Over it.

Enough with the partisan disaster takes.

Yesterday, on another platform, I posted news of the connection between DOGE cuts and the loss of life in the tornadoes in Kentucky and Missouri. Several people commented that as these states voted for 47 and/or likely voted for GOP legislators, they had it coming. By this reasoning, all of Western North Carolina, at least everyone who lives outside the city of Asheville, also deserves the suffering we experienced and continue to experience from Hurricane Helene. I have seen this ludicrous line of reasoning before. You can't live in the south without regularly hearing from other parts of the country that each of us deserves the worst possible outcomes if our state is seen as "red." I can usually just roll my eyes and move on. Maybe it is living through ongoing hurricane recovery, but this one got me.

It is easy to list reasons why judging an entire region based on election outcomes is nonsensical. To start, these states are gerrymandered all to hell and have extensive voter suppression measures in place. If you have any knowledge of these practices, then how can you make broad assumptions about the voters? Even so, no one voted for DOGE to come in and dismantle the government. DT did not run on a platform of de-funding weather service disaster prevention.

We can then argue against the absurdity of reducing state demographics to one kind of person, red (bad and unworthy of sympathy) or blue (good and worthy of sympathy.) The populations in these states, and within the disaster zones are diverse, especially, but not only, in the more urban areas. Generalizing that everyone affected by these disasters are MAGA true believers who have it coming is painfully uninformed. Low income black and latine communities, undocumented folks, queer and transfolks, and migrant communities from all over the world were affected by these disasters, though these will be the people who are denied any federal or state aid that makes its way to these areas. Ignoring their existence for rhetorical purposes is cruel.

I could go on listing reasons that this framing is irrational, but really, this is the wrong argument to make. This country is a mess and the "blame-the-victim-if-it-happens-in-a-red-state" reaction is a symptom of the larger problem. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the people being denied sympathy due to the party affiliation of their congressional district representative and/or their state's electoral college outcome are in fact DT supporters. Do we want them to have a chance to reconsider their position in light of the ongoing crisis or do we want them to double down, when they see the folks on the other side saying they deserve to suffer and even die? Do we want societal change? What kind of world are we aiming for? One where people can learn and adapt? Or one where we deepen the divides every chance we get?

If your first thought when you see tornado destruction is, "who did they vote for" then the mechanisms of hate and division are already working on you. You have successfully othered a large part of the population who you now deem unworthy of compassion or support. Ironically, this is the exactly what the vast and effective propaganda machine of the far right is molding their viewers and listeners to do to others. Now you have something in common with these people after all! But don't feel bad, people can change, especially if we make space for them to do so. I for one, hope you can regain some compassion, some faith in other people's capacity for transformation, a sense of empathy, and some perspective even in a world that keeps telling us that there are only two kinds of people, good and bad. It is work to see the humanity in others who are very different from you, but to fail to do so is to take on the behavior that you scorn in these very groups.

For the record, people from all sides of the highly polarized political spectrum have donated vast amounts of resources and have traveled to Western North Carolina to help with our hurricane recovery clean-up and rebuild. If you have not seen this kind of cooperation from people with divergent and even opposing political philosophies, then you should try getting offline and working in your local community. You'll be surprised who you meet. It might just help you imagine the possibility of real and lasting change.