Denker: Ghosts don’t vote, but haunted people do

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You know you’re getting older when you tell people you’re going to visit family, and then you find yourself at a cemetery.

Recently, I traveled about two hours northwest of the Twin Cities for a gathering of Lutheran pastors. I found myself in the same central Minnesota lake town I’d last visited 14 years ago for my cousin’s funeral.

He died, suddenly, at age 22, almost exactly 11 years after his mom — my aunt — died of cancer at age 42. They now share a gravestone.

And so I found myself telling people, awkwardly, that my plans for our conference break time involved heading to the cemetery. But first I had lunch at the local diner, where the senior couple next to me reminisced about grabbing beers from the local dairy’s basement refrigerator at age 15, and smoking cigarettes outside the house at age 14.

“No one cared then,” they laughed, talking about overprotective parents of today and the lessons learned only by the passage of years, but also the ghosts of the past and the unintended impacts of so much early drinking and smoking.

On the way to the cemetery, I passed Minnesota Teen Challenge, the conservative Christian faith-based drug and alcohol treatment center that has choirs who sing in churches and a record of helping those suffering from addiction, but which has also been criticized for poor treatment of LGBTQ+ and non-Christian participants.

Then I passed numerous Trump/Vance signs, some of them homemade. Some of the signs said: “Take America Back,” and others said “Keep America Great,” which seemed to me to be contradictory messages.

But the succession of first the conservative Christian drug and alcohol treatment center followed by the political yard signs reminded me of the ways in which Trumpism seems to prey on hurting people like a vulture, coming into our rural communities and towns and hoovering up whatever financial resources people have left, plying them with promises of prosperity or at least revenge on those painted as usurpers or enemies.

I couldn’t help but come into this town and be haunted by the memories of my cousin and my aunt. There was the city park where we celebrated his 9th birthday party, a feat his mom somehow managed despite being desperately sick with cancer. Down that road was the house where they lived near the lake, which was constantly being repaired and fixed up, as it goes with older homes and people who do the work themselves.

These are my family stories, but I’m telling them because I know they aren’t unique. So many of us smile and blithely recount an unmarred, happy youth, concealing behind our smiles the larger stories of American grief and loss buried on the plains and the prairie, underneath the North Woods and down deep on the Iron Range. Our families share stories of war veterans returning home — or not — or returning home but leaving a part of them behind — in France, or Vietnam, or Korea, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. Of small-town teenagers who lost their lives driving home from a town baseball game on an unremarkable June evening. The relative who inherited the family farm but couldn’t make it work. The guns so often celebrated in memories of deer hunting and sharpshooting that sometimes become a way out, a last resort in a moment of lonely despair.

I don’t really believe in ghosts — not in the sense that they show them on ghost hunting shows on TV, lurking in corners and making strange noises late at night. I don’t believe in the manufactured fear that legions of dead Americans will suddenly show up on voting rolls, rising to cast votes in a wild fever dream of “election fraud.”

Ghosts don’t vote. But haunted people do, and who among us can say we aren’t haunted? By unresolved pain and grief and loss. By the inherent economic unfairness of the recent decades of American life. While Wall Street banks got bailouts, ordinary Americans lost their homes because their mom needed a cancer treatment they couldn’t afford. Or you tried to be the first person in your family to go to college, and now the interest on your student loans means despite making payments faithfully, you owe more than the original balance.

When I return to the small towns and fields of greater Minnesota and rural America, I feel at once at home among familiar folks that remind me of my family. At the same time, as I see the proliferation of Trump signs and the growing divide in polling data between urban and suburban voters and the rest of the state, I am haunted by a sense of unresolved pain and anger.

In Donald Trump and JD Vance, I see two men who are all too willing to capitalize on the ghosts of rural America’s past and present. They introduce more and more wild theories about Haitian immigrants, about pregnant women, about Kamala Harris herself — if only to distract attention from the real pain and anger buried deep in these towns where far more people die than are born, where maternity wards are shutting down, and immigrant labor is the only thing sustaining the large agricultural operations and manufacturing plants that have replaced most family farms and local businesses.

The cold, hard political truth is that our presidential election system is set up such that Harris can likely win the presidency even while suffering big losses in rural America, and at the same time, Trump can win the presidency even while suffering big losses in urban centers in blue states. The difference is, however, that one candidate is campaigning so that we remain haunted by our pain, and the other is campaigning so that we can address it together and hopefully move into a future marked by a sense of shared responsibility — urban and rural Americans alike.

For the last eight years, I have watched the Republican Party capitalize on the pain of rural people who I love, and claim they’re doing so on the basis of Christian principles. But the God I believe in is not a mere ghost, conjured up by promises of violence and hate.