Where America is really at

This opinion piece shows where America is really at and why there are so many issues affecting the country.

OPINION

The year before Donald Trump was first elected, I was lucky enough to take a meandering trip through the United States over several months.

My wife and I had rented a car, which we put through its paces as we traversed a nation we thought we’d learned so much about through films, books and popular music.

While the timeless landscape of its great mountains, canyons and deserts were forever etched into my brain, one moment altered my perception of the States and it plays increasingly heavily on my mind at this critical juncture in history, five years later.

It took place while I was sitting in a dive bar in Philadelphia where, unlike Aussie pubs where we sit with the mob we came in with, everyone was perched along the bar — fuelling drunken conversation between strangers.

I pulled a tall stool up, ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon and – as seemed obligatory in the States – sparked up a conversation with the fella sitting next to me.

We talked about my trip, where I was from and a bit about what there was to see and do in Philly aside from eating cheesesteaks.

I cracked loudly with laughter as he shared a few anecdotes about his life and the city he called home, which he claimed was not as good as it used to be.

His sentences were punctuated with slurred words and yelling, but that was by no means unusual in an American bar. He seemed like a decent, hardworking bloke letting off some steam on a Friday night.

That was until we hit the subject of politics.

I still remember the hot smell of booze on his breath as he leaned over, attempting to dip his voice slightly, and told me he was planning a trip to Washington DC with a stepladder and his rifle.

His plan was to lean the ladder up against the walls of the White House and shoot Barack Obama as he slept.

“Bang! Bang!” he yelled as he cocked his finger and stared into my eyes.

At first I thought it was all a dark joke to scare the gullible tourist, I laughed nervously, but I could soon tell he was fair dinkum.

It was from that moment I came to notice how Americans, so often accepting and convivial when talking about anything else, became bitter and angry when it came to politics.

Driving through the nation’s heartland, I lost count of the bumper stickers screeching out conspiratorial claims about healthcare, communism and nefarious plans to remove the nation’s sacred Second Amendment.

In the cities of the west coast, I saw extreme poverty that was easily on par with third world nations, with streets choked with crowds of homeless people, needles and human excrement strewn across pavements, and clusters of tents building up in even the most gentrified areas.

The appalling pay and conditions endured by those lucky enough to find work became clear just by stopping to pick up a coffee at a highway Dunkin’ Donuts.

I got talking to a bloke in his early 20s behind the counter at a rural midwest store. We talked about the trip I was taking and he said he dreamt one day of being able to travel interstate, but that it was probably never going to happen.

For a nation where it costs next to nothing to rent a car, you can fill it up for $20 and stay at a motel almost anywhere for $30, it was depressing to hear someone in the prime of their life believing they were never going to be able to afford or be given the time off to be able to take a quick trip to another state.

It was clear that the “hope” promised by Obama in 2009 had not materialised in any meaningful form for many Americans.

They were broken and let down by a political system that had clearly failed them generation after generation.

It was not long after I’d flown to my former home in the north of England, that Donald Trump revealed he was running for President.

In the immediate aftermath of the announcement I, like everybody else, thought it was a joke. But once it was clear he was serious, he was selected in the primaries and I had reflected on what I had seen in the States, it was obvious to me that he would win.

My conviction was emboldened by the Brexit vote in my home nation not long before Americans went to the polls, when the sneering, elitist and London-centric media gave the Leave camp no chance of winning – while labelling everyone who disagreed with the narrative as some sort of inbred, racist ogre.

Almost everyone I had spoken to in the real world as a reporter in the depressed former mining town where I lived – far from the vacuous echo chambers of social media – told me they were voting Leave.

They weren’t racists or bad people. They were just desperate, poor and crying out for some sort of change.

I could see the same thing happening across the Atlantic months later, when Hillary Clinton incredibly labelled anyone who voted for Trump as “deplorable”.