Eleven years ago I wrote what I fondly call my snippets of life book, The Road to My Country. It is far from a complete autobiography but it has a lot of background information on my life. I wanted to get it out because I suspected North Carolina’s image was going to take a hit when the republicans (I no longer capitalize republican or gop as long as they remain a cult) gained control of the NC House and Governorship. That did happen with the bathroom bill and my nearly invisible book did nothing to help. My way of dealing with a crisis is to work it out with a keyboard even if no one but me reads it. Still we recovered and elected Governor Cooper who has held the crazies at bay.
Both my wife and I were born in North Carolina in 1949. My mother’s family has been in North Carolina since just after the revolutionary war. My wife’s family has been here longer. My father arrived in North Carolina around 1900 at the age of 25. Both our families have deep agricultural roots in the state. I grew up around farming and my wife even worked in tobacco as a teenager. I went away to military school in Tennessee at the age of fourteen in 1963. While I was home in NC most summers and some holidays, I mentally left the state in that same year, 1963. I wasn’t running from North Carolina, I was trying to put distance between myself and my family. I did not have a terrible childhood but there were some demons loose in the family and the only to avoid them was leave until they were conquered by the only ones who could do it.
With that in mind, when I left for college, I put my suitcases and typewriter in the car and headed off to Cambridge, Massachusetts to become a Harvard freshman. That year, 1967, I was one of three students in the class of 1,200 who called North Carolina home. Harvard wasn’t a place where you had to defend your state, but you did have to defend yourself with your wits. I didn’t have any trouble doing that since freshman year was my fifth year away from home. Other than visits and business, I would not come back to North Carolina as a resident until 2006, thirty-nine years later when we bought a second home along the shores of the White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle, North Carolina.
I left with visions seen by the eyes of a fourteen year-old teenager. I came back as a survivor of ten years of farming and over twenty years of selling Apple’s computers. By the time I got back and wrote the book, I had visited all fifty states, ten Canadian provinces, Ireland, England, France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. We had owned homes in two provinces and three states. We had lived in everything from the tiny village of dozen homes in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia to the big city of Halifax and halfway between Washington and Baltimore. I spent the last five years of my Apple career working the federal government from inside the beltway to Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Labs. I had set in on Congressional hearings and dealt with many politicians. The fifty-seven year old corporate survivor who moved to North Carolina in 2006 was very different than the youngster who could see little besides an escape route north.
Back in 2021 during the pandemic we made a move from Carteret County, North Carolina to Davie County, North Carolina.
We were ready to walk on ground that wasn’t squishy even though we had grown to love the salt marshes where we lived. We wanted to be close to the few relatives we have remaining and be a part of the lives of our grandchildren who continue to grow faster than we can comprehend.
The North Carolina that I left with its small patches of tobacco allotment was long gone. There were 4.7 million people in NC in 1963, today the state population has more than doubled to 10.8 million. The state is still full of a lot of very good people who would do almost anything to help you even if a MAGA hat has been on their head at some point.
When we moved back from the coast, we knew we were moving to solid red Davie County from solid red Carteret County. The only obvious advantage was that in Davie County, I no longer had a daily drive by the sign saying, “Welcome to Carteret County, Clinging to Our Guns and Bibles since 1760.” (See attached election results)
We have been in Davie County three years and three months and I have had one run in with a couple of red hats who were ranting while they shopped in a tiny store about how much they loved the former guy. It lasted two minutes and I have never seen them again.
We regularly go to eat in a small restaurant in the most rural part of the county, I have never see any red hats there. We are regular visitors at all the farmers markets and I haven’t been kicked out of one yet. There are few farmers I don’t farm a little with while my wife is shopping. I know of maybe two or three signs for the former president.
What I can say is that there are redder counties around us. A few have had contentious school board meetings but I don’t think it has become normalized behavior yet.
We don’t have a massive number of blacks in our community but we do have a lot of Hispanic people. Our house cleaner is one of them and we are very proud that she went to her citizenship ceremony last Friday.
I can categorically say that I have had far more HOA political battles (down at the coast) than ones with local republicans. While there might be little hope of Davie County turning blue, I like to think that given the chance to have a civil conversation, people here will listen, maybe not change their mind today, but possibly in the future. The young people already have more open minds.
The biggest problem we have In places like Davie County are the politicians like Virginia Foxx who mock our form of government by refusing to acknowledge the validity of the 2020 election. Foxx once said that Obamacare was a bigger threat than terrorists. She seemed to think it was funny to shout down a reporter’s question with “SHUT UP.” I can respect Foxx humble beginnings but I have no respect for someone who weaponizes the House Education Committee like she has. Politicians like her are the problem, not the solution.
When the founders cobbled together our constitution, their fervent hope was that we would have leaders who tried to bring out the best in their constituents. The hope was that government and the shared goal of making things better for as many people as possible would temper the bad human tendencies. What we have today are hack politicians who try to mine political benefit off of problems instead of trying to solve them.
Foxx and her republican buddies had a chance to make things much better at the border but they decided to pass up the once in a long time opportunity to get the Democrats to agree to stiff border measures for the opportunity to campaign on border problems. They had a sham impeachment against a cabinet member after denying him funding to try to solve the problem they used for impeachment. These people just want to stay in power. They care nothing about any of us unless we write big checks for their re-election. They actually favor Russia over Ukraine, our struggling democratic ally. They live in some fairy tale world where Putin is not the murderous thug everyone knows him to be.
These are the same politicians who fought Medicaid expansion, deny climate change, and tell their constituents year after that tax breaks to the rich will benefit them. That has yet to work even though they have been saying it for decades. When is the last time someone from the gop supported an increase in the minimum wage?
The $28 Billion that Trump had to spend on farmers to compensate for his tariffs on China gets spun into something good. Wouldn’t it have been far better to let the farmers keep their markets and not have to spend $28B of taxpayers money to cover up a policy mistake of his own making? (See attached table)
I know there are plenty of good people in Davie County. They aren’t that different than me. I worked the soil for ten years and had 200 head of Angus cattle. I still have a shotgun in the closet. I eat country ham and chicken stew. I have butchered hogs and had a garden big enough to feed my family. I drive a car nineteen years old. I have spent more time on a tractor than almost anyone that I know.
What we need to do more than anything else is to restore rural residents’ belief in our government’s ability to solve their problems. We should show them how makes this is a great place to live. We have libraries, streets, schools, police, and a thriving economy. Government plays a part in that.
People who treat politics as war do no good for any of us. I would like to invite some government advocates to come talk in Davie County but stop by for a visit with me first so you know that you do have friends in the County.
You can get more government supporters if you made it clear what you are doing to help the people in the County and listen to what they need. Maybe it is time for free community college education. It would be a great thing to lift up any rural community.
Our technological infirmity 