Here's a thread absolutely no one asked for about me & a small town I grew up going to every summer & how it connected me to Pete.

It took me a long time to figure out why I latched onto Pete of all of the 2020 candidates. I should have been a Warren type. Sure, he's cute & young & gay which absolutely helped, but that wasn't it.

It was the image of a crumbling factory in a city that had seen better days.

It's almost impossible for me to believe this video exists, but this is exactly what one day of every summer when I was a kid looked like: it was driving from New Orleans to Kaplan.

It was the swamp on the side of I-310, the bridge connecting Destrehan to Luling. Miles of 2 lane roads with lush green trees, railroad tracks, & sugar cane fields. Factories & bridges that have seen better days, closed stores that will likely never have another tenant.

Kaplan, Louisiana is where my great grandmother lived her entire life. She lived to be over 90 years old. Her husband, my great grandfather, died when my mom was a kid. So the entire time I knew her, she lived alone, until the last years of her life when she was in a nursing home

Her house didn't have air conditioning & basically no ventilation. One room in her house had a window unit. There was a garish light above her kitchen table. She watched a tiny black & white TV. A man delivered her groceries every week. She had an old style rotary phone.

She lived on the corner. There was an empty concrete lot across the street where my brother & I would kick a soccer ball back & forth. I played my GameBoy & listened to the same 5 CDs for however many days we were there until it was finally time to leave.

The Baptist church on the right here was an Eckerd (later bought by CVS) I went to every summer. I bought a new jar of nail polish & a new notebook each time. My mom got more film developed at that Eckerd than any near our house in Florida.

I literally grew up going to Disney World. So this teeny tiny town didn't have much for me.

It did have, however, a landmark that stuck with me: an abandoned rice factory.

So when Pete painted a picture of an industrial town looking to find itself again, it wasn't an abstraction to me like it was to reporters in NYC.

It was Kaplan. It wasn't a thing I had to wrap my head around; it was a real place from my childhood that I couldn't wait to leave.

I don't have much of a point to this.

I guess it's that I get to an extent what my mom was trying to show me every time she drove my brother & I to the middle of absolutely no where to visit my great grandmother, who was never very happy to see us.

She was showing me the rural America she knew from when she was kid, before she started going to Mardi Gras parades in the city & went to college & met my dad & moved to Florida.

And honestly, if I hadn't had the experience of seeing teeny tiny towns that, for whatever reason, have been left behind as America moved into the 21st century, I probably wouldn't have had any clue what Pete meant when he talked about crumbling factories, either.

I absolutely loathe the phrase "coastal elites" & the way it's been used to describe people who live on the coasts, bc I'm not "elite" by any means just because I live near an ocean, & I'm high key super annoyed when Pete says it.

But to some extent, I get it. Especially considering there are very few articles that actually describe South Bend & accurately contextualize Pete's experience there, because *for some reason* NYC/DC reporters have no idea how to talk about it.

If you haven't given this article a read, I highly recommend it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/upshot/buttigieg-south-bend-image.html

anyway if you made it this far, donate to a bail fund & call your city or county reps & ask them what they're doing to prevent police bruality in your community.

if their answer is garbage, vote them out.

if the alternative is worse somehow, re-elect the incumbent & become an absolute thorn in their side until police violence is gone in your community.