From rural Virginia. Photo by Katrina VanHuss.
I grew up barefoot, with hard calluses. I rode a pony most places, and my ginger skin was sunburned most of each summer. Our Virginia family raised tobacco, chickens, beef cattle, grains, vegetables, and morality.
We were steady churchgoers: Sunday morning for Sunday school and preaching. Sunday nights sometimes. Always on Wednesday nights for the shared meal and Bible classes. Our family and community were close-knit, bound by religion, geography, and the work of growing things.
Support for the MAGA movement is high in my home community. Where the church was once the foundation, MAGA is now the Bible that dictates beliefs and behaviors. My own family is riven by differences in politics, religion, and views on social justice. The fact that I now live a three-hour drive away from where I grew up feels like a blessing.
My career, from which I recently semi-retired, is mostly built around nonprofit work. The tools of my trade include understanding how a community functions psychologically, and which “Easy” buttons we can press to get humans to exhibit the behaviors we are after. By 'those behaviors,' I mean donating to a nonprofit, volunteering, advocating — doing tactical good. I work hand-in-hand with a very-very local psychologist, Dr. Otis Fulton, my husband. We explore social psychology, social good, and politics in our tandem writing.
And that is how we pissed off a good hunk of our own community of do-gooders, the national network of nonprofit professionals I have spent 37 years being a part of.
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