One thing about small town life: everybody knows everybody else. Everything’s connected. This state of affairs moderates behavior.
When a kid runs a stop sign on Central Avenue, four neighbors have reported the offense to mama before the offender can get home. You’re less prone to flip off the person who pulled out in front of you when you know she may well be plating your food at the local cafe. When everyone is somebody’s sister’s niece’s cousin, people with good sense hesitate before saying something mean.
So we “make nice.”
A man who said hateful things about gay people during a recent church split will see me at Tallahatchie Gourmet, run to shake my hand, and tell me how much he misses seeing me and Clyde at church. In return, I ask him how his mama’s doing.
We have a couple of troubled souls given to making vicious, ill-informed posts on social media—but when encountered downtown, these people are nice as pie, and they expect you to be civil, too.
That’s life in a small town. On any given day, you’re likely to see at least a handful of people who’ve disappointed or shocked you in some way or another. Even so, everyone nods and smiles at everyone else.
At first, as someone who didn’t grow up here, I mistook this for hypocrisy. My nature is to pull away from people who act one way in my presence and another way in my absence. It galls me that “making nice” lets bad actors escape the social consequences of bad behavior.
But it’s also true that you can’t stay mad at everyone, all the time. It’s exhausting. Plus, in a town our size, you’d quickly run out of people to speak to when picking up your coconut cake at Sugaree’s Bakery.
These past few months, I’ve really been struggling with the business of making nice with my MAGA neighbors.
Despite the fact Gov. Tate Reeves would like to change our state name to MAGAsippi, not everyone in the hospitality state supports the MAGA extremists. A few oppose them openly. Many others—even some lifelong Republicans—oppose them quietly.
But the majority of our neighbors did vote for the MAGA agenda, and many embrace it. In fact, for me, one of the harshest realities of the present situation has been confronting how many of my “nice” neighbors really do believe that white people are better than everyone else, that trans and gay people require fixing or disappearing, and that the immigrants whose undocumented labor makes local industry possible are all rapists and murderers.
Back in Atlanta, if I knew business owners or restaurateurs supported a philosophy like that, I’d refuse to give them my business. But in a MAGA city in a MAGA county in a MAGA state, refusing to patronize their businesses would have me driving ninety minutes to Memphis just to buy milk.
Given all that’s going on, it’s getting harder to smile and wave at certain people. But: I have to keep making nice with my neighbors. In a town this small, maintaining civility isn’t optional. It’s survival.
I do not, however, have to “make nice” with the huge corporations funding and profiting from the MAGAfication of America.
For me, that means looking for ways to give less of my money to companies like AT&T, Apple, Amazon, and OpenAI … and trying to convince others to do the same.
Getting in a Facebook flame war with the lady down the street achieves nothing. My standing outside a corporate office with signs doesn’t move the needle. Boycotting local-owned businesses doesn’t make sense. But if enough of us cut back, even just a little, on what we spend with the big companies funding fascism in America … well, that hits the bottom line, and in a capitalist society, that gets attention.
I’m not asking anyone to do anything extreme. Truth is, we can’t fully extract ourselves from these corporations. (I sure can’t; my work depends on some of their technology.) But we can be more intentional about where our dollars go, substituting where possible, reducing what we can’t eliminate.
Could you unsubscribe from one of your eight streaming services? Could you get your internet from Ace Fiber instead of AT&T? Could you order just a little less from Amazon and shop more at your local retail shops? Could you make do with your current iPhone until Tim Cook retires?
In a small town, you gotta make nice — even with neighbors whose beliefs and behaviors shock me. But with the corporations bankrolling the destruction of democracy? I’m done making nice.
That’s a line I can draw. That’s a choice we all can make. And maybe it’s the most meaningful one available.
