Politics brings out the crazies. Don’t become one of them

It was always a dream of mine see to Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” I finally got my chance when I visited the Art Institute of Chicago with a friend last weekend.

Finding it involved a journey that took us up and down multiple flights of stairs. Several times, I held onto my friend’s arm as we slowly made our way down the grand staircases. Regular readers may recall my regular mentions of having quite a hitch in my giddap due to advanced idiopathic arthritis. Falling down a marble staircase would be … very bad, in a life-altering kind of way.

“I don’t want to sound overly dramatic,” I told my friend, “but I have to admit, ever since that event I told you about where those two weirdos dropped all those marbles, I sometimes try to be extra cautious when going up and down stairs in a crowded place.”

My friend is a police officer who does protective detail for metropolitan elected officials facing unsettling attention. My own background includes a decade as a grassroots political volunteer and several years now as an opinion writer. We’ve talked at length about some of our experiences on the political scene, so my friend had already heard about an event featuring a controversial conservative speaker that I’d attended at the University of Iowa in April 2023, at which two wannabe resistance fighters dropped backpacks full of marbles near the top of a flight of hard stairs at the event’s main point of entry.

Shortly after the event, which I wrote about last year, I realized I had been standing in line not far from where the marbles were dropped. Others further back in line were even closer to the affected area and quickly reported the scene to police officers on site. Police scrambled to contain the marbles and closed off the area to passersby. Had they not done so, any of us — including your friendly disabled neighborhood opinion columnist — could have slipped, fallen, and been seriously injured.

Politics and journalism both require a thick skin. I’ve got a sturdy constitution and a sense of humor. But I’ll still admit that the scarier moments, from all of which I’ve emerged unscathed, can still stick with me and leave me feeling on edge. That’s not unusual. A lot of us have experienced a number of scary political moments over the years.

I can sum it up in five words: Politics bring out the crazies. As do the issues at their center, over which we are so often divided.

After we found and marveled at “American Gothic,” my friend and I left the museum and sat down to supper. It was July 13, a sunny, carefree Saturday. I’d barely looked at my phone all day. Politics was the furthest thing from my mind in the middle of my weekend jaunt.

Then some random guy came into our little pizza joint to find his friends at the bar, and I overheard him say, “Trump’s been shot.”

The TVs in the bar came on instantly. We watched the coverage while some of the people at the bar crowed with delight. One exclaimed, “I wouldn’t have missed!”

After we finished our pizza and left, my friend and I didn’t talk a whole lot about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life. There would be plenty of time in the coming days and weeks to react. But suddenly, the conversation on political violence had taken on relevance like never before.

Were it not for a serendipitous pivot, 20,000 Trump rallygoers in Butler, PA would have watched the 45th (and very possibly 47th) President get murdered right in front of them. And for a brief 26 seconds before the shooter was neutralized — possibly the longest 26 seconds of their lives — those 20,000 rallygoers also faced their own mortality. Or at the very least, their own safety.

Armed assailants are, luckily, an extreme rarity at presidential rallies. But our fear for our safety isn’t limited to the presence of weapons. And in our modern era of political vitriol, safety in our political activities is at forefront of our minds more than ever.

For campaign staff and volunteers, safety has always been top of mind. Conversations at a person’s door are the best way to earn their vote. But that means knocking on one stranger’s door after another — a sometimes-unsettling concept.

My own experience as a political volunteer has hardened me a bit over the years. I used to help run Republican campaign offices in Cedar Rapids. In late September 2016, I was manning the office with another volunteer named Kayla, who was brand-new to campaigning. We were by ourselves when a man in his mid-30s walked in and introduced himself as Josh Ferguson, a former Democrat who was now eager to volunteer going door-to-door for Donald Trump — starting right that instant.

The alarm bells in my head really started to sound when Josh attempted to take every last Trump yard sign in the office — hundreds of dollars’ worth — and load them in his truck, claiming he wanted to hand them out as he went door-to-door. He was friendly — too friendly. His body language exuded nervousness, his eyes were as wide as saucers, his hands clammy and shaky and his skin splotchy red. His answers to basic biographical questions seemed difficult, as if he was making them up as he went.

He might have been dealing with severe anxiety, on drugs or not of sound mental health. We weren’t sure what his intentions were or if he was in control of his actions. And we certainly couldn’t be sure that we were safe.

After 45 weird minutes, “Josh Ferguson” suddenly realized he had to be somewhere. He never returned to the campaign office. I called the contact number he had left. It was a dud. The address he’d written was illegible. When I called the school where he claimed to be a paraprofessional, the staff member with whom I spoke confirmed that no one by that name was employed there.

Politics brings out the crazies. Was “Josh Ferguson” crazy, or did he just hate Republicans? I got my answer after I spotted him at a League of Women Voters forum the next year and approached him. Thinking I was being jovial (in fact, I was confronting him,) “Josh Ferguson” chuckled as he told me his real name. Five minutes after arriving home, I was viewing his paystub from the canvassing job he’d gotten with the Iowa Democratic Party shortly after our encounter.

He openly admitted to crashing our office out of hatred for Trump. He didn’t appear the slightest bit concerned that his actions caused two women to feel physically unsafe.

That said, Republicans have no business laying blame for actions like his at the feet of Democrats. My stories are from a Republican perspective simply because I am one. One of the most important lessons I ever learned in politics is that the main difference between a Republican and a Democrat is a check mark. Democrats have their own stories about right-wing weirdos.

Just as we learned this week when bullets flew at a Trump rally, it simply cannot be claimed that political violence is a partisan problem.

Both sides have their freaks — at the local and national level. They’re easy to spot when they’re in firing position on a sloped roof. They’re not so easy to spot when they’re on a college campus with a backpack containing what you hope is just books.

I recall other moments during which I felt unsafe because of political hatred. A couple weeks after “Josh” visited in 2016, I was working by myself in the campaign office after dark one night when I saw that a GOP office in North Carolina had been spray-painted with the words “NAZI REPUBLICANS LEAVE TOWN OR ELSE” and firebombed. Every headlight on a passing vehicle outside suddenly looked eerily like a flame. I packed up and went home.

In June 2017, I gave an Uber ride to a friendly woman my age and her less-friendly boyfriend. When they asked me if I liked Bernie Sanders, I chuckled and said, “I’m actually a conservative.” Moments later, the girl was leaning forward from the back seat, inches away from my face while literally screaming that the world was going to hell “BECAUSE OF YOU AND THE WAY YOU VOTED!” I pulled into a gas station and instructed the pair to exit the vehicle. As they got out, the woman took two bananas from a little snack basket I kept in the back seat and hurled them at my car as I drove away.

Blaming the other side is what we always do. It isn’t working. I can’t control what lefty lunatics do when they lash out at the right. (I can only write about it.) I can’t even control what the right does when they want to stick it to the left. (I can write about that, too.)

I can only control my own actions and reactions. And I can only encourage you to do the same.

Limit your web and social media use, especially if your feeds are filled with one incendiary political story after another. They’re designed to make you feel that way. Don’t let them. Manage your consumption of cable news while you’re at it. Find better background noise for your house.

Channel your political frustrations into actually doing something. Find a campaign, a party organization, or an issue advocacy group and let them put you to work.

Leave your house and actually interact with people face-to-face. You might actually get along with them.

And above all else, drop your disdain for your political opposites. Believe it or not, they’re just like you: They discern, they opine, and they vote. Then they come home and carry on with life. Imagine what politics would be like if we all remembered that.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com