Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXI): Where COVID policy merges with the wider political landscape in nonmetro America

Sabrina Tavernise's story out of Enid, Oklahoma, population 49,379, appeared on the front page of the New York Times yesterday.  The headline was "First they fought about masks.  Then over the soul of the city."  Even though I don't think of Enid as particularly rural--and even though Tavernise doesn't play up the place's rurality--this story represents what urban America, particularly coastal urban folks, have come  to think about rural America and the flyover states generally in relation to the pandemic.   

The story features a Black city councillor, Jonathan  Waddell, retired from the Air Force, who has lived in Enid with his family for seven years.  They had planned to make it a permanent home, but Waddell's advocacy for a mask mandate caused him to be ostracized from the community.  Now he is looking for a job outside the region.    

Meanwhile, another major player in the story is a deeply religious 45-year-old woman who has home-schooled her children.   She represents a class of folks who have become politically active to respond to pandemic restrictions.  In particular, she founded the Enid Freedom Fighters who have opposed pandemic restrictions, including mask mandates.  

Some excerpts about Waddell and Crabtree follow, but let me lead with these comments from one of the Enid residents who attended the City Council meeting where the mask mandate was debated in the summer of 2020: 

“The line is being drawn, folks,” said a man in jeans and a red T-shirt. He said the people in the audience “had been shouted down for the last 20 years, and they’re finally here to draw a line, and I think they’re saying, ‘We’ve had enough.’”

This strikes me as a good summation of how many in rural America were feeling in the run up to Trump's election--it's why many supported him.  He was, as Thomas Edsall put it in a New York Times column, the enemy of their enemy.   They felt beleaguered after years of being told what to do by bureaucrats and technocrats, and when the pandemic hit with its attendant public health restrictions, they weren't willing to accept any more regulations.   

Tavernise further describes the meeting: 

One woman cried and said wearing a mask made her feel like she did when she was raped at 17. Another read the Lord’s Prayer and said the word “agenda” at the top of the meeting schedule seemed suspicious. A man quoted Patrick Henry and handed out copies of the Constitution.

Mr. Waddell was so jarred driving home from that meeting that he kept checking his rear-view mirror to see if he was being followed. He viewed himself as conservative, so he was surprised at how his advocacy of indoor mask wearing caused him to be ostracized: 

[Waddell] knew Enid was conservative. Garfield County has voted for the Republican candidate in every presidential election since 1940. But he considered himself conservative too. He is a registered independent who believes in the right to bear arms and fiscal responsibility. And anyway, national politics were not important to him. Good schools and low housing prices were what he cared about.

And by the end, a realization that this was not about masks:

Mr. Waddell thought it had to do with fear. He said America is in a moment when the people who ran things from the beginning — mostly white, mostly Christian, mostly male — are now having to share control. Their story about America is being challenged. New versions are becoming mainstream, and that, he believes, is threatening.

“You don’t just get to be the sole solitary voice in terms of what we do here, what we teach here, what we show on television here,” he said. “You don’t get to do it anymore. That’s where the fight is.”

He sees it as the next chapter in the story of what it means to be an American, of who gets to write this country’s story. But he does not see the country getting through it without a fight.

Then there is Crabtree, aged 45, who owns a business selling essential oils and cleaning products.  She also works as an assistant to a Christian author.  Crabtree moved to Enid just two years ago, and she's also new to political engagement--spurred to action by her COVID skeptic beliefs.  Crabtree accepted Jesus as her savior at age 4, and she blamed her parents' generation for not being sufficiently devout and vocal about their Christianity. 

The more she researched online, the more it seemed that there was something bigger going on. She said she came to the conclusion that the government was misleading Americans. For whose benefit she could not tell. Maybe drug companies. Maybe politicians. Whatever the case, it made her feel like the people in charge saw her — and the whole country of people like her — as easy to take advantage of.

Tavernise quotes Crabtree:   

I don’t like to be played the fool, And I felt like they were counting on us — us being the general population — on being the fool.

Crabtree described some local consequences of her activism: 

She felt contempt radiating from the other side, a sense that those who disagreed with her felt superior and wanted to humiliate her. She said she was taken aback at how people were ridiculing her on a pro-mask group on Facebook. She said she remembers one person writing that he hoped she would get Covid and die.

Interestingly, this sentiment seems to reflect that of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, who visited Crabtree's church, Emmanuel Enid.  Kirk said of an "unspecified 'metropolitan elite'" : 

They want to crush you....They call you the smelly Walmart people. They do. You should hear the way your leaders talk about you. They have contempt for you. They want to try to turn Oklahoma into nothing more than a producing colony for the rest of the country.

Sadly, there is some truth to Kirk's assertion--that the ruling classes do hold many in middle America in contempt.  Indeed, what Kirk asserts is not inconsistent with Hillary Clinton's 2016 "basket of deplorables" comment--well, depending on how one defines "deplorable."  

Then there are Crabtree's views on race, even as Tavernise notes that Enid has experienced very rapid racial diversification in the last decade.  Crabtree is quoted:  

Why all of a sudden are we teaching our 5-year-olds to be divided by color? They don’t care what color your skin is until you tell them that that 5-year-old’s grandpa was mean 200 years ago. 

Also of interest are details of how Crabtree is passing her beliefs on to her children. We're told her high school graduate son is too busy being a patriot and working to save the country to go to college, where he'd have to "pay $100,000 to fight indoctrination."  Instead, he got a job at Chick-fil-A. 

Finally, here is Tavernise's commentary, her framing on what is happening in Enid (emphasis added):

From lockdowns to masks to vaccines to school curriculums, the conflicts in America keep growing and morphing, even without Donald Trump, the leader who thrived on encouraging them, in the White House. But the fights are not simply about masks or schools or vaccines. They are, in many ways, all connected as part of a deeper rupture — one that is now about the most fundamental questions a society can ask itself: What does it mean to be an American? Who is in charge? And whose version of the country will prevail?

Social scientists who study conflict say the only way to understand it — and to begin to get out of it — is to look at the powerful currents of human emotions that are the real drivers. They include the fear of not belonging, the sting of humiliation, a sense of threat — real or perceived — and the strong pull of group behavior.

Oh, and I can't close this post without acknowledging that folks on the Left are complaining that this story even got printed because it tells us what the right is thinking.  Here's a Tweet from my feed calling Tavernise's story a "two-sides approach to a broad topic where one side relentlessly lies, threatens violence, denies scientific reality, and so much more.  This one featured academics, however!":   

I am not sure what Gillmor wants--to ignore that folks like Crabtree exist, perhaps?  What would he have the New York Times do?  Not even ask questions about why folks in Enid believe what they believe?  

About Gillmor: He is with the News Co/Lab at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which he describes on his webpage as "an experimental lab, which he co-founded in 2017, that collaborates with others to improve the information ecosystem."