He left after a year and a half and finished online, but we were back and forth a bit. We have been to Asheville again more recently. I was aware of half the retired social workers in NH moving there over the last twenty years, but I hadn't realised the culture went back to 1975. We stayed in West Asheville, which seemed identical to Brattleboro, VT. We went out for breakfast and could not find a place that had a waffle on the menu. One place had whole-grain pancakes, but it was mostly avocado toast and eggs benedict everywhere we looked. Which are fine, but not what I wanted.
It is true that I am imputing a reasonable theory to her; but what struck me is that the mask issue is facing a much stiffer opposition than I'd expected. I thought it would be re-adopted as a sort of tribal signal by the progressives in Asheville, just as they'd done before. Instead, at least so far, they're rejecting it too -- and that they've found a tribal argument for doing so will make it much harder for the government to re-impose. Opposition to masks is thus broad and deep, and not (as it was last spring) one side versus the other.
I could be too negative in my reading but I'm placing more emphasis on what I suppose to be the consistency of her message (Republicans are why we can't have nice things) than the form of the signal (mask vs no mask). Of course we can't know but I suspect that in October 2020 she would have expressed skepticism of getting 'the Trump shot' but now considers getting it 'the right thing to do.' I'm fairly sure she was in favor of every one, including herself, masking forever a month ago or less. The importance of the tribal argument is that it is the *tribal* argument, not that its expression is consistent.
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