https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/12/election-suspicion-georgia-greene-trump/


I'll set the stage with this:


“The smartest district in the U.S.A.” is how Greene has described her followers.

Those followers include Rubino, a married 40-year-old mother of two, a New York transplant who had worked in restaurants and flipped houses for a living and once believed politics was only for the powerful.



-------


There is a lot between this moment in the profile and where we're going, but eventually we get to:


“Sometimes, I’d like to know what the point is,” she said, driving in a screw. “The fact that I can’t figure it out is what bothers me. Because I need to understand.”

It was a question that had troubled her since the first time she ever asked it, which was when she was 8 years old, sitting in the back seat of her mother’s car on the way to religion class.

“The thought just came into my head,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘What are we doing this for? What are we doing any of this for if we’re just going to die? You die, and it’s over. So, what’s the point?’ I felt afraid. Afraid to the point of not wanting to think about that anymore.”

She had never stopped thinking about it, though, and in some ways, she said, it was the question that had drawn her into the movement for Donald Trump, who was the first politician to give voice to her private thoughts about what America was becoming, which made her feel recognized and even important. She had never voted before, never felt herself mattering as a citizen until Trump came on the scene along with everything else — the rallies, the social media, and eventually, successors such as Greene.

They were the ones who introduced her to the version of America she now inhabited, but what was happening, she realized, was that the more she believed in it, the more that all the certainties of the old America were turning into suspicions. She no longer trusted her schooling. She no longer trusted traditional news. She no longer trusted election results. She no longer trusted courts, or local government, or state government, or the U.S. government, or any of the institutions of democracy she once took for granted. She was no longer sure America was the country she once thought it was.

“It’s just endless questions,” she said. “You’d like to have somebody to trust, something to be sure of.”

But every question led to another suspicion, she said, and every suspicion led to another question, and at times it could all feel so destabilizing that she was no longer sure of her own sense of reality itself, which had so thoroughly broken down that she sometimes had to regain her bearings by doing what she was doing now. She picked up a screw and squeezed it.

“I know I have this screw in my hand because it’s poking my finger and hurts,” she said.

She pinched the skin on the inside of her forearm.

“I am really here,” she said.

She looked at a tree across the yard.

“I know that’s a tree,” she said, then stopped herself. “Or at least I know that it’s called a tree because that’s what I was told, but how do I know it’s not something else?”

She looked at her garage, where she was storing the bags of shreds that she was still planning to spread out on a long table and tape back together again, at which point she believed that she might better understand this moment in America. She realized how absurd this could sound.


“Sometimes I’m like, what if I’m wrong?” Rubino said. “It crosses my mind. Then I ask God: If I’m doing something wrong, please give me the strength to figure it out. Because I really want to understand what the point is. This can’t be what life is, that you get up and go to work and come home. That as humans, we’re nothing.”

She drove the screw into the plywood.

“I want people to realize we’re significant,” she said.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz