From birth to age 10, I grew up on blackberries and the marine layer in the flatlands of Berkeley, Calif. We rooted for baseball’s Bash Brothers and Rickey Henderson, rode BART and flew kites at a bayside park built over a former dump. Then my parents moved their four children to rural south-central Kansas, back to my mother’s Mennonite community. Some of their California friends thought they’d lost their minds. My father was an East Coast Jew; they were both busy labor lawyers. But they wanted us to be near extended family and so, just before I entered fifth grade, we arrived in a place where people measure rainfall in hundredths of an inch.
Nearly 20 years ago, Barack Obama insisted that we are one people. In the Pledge of Allegiance — which I found myself reciting for the first time in my life every morning before class in Kansas — we say we are one nation. But lately it can seem the red and blue are not only two different worlds but also doomed to an ever-warming cultural war.
These days, I travel several times a year between the Bay Area — where I’m raising a family of my own — and Kansas, sometimes spending a month or more on my parents’ farm, surrounded by wheat, soybeans, alfalfa and corn. And I’m here to tell you our divisions are not so much hardening as blurring — rural and urban America are not as divided as many people think.
The possibility of this country, the promise, is based on a union mutually beneficial even as it contains multitudes of difference. What we might think of as blue-state values (environmentalism, support for L.G.B.T.Q. communities, internationalism, racial and cultural diversity) are also valued by people living in red states. And some of these values (conservation, land stewardship, growing your own food) were originally also red-state values that blue areas of the country tend to forget they didn’t invent.
On my block in Oakland, neighbors have turned their front yards into vegetable plots. A few doors down, chickens hunt and peck. Some of my neighbors long to do what my parents did — “blow up the TV,” as John Prine sang, “go to the country,” “plant a little garden” and find a slower pace nearer the land.
MY MOTHER hails from generations of farmers; she left to study law at the University of California, Berkeley, and met my father, who had been educated at Columbia Law School, when they worked as attorneys representing the United Farm Workers union. When I arrived on the Kansas farm that would shape my childhood, I did not miss California as much as I loved the land — the creeks, the prairies, the smell of the air and the earth.
I was also, I discovered, a misfit. I had long hair and wore colorful Berkeley clothes. Our farmhouse was full of books by people like George Eliot, Rosa Luxemburg and Abraham Joshua Heschel, with posters on the wall of Angela Davis and Pete Seeger. We canned our own tomatoes and turned ice cream by hand but also traveled to the East Coast for b’nai mitzvah. I fished the creeks but still followed the Oakland A’s. Had I not had one foot in the door by way of my mother’s family roots, I don’t know if I’d have survived Kansas. It was not an easy place to be a half-Jewish boy with an odd haircut.
