LIFESTYLES
WEEKEND, NOVEMBER 5-6, 2016
AP Photo/Brennan Linsley
AP Photo/Matt Rourke
Gun-rights advocate, restaurant owner and mother of four sons, Lauren Boebert
wears her usual gun on her hip as she brushes the hair of Roman, 3, as the family
gets ready to leave home for church in Rifle, Colo., on May 1. “When we first opened
Shooters Grill, we were one month in, and I was there alone a lot, and there was
actually a man who was beat to death in the alley. He lost his life that night, and it
kinda shook me up. I was there alone a lot and I thought, ‘what am I gonna do, what
am I gonna do if something happens, what if somebody comes in here, my husband
isn’t here to protect me, I’m all alone,’ and really, that’s what got me to open-carry.”
Dorothy Johnson-Speight visits the grave of her son, Khaaliq Jabbar Johnson, in
Philadelphia on Monday, May 9. Johnson was killed in 2001 — shot seven times
over a parking space dispute. “We’re losing our loved ones at an alarming rate. I
don’t think that folks that are fighting and talking about the Second Amendment
understand us. We don’t want to take the rights of responsible gun owners away
from those people. We just don’t want our loved ones to be murdered on the streets
of Philadelphia and cities across the country because they have the opportunity to
get guns so easily,” she says.
YEARNING FOR UNITY
AP Photo/David Goldman
AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
AP Photo/Claire Galofaro
Richie Clendenen, lead pastor at Christian Fellowship
Church, left, and his wife Jenny, say evening prayers
with their son, Trey, 11, as he goes to bed at their home
in Benton, Ky., Sunday April 10. “I worry about the
country he’s going to inherit. I feel our rights are slow-
ly being taken away from us,” said Richie Clendenen.
“I pray if Christianity could lose all rights in his future.
I question what that’s going to mean for him.” Even in
this deeply religious swath of western Kentucky — a
state where about half the residents are evangelical —
conservative Christians feel under siege.
Police officer Jessi D’Ambrosio, right, of the 120th
precinct in the Staten Island borough of New York,
speaks to a resident while on patrol at the Richmond
Terrace Houses, Thursday, July 7. D’Ambrosio, 32, and
his partner, Mary Gillespie, 28, are the new “neigh-
borhood coordinating officers” for the six-building
project where Eric Garner once lived. Jersey Street,
with a reputation for crime, runs the length of a com-
plex, most of whose residents are black. “We want
them to feel comfortable with us and that’s what
we’re building on,” Gillespie says.
Billy Prater, 27, adjusts a Donald Trump sign on his
fence in Beech Creek, W.Va., in Mingo County on April
28. Laid off from the mines, he had been out of work
for more than a year. Now he works for the railroad,
but the major customer is the collapsing coal industry
so his work is unsteady. He was a registered Demo-
crat from a family of diehard Democrats. But when he
hung the Trump sign, his neighbors started calling and
sending him messages, asking where he got it and
how to get their own. “Everybody on this creek wants
one,” he said.
ENDURING DIVISIVENESS
By JERRY SCHWARTZ
Associated Press
Though they live about 1,730 miles
apart, though they’ve never met, though
they are of different races and back-
grounds, Lauren Boebert and Dorothy
Johnson-Speight speak almost in
unison when they lament the fracturing
of America.
Americans must “come together,
be non-judgmental about people and
their opinions,” says Johnson-Speight.
Americans must “come together as
one,” says Boebert.
And yet these two women stand
squarely at the epicenter of American
acrimony — territory explored by The
Associated Press in “Divided America,”
a series of stories that surveyed a United
States that is far from united.
Boebert owns the gun-friendly
Shooters Grill in the aptly named
town of Rifle, Colorado, and wears a
handgun. Johnson-Speight fights for
gun control laws after the 2001 murder
of her 24-year-old son Khaaliq Jabbar
Johnson, shot seven times in a dispute
over a Philadelphia parking spot.
Their differences are stark, but
their yearning for a more civil and less
divided nation is genuine. In that, they
mirror other Americans interviewed
over the past six months. They are
caught up in a campaign that magnified
its disagreements, and left them longing
for harmony; they live in a country
that cannot square its present with its
pedigree as “one nation, under God,
indivisible.”
The fact is, America’s differences
are real, and cannot be glossed over.
In Missoula, Montana, an effort
to welcome dozens of refugees —
Congolese, Afghans, Syrians — was
met with demonstrations and angry
confrontations. “I didn’t do this to be
controversial. I didn’t do this to stir
the pot,” says Mary Poole, one of the
leaders of the refugee project — but
she did. Two patriotic visions came into
conflict: the America that welcomes
the huddled masses yearning to breathe
free, and the America still shaken by
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and
in the years since, insisting on home-
land security above all.
On New York’s Staten Island, police
and the policed struggle to coexist.
On an island that is home to 3,000
police officers, a black man suspected
of selling loose cigarettes died in an
encounter with police in 2014. The
black community knows the police
do an important job, but it is deeply
distrustful after the death EDITOR’S NOTE
head, what his vision
of Eric Garner and other This is the final installment
is for us,” said Ashley
violent encounters with of Divided America, AP’s
Kominar, a mother of
authority. Police, mean- exploration of the economic, three whose husband lost
while, feel unappreciated, social and political divisions his job in the mines. “But
their character impugned. in American society.
