The social divide is infecting even small-town USA
This is a town on the edge of the White Mountains. It has a quaint main street, a storied past and a sense of self.
It's an emblem of New England: the whitewashed church, the Greek revival hotel, the Victorian opera house, the imposing post office. And, of course, the covered bridge. It's Norman Rockwell's America, all sweetness and light.
The sweetness is Chutters, which claims “the world's longest candy counter.” True or not, the counter is 112 feet (34 metres) and offers every confection imaginable. Children love it. Adults do too.
The light is Pollyanna, the fictional character created by Eleanor Porter, a native daughter. Pollyanna represented hopefulness. See her likeness in a bronze statue in front of the Carnegie library. See “gladness” as a commercial theme, trumpeted by local merchants.
No doubt Littleton has problems, like other communities in rural America facing opioids, obesity, diabetes and domestic violence. Still, given its blessings, Pollyanna might confidently declare today, like Voltaire's Pangloss, that in Littleton “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”
So it was startling, then, to learn that the community divided last year over murals painted on the wall of a building downtown. They were organized by a local gay and lesbian group and denounced by a conservative, evangelical Christian, Carrie Gendreau, one of three elected town officials. She called homosexuality “an abomination.” From there, things got small in Littleton.
Littleton reflects a country where contentious issues are no longer settled (same-sex rights, reproductive rights, minority voting rights, affirmative action) because some will never agree to them. See slavery yielding to segregation, which endured a century after the Civil War because southerners refused to accept equal rights for Blacks. See universal access to abortion legalized in 1973 and rescinded in 2022. The reason was a loud, angry minority that always rejected Roe v. Wade, eager to tear up the social contract with no thought to consensus. Most Americans favour abortion with few restrictions, but in many states, it's now illegal.
Church and state? The fabled separation no longer matters as authoritarians and absolutists arise, speaking in apocalyptic terms, calling compromise unholy.
Look at the collapse of civil discourse. In the U.S. House of Representatives, members turn on each other, like kids in a sandbox. They snipe, they mock personal appearance, they jeer as the president addresses Congress. Today politicians are commonly threatened at work and home, forcing them to leave (or not enter) what John F. Kennedy called “an honourable profession.”
A former president is on trial in New York. He is a misogynist with a record of sexual assault — we'll know about his criminality soon — which once would have disqualified him from public office. Yet he may become president again in January.
This country is awash in vulgarity, recrimination, malice, stupidity, amnesia and civic laziness. The superb New York Times journalist Frank Bruni calls ours “the age of grievance,” in which everyone has a complaint and everyone wants to air it.
Standards have collapsed in dress, where kids go to school in pyjama pants because, after all, they have to be comfortable, and where choking is the new rage in sex among young Americans. For others, there is less talk about Pollyanna than polyamory, the subject of Molly Roden Winter's best-selling More: A Memoir of Open Marriage. Popular culture is an epidemic of expletives. Comedian Bill Maher is a truth teller, but does every sentence have to be laced with profanity?
Crime is falling in the United States, but violence is sewn into the national character. Civil War, a box office hit, is about what may happen here amid growing polarization, though it offers no clear explanation of this dystopia. It's content to present a numbing tableau of violence.
Is there an end to this? Not imminently. In Littleton, however, the outraged official did not seek re-election, her leading antagonist did (and won), and gladness and hope are back in town. For now.