Hometown Conspiracies

The cabin I was born in.

I grew up in the sticks, on a tiny island in the Puget Sound. My parents moved there in the '70s as back-to-the-land hippies and built the log cabin my mom still lives in (I wrote about my late father here). I had it easy with power and running water by the time I was born; my siblings had ten years without. But there are some funny things about the country, as illustrated all too well by an article entirely too close to home: The True Story of the Antifa Invasion of Forks, Washington. It's a long read, but I highly recommend it; while I don't know any of the people referenced, I feel like I could have. It's a good portrait of a world far outside the urban bubble. 

Now, my town was actually closer to Port Townsend, a tourist metropolis of about 8,000 people that served as my bright, shining lights. Port Townsend probably has more artists per capita than anywhere in the state and has attracted hippies like my parents for decades, so it's quite a liberal bastion. However, all around is quite rural, so my K-12 school was also full of rednecks. But a lot of those rednecks were friends of mine and the social lines were blurry anyway. Something about going to school with the same 100 or so kids since Kindergarten meant there weren't really any cliques, or at least that membership crossed them broadly. 

I would say the West Coast, relative the rest of the US, is dominated by liberals and libertarians. Certainly my hometown was a microcosm of that, but being rural, everything had a way of being exaggerated. In fact, we often noticed that the extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing started to look quite a bit alike: off-grid solar panels, growing pot, guns and dogs to keep the government and trespassers at bay. Whether it was gay orgies or Klu Klux Klan membership (or possibly both?), they all just wanted their privacy. 

Another thing these groups had in common was their love of conspiracy theories, though generally different ones. My high school history teacher was very open about his love of conspiracy theories. He used it to teach critical thinking: don't just blindly believe what you're told, but check alternate sources and make sure you have the whole picture. It was hard to tell how much of what he said he actually believed and how much was just to challenge our assumptions. Sadly, either I gave him too much benefit of the doubt, or he simply went downhill in later years. 

We were both at my friend's wedding some years later and he started telling me about how the Twin Towers were an inside job, how the planes didn't make them fall because jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt the steel beams. I was an aerospace engineer by this time and reminded him that steel loses most of its strength far below its melting temperature and that this kind of thing really isn't hard to look up. I asked him why he believed some internet crackpot and wouldn't apply even the most basic critical thinking to their story when he was so critical of mainstream news? He had no answer.

Of course none of this was surprising; I'd been hearing conspiracy theories from left, right, and center for as long as I could remember. Big Oil colluded to kill the electric car. Lyndon Johnson had Kennedy assassinated. Chem trails, fluoridation, UFOs. The Pyramids were built by aliens. The list goes on. Of course this means that another nearby town electing a conspiracy theorist as mayor was hardly surprising either: Residents of Washington town wonder if QAnon has taken hold of their mayor. 

Perhaps this upbringing has something to do with my thirst for knowledge and truth. Central in my personal philosophy is the tenet that it is my duty (ideally everyone's duty) to make clear the distinction between fact and opinion and to share knowledge and stamp out ignorance. My wife reminds me this is not a good way to make friends, and she's right. I'm commonly known as the Crusher of Dreams by those closest to me. But for better or worse, that's who I am.