America has a Sore Loser Problem

What if tradition is really just spite of the future?

Election day is tomorrow. Blame the now 3rd election-cycle where Donald Trump’s daily idiocy has been inescapable, but this feels like it’s been dragging on our whole lives. And this election’s central theme is tradition vs. progress.

Now, this theme manifests in different ways between the two main presidential candidates. Vice President Kamala Harris is pretty traditional in her campaign approach. She’s doing tons of voter outreach, live appearances, and had a stump speech prepared for her myriad of campaign stops, adding cool opening acts like Beyoncé and Cardi B. to differentiate the events. But obviously a Black/Indian woman is not a traditional choice. And her vision for our fragile, crumbling democracy is about creative and new solutions to the same old problems that plague us every election cycle: the economy, immigration, healthcare, human rights.

Contrast this with Trump. His campaign strategy is chaos, rambling incoherently from town to town, confusing insane asylums with asylum seekers in his inane rambling to dwindling and evidently bored crowds—but he wants to take America backward, as far backward as he can get away with, it seems. “Make America Great Again” only works as a slogan if you want things to be the way they used to be, the way, until some arbitrary time, they had always been.

I’ve been thinking about this conflict, tradition v. progress, a lot. It’s not a plug (but it’s not not a plug) to say Rebel Spirit is a project that has taken up a huge chunk of my brain space. In the 14 episode podcast (9 have been released), the central theme has been a commitment to tradition at all costs versus the risk of moving forward and creating a new, better, more-inclusive tradition.

The show is about my high school and its team name, The Boone County Rebels of Florence, Kentucky, and how a commitment to tradition now 70 years deep has led to an absolute void of school spirit, the removal of a racist mascot, and the simple “B” initial, the only real symbol that remains of a school that for the majority of its existence flew the Confederate flag (in a state that was NEVER in the Confederacy). And it is fascinating.

Not to give too much away, but one of the first major revelations of the podcast is the lengths people will go to preserve tradition, to the point of even lying about the origin of the tradition to keep it in place. I’m not sure I had the words before doing this show, but it mirrors the phenomenon of MAGA and how even as the right tells us in their outside voices that they’re the only patriots and that everyone else is lying or fake news, they’re also whitewashing museums, censoring history books, and complaining about being fact-checked.

With the podcast, I find myself asking all the time, if the tradition (being called The Rebels) is so great, why make up a lie about it being based on Rebel Without a Cause? No school in the history of the planet has ever named a mascot after that film, but especially not right then, in the 1950s. Beyond that, within a couple of years of the school’s founding, the Confederate flag is all over the yearbook. So what is the truth? Are you proud of the origins of the school and the blatant racism of the imagery the administration at that time chose, or are you ashamed, and unwilling to face that and finally move forward? I think the latter, and I think the latter is true for the country. And it’s giving sore loser.

So much of this tension is about the right feeling like progress is an affront to them personally. If a poor kid gets free lunch, then I no longer get to pity and look down on them and their family. If a Black person gets admitted to an Ivy League School then I might have to confront the reality that there are Black people smarter than myself. If an immigrant gets a job where I work then I might have to prove I’m good at my job to keep it. They claim a loyalty to meritocracy, but do everything in their power to tilt the scales in a direction that benefits straight, wealthy, white men. They do not want to compete, because they never learned how to lose with dignity.

But this isn’t new. We can look to the Civil War as a perfect example. The South wanted slaves. If the South had won the war, I would likely be enslaved, if alive at all. But ask people who fly the Confederate flag about it today, and they will skirt that part of the reality of this country as much as possible. They are the sorest of sore losers. I struggle with this. I don’t understand why you would fly a flag if you are scared to say ALL that it represents. Because you know what it means about you, actually. It’s not a neutral thing you get to introduce into the world, it symbolizes the ugly underbelly of the realities of this country whether you want it to or not.

And I’m not saying an endorsement of anything is necessarily praise of 100% of the thing. But it should be the majority of the thing, right? Or at least the good should outweigh the bad? Or at the very least the worst thing about it should have the potential to be improved upon and you should be enthusiastic about improving upon it…

James Baldwin once said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

—

Last week I cast my vote for the first Black woman (and first Indian woman) to lead a major party’s presidential ticket. I know we are still in the backlash to 2020 and speaking about anything not to do with white men is seen as cliché or something, but it matters so much. I would love for it to not matter, because the US has healed from all of its trauma, and opportunity is doled out evenly. But that’s not reality.

I remember in early 2008, my mother saying that America will never have a Black president, and by summer we were both volunteering our time to help get him elected. I’ve lived long enough to become cynical about what’s possible in this country, and in my hometown, but I think progress is better than tradition, and my hope is that more and more people do. We have to.

Please vote tomorrow if you haven’t already.

A