I know he has one and
“I think the divide is For the complete series,
that’s what counts.”
worse than it should be visit eastoregonian.com
The recovery from
and more than people
the Great Recession
think it is,” says retired
has left behind a lot of
detective Joe Brandefine.
rural America. The Washington-based
At the Christian Fellowship Church Economic Innovation Group found that
in Benton, Kentucky, pastor Richie half of the new business growth over
Clendenen tells his congregation, the past four years was concentrated
“There’s nobody more hated in this in just 20 populous counties, and three
nation than Christians.” Evangelical quarters of the nation’s economically
Christians’ numbers are in decline, distressed ZIP codes are in rural areas.
their political clout diminished. On
The recovery meant little to workers
signal issues — particularly same-sex in Hannibal, Ohio, where Chinese
marriage — they have lost, at least competition resulted in the loss of the
for the moment. They are angry and largest employer, the Ormet aluminum
frustrated and unwilling to surrender. plant.
“We are moving more and more in
And it meant little to students in
conflict with the culture and with other Waukegan, Illinois; poor school districts
agendas,” says David Parish, a former had no way to make up funding losses
pastor at Christian Fellowship.
when federal stimulus money dried up.
There’s so much more: Americans So while the nearby Stevenson district
split on climate change, between those spends close to $18,800 per student,
who say it is an existential threat and Waukegan spends about $12,600. Its
those who deny it is happening or at students must cope with a high school
least that man has anything to do with it. that is often badly maintained, where
Even as they contemplate electing the as many as 28 students share a single
first woman president, even as women computer.
take on combat roles, Americans are
That Stevenson is mostly white
struggling with a misogynistic back- and Waukegan is mostly minority
lash, online and in real life. Then there’s should come as little surprise. The
the gun debate, which Adam Winkler, a racial divide endures, at least in some
constitutional law professor at UCLA part because minorities continue to
says is “more polarized and sour than be significantly underrepresented in
any time before in American history.”
Congress and nearly every state legis-
There is common ground. At the lature, an AP analysis found. Thanks
Annin Flagmakers factory in South to gerrymandering and voting patterns,
Boston, Virginia, seamstress Emily non-Hispanic whites make up a little
Bouldin says Americans “may be over 60 percent of the U.S. population,
divided on some things, but when it but still hold more than 80 percent of
comes down to the most important all congressional and state legislative
things we come together.” Nearly seats.
all Americans, according to surveys,
An example: African-Americans
believe in small business, the public represent more than a fifth of Delaware
schools, helping the less fortunate and residents, but for the past 22 years
caring for veterans.
Margaret Rose Henry has been the
Some differences, though, are state’s only black senator.
profound and lasting, having less to
“If there were more black elected
do with what people think and more officials, we would have a better chance
to do with where they fall — on which to get something done,” Henry says.
side of the line between prosperity and
Much of this is not new. As much
ill-fortune.
as Americans like to recall the past as
In Logan, West Virginia, in central a rosy Norman Rockwell illustration,
Appalachia, the decline of the coal they have been at odds from the
industry has brought a population drain, start — thousands of British loyalists
rampant drug abuse, heightened poverty battled their revolutionary neighbors in
(cremations are up because folks can’t the colonies, North and South went to
afford caskets) and deep resentment war over race, labor and management
that fed support for Republican Donald fought for decades, often violently, and
Trump: “I don’t know what’s in his the Vietnam era was awash with vitriol.
If today’s divisiveness is different,
some say, perhaps it is because of a lack
of leadership.
“Yes, America is great. It could be
a lot better if the politicians weren’t
fighting each other all the time,” says
Rodney Kimball, a stove dealer in West
Bethel, Maine.
Elvin Lai, a San Diego hotelier,
says the voters themselves must accept
much of the blame.
“I do believe that our political system
is broken,” he says. “I do believe that
a person that is centered and is really
there to bring the country together
won’t get the votes because they’re not
able to speak to the passionate voters
who want to see change.”
It’s those passionate voters, after
all, who cocoon themselves with the
likeminded, watching Fox News if they
lean right or reading Talking Points
Memo if they’re on the left. In their
ideological segregation, their minds are
not open to compromise.
Take gun control. For all the
nastiness surrounding the issue, a Pew
Research Center poll in August showed
85 percent of American supported
background checks for purchases at gun
shows and in private sales, 79 percent
support laws to prevent the mentally ill
from buying guns, 70 percent approve
of a federal database to track gun sales.
Dorothy Johnson-Speight, who
founded the anti-violence, anti-gun
group Mothers in Charge after her
son’s death, says these are steps well
worth taking. “We don’t want to take
the rights of responsible gun owners
away,” she says.
Her aim is peace — both in the
streets and in the public sphere.
“We’ve got to find a way to be
more accepting of one another, more
tolerant of each other,” she says. “We
have more things in common than we
do that are different and we need to find
those commonalities in order to live in
peace.”
Lauren Boebert calls most gun
measures “crazy,” but she is not skep-
tical about the ability of the American
people to rise above division, on this
and other issues.
“Right now, we’re using our rights
to tear each other apart,” she says,
passionately. “Freedom of speech, it’s
just being used to say whatever mean,
harmful, violent thing you can. ...
That’s not what it’s for. You also have
the freedom to lift them up and to hold
them up and edify them. Let’s come
together, let’s unify as Americans,
all of us.”