When you drive to Millerton, it looks like you are driving into the heart of archetypal America; Psychically, emotionally, there is blood flowing in the streets; and bodies are stacked up, invisible, in front of the candy stores, the high end wine stores, the pretty memorials to the World War Two dead; outside the farmers’ market on Saturdays, outside the tapas bars.
Oddly, living now in the purple-to-red rural America that my former “people,” the blue-state elites, are conditioned to view with suspicion and distrust, I also have more personal freedom than I did as a member of the most privileged class. The most privileged class does not have the greatest privilege of all, that of personal liberty: it is a class that is continually anxious and status-insecure, its members often scanning the room for a more important conversation, its collective mind continually exerting subtle control, both socially and professionally, over other members of the “tribe.”
To have a free society we have to have a history, and in this major historical moment, we had a massive betrayal of the social contract — a betrayal committed by millions. The social contract cannot be re-knit without public accountability, confrontations, and even condemnation.
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