Different Tongues

I was with my grandmother a while back and she was asking about politics, people, and situations I’ve been in. She said something that resonated more with me than any talking point I’ve heard in my decade of managing political campaigns.

But first, we’ll do a little background on Beva (Grandma).

She grew up in an old run down farm house that sat beside the Roanoke River outside of Blacksburg (Virginia). My grandfather (Henderson) grew up down the road in a house that they can still only describe as a shack. They moved around following jobs for 30 years, living in 28 different houses across the south. From the Richland coal fields, to working on the railroad, building factories & stores, to Grandpa running a fire department for a few years outside of Raleigh.

After a warehouse explosion outside of Durham that rendered Henderson unrecognizable and briefly dead. They were forced to find their way back home. He was searching for meaning and started preaching at the family Holiness church.

During all of this time Beva raised 5 kids, worked in kitchens, on farms, and was always in the middle of everything for humungous family. Twelve brothers and sisters, over 60 first cousins. So keeping current with the family was a full time job. But she never stopped (and still hasn’t).

They both kept trying to fix things that were broke. Church, family, and then they got into politics.

Henderson didn’t like the way taxes were levied in our county, so he decided to try to fix it.

In Virginia, the job to fix that problem is the Commissioner of Revenue. They liked Reagan and had an in-law that held office as a Republican, so Henderson decided to run. The only Republicans in Montgomery County back then were the executives at the plants, economic professors at Virginia Tech, or anyone with a country club membership. Needless to say, he didn’t fit in (or win).

Now back to the story.

Knowing that I work in politics, Beva started asking me about the events, mixers, fundraisers. How I handled them, did I find it easy to be around the kind of people that go to political fundraisers?

Then she recounted a story of an event that they went to when Grandpa ran for office. They were at a county Republican party fundraiser. She remembered the wives of all of the donors, other candidates, being outside, making small talk. Talking about their trips, bank accounts, charities, clothes. When one of those ladies asked her how she spent her time. Beva only knows how to belt the truth, so her response was “I spend most of my time clearing brush and working on the mountain”. She remembered that a handful of them began snickering at her and poking fun of the drawl in voice.

None of them grew up in the area, all transplants from up North. They saw the people that lived outside of the country club as poverty embodied, and they hated interacting with it, and Beva was one of those people. She had spent her entire childhood on the dirt road beside the club, in the “holler” working with her family.

Beva told me “I never thought I would feel like I didn’t belong somewhere, so close to home.” And then, the thing that has been stuck in my head. She said “Those women were speaking a different language”.

That barrier of tongue, of the lack of commonality, still exists here (and across the country). That is the disconnect across the board. If you believe you share the same values as another but you fail to speak the same language, your story will never connect.

It doesn’t make the people you speak differently “stupid”. And when working class people go vote, they are not voting against “their own interest”. They are voting for the only people that attempt to speak their language. Somebody’s self interest goes beyond a prescription of social programs. It’s respect, it’s understanding, it is caring about their struggles and not blindly telling them what their problems are.

I firmly believe that it is not just about communicating the same words, or descriptors. But it’s how we address each other, it’s how authentic we are to ourselves when we communicate, and if we are standing on the stump of hypocrisy, there will never be a true commonality.