Libby Bruce

I regret to inform you that my ancestors put me here, at this place, in this time, to run my mouth.

A dispatch from the heartland…

My whole life I felt gaslit by my community. I knew they weren’t as nice as they said they were. 

I knew that other places had to be different. I knew the norms enforced in my community were not universal norms. I knew that horrible behavior was glossed over when it came from certain people. I knew that the adults around me were frequently wrong. This intuition was mostly invalidated by those around me, and I was generally regarded as The Problem.

I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe any of this, or the experience to validate my gut feeling. So I spent my youth in a cloud of confusion, knowing on an instinctive level that I was seeing something everyone around me was denying. I escaped into books as a kid, and to an urban university as soon as I could.

Now I’m back, though. And boy, do I have a vocabulary and some experience.

Coming home was a complex decision for me. In a way, it wasn’t a decision at all; circumstances necessitated the move. But I had toyed with the idea of coming back for years. In the end, the Fates made the decision for me. You can’t escape your roots, and everything you run from, you run right back into. I’ve been back in my hometown for almost four years now, and it’s mostly good. I am trying to take up the space I deserve and validate everything that gaslit little girl was right about.

This past election cycle, a town trustee made an overtly racist social media post. He lost his seat. I watched in satisfaction as my town voted him out. 

Now, his term just ended, and a local community Facebook account made a post about him. The post itself bummed me out, because I mostly like the page a lot. It was the sort of milquetoast, “Nice White Folks preaching tolerance for grandpa because he’s from a different time” take that I dislike but have come to expect.

The comments, of course, were a dumpster fire of excuses, racism, and fragility. I wasn’t surprised, but I was sad. What I noticed most was that several people said “he told the truth,” or “he just said what we were all thinking.” Now, that triggered something, my friends. That little gaslit girl spoke up and said, “for fuck’s sake, we are not all thinking that, Melissa.”

And then I came to a comment that fully woke up that little gaslit girl, who kept getting labled as the problem, who always felt in her gut that the loudest voices in this community were also the wrongest voices, and that dissenters were gaslit and bullied into silence.

The man who had been superintendent of the school district while I was a student there commented that he had been in meetings with the town leadership, and behind closed doors the things they said were “tame” compared to the things our disgraced trustee had said. He said it loud and proud, on a public page. He said it to minimize and normalize the racism of the trustee.

And I swear to God, teenage Libby stood up and screamed, “I KNEW IT!”

I wasn’t the crazy one, I was being held hostage by a bunch of people who went to church every Sunday and claimed to be good people, but behind closed doors were dropping slurs. And whenever I pointed it out, I was the problem. 

You better believe I validated the hell out of Teenage Libby. The Oscar for Being Right The Entire Fucking Time goes to Teenage Libby! The Nobel for Seeing Straight Through Christian Hypocrisy also goes to…Teenage Libby!

Before I got worked up, I reminded myself that the trustee lost his seat. He lost his reelection as a direct result of his statement. The community said, “no, thank you.” 

But you wouldn’t know it from the comments online. It reminded me of how it felt to grow up in this community. Half the town is bullied into silence by a minority of extremists who insist they are actually a majority of very nice people.

This is what is hitting me about living here. People are afraid to disagree with the group of right wing white men running the town. I felt it sitting in my classrooms when teachers overtly bullied the gay kids or allowed racism to go unchecked, and I felt it reading those godforsaken, ignorant-ass comments.

I want to chisel away at the cocoon of madness around this town. In the past few decades a chunk of our people got sucked into a frenzy of propaganda and misinformation. But the biggest lie is that everyone agrees with them. 

Listen, and I am speaking directly to my neighbors here, and I am holding your hand as I say it:   some people agree and some don’t. 

Stay with me, now…thousands of your neighbors disagree with you, and just keep their mouths shut and let you go off, because disagreeing with y’all opens a person up to a bananas level of bullying. 

I know. Sit with it as long as you need to. If what I said makes you feel rage, I regret to inform you that it’s about you.

The thing is, the vast majority of people do not fall into this us-and-them, Trump-vs-the-world thing that right wing media has cultivated.  People are more complex, and most of them will change their opinions when they get new information.

This town is a republican stronghold, but you know what? We decisively said no to a racist trustee.

This county voted hell yes for reproductive rights and legal weed. Almost half of those of us who voted said no to Trump.

That’s not nobody.

A whole lot of folks around here are from genuine redneck stock, and I mean redneck in the original sense. Our ancestors fought and died for the union in the Kentucky and West Virginia coalfields. Then they moved to Butler County to work union jobs. My Papaw was a mixed race hillbilly orphan who got a purple heart fighting fascists. My ancestors ran moonshine stills and dodged the feds, and they did not put me here, in this time and place, to cosign this nonsense. 

It is with great sorrow that I inform you that they put me here to run my mouth.