Steve InskeepVerified account

In 2012 I met a woman as she cleaned out her garage. In 20 minutes she told me the whole story of the US economy since the financial crisis as seen in her neighborhood’s real estate, then wept as she told me her 18-year-old son would be inducted in the army that September 11.

In 2008 a man and woman answered their door and led me to their back porch and gave me something to drink and we talked politics - they were “yellow dog Democrats” - as darkness fell and the fireflies came out.

In 2016 I was renting a car in Wichita, Kansas and ended up interviewing the clerk; she gave an extended riff on how hard it is to be black in Wichita and try to live on $16 an hour.

Also in 2016, I introduced myself to several travelers over breakfast at a B and B in Paducah, Kentucky. They were strangers to each other, but discovered through our talk that they were all conservative and excited to meet others who felt America must “wake up” to its peril.

I thought of those conservative voters, and their use of the phrase “wake up,” when Donald Trump won the presidency and it swiftly became more popular for people on the left to talk of each other as “woke.”

In suburban Chicago in 1998, I knocked on a door and found the first black family in a white neighborhood. Somebody had stoned their windows. I knocked on other doors and found a white man who approved the stoning. Why? “Because I’m racist,” he said. “Goodnight.”

In Ohio in 2004, I met a young couple who took their political cues from Howard Stern, across the street from an older couple who took their cues from Fox.

In Juarez, Mexico in 2014 I met a maquiladora worker in line to get her pay, and she agreed to take me home on the public bus. It was a used American yellow school bus, its ceiling so low that I had to bend my head sideways as I stood in the crowded aisle.

She took me to the house where she lived with her daughter on the pay from the factory - two rooms, dirt floors, in the courtyard of someone else’s home. The little girl’s few belongings included a stuffed animal.

At an observation point overlooking Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 2017, I met a Democrat dismayed with the state of the country: “Hell, if we’re still alive next year at this time, I’d be surprised.”

In the same town in 2017 a woman said she voted for Trump because “jobs trump everything,” meaning she was willing to ignore his behavior. Although, she acknowledged, “the law of unintended consequences could come into play.”

In Iran, officials won’t often talk to outsiders, but people on the street will. And if you know how to start a conversation and listen to the subtleties of the answers you learn - not everything, not by a long shot, but a lot.

In China this year I asked people on the street and in restaurants to name the first word that came to mind when I mentioned America. The answers included: Democracy, freedom, prosperity, developed, technology. They thought better of America than we sometimes think of ourselves.