Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right QUOTES

41 " Local waterways had long been contaminated from many sources. But in 1987, the state at last issued a seafood advisory for Bayou d'Inde, the Calcasieu Ship Channel, and the estuary to the Gulf of Mexico. ... From net to plate—fishermen, grocery stores, trucking companies, and restaurant workers—all were furious at the government officials who had declared the seafood advisory. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

42 " The English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of having that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift. Gratitude, awe, appreciation; for me, all those words apply and I don’t know which to use. But I think we need a special word, and should hold a place of honor for it, so as to restore what might be a missing key on the English-speaking world’s cultural piano. Our "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

43 " In a racially separated world, it's possible to have racial disadvantage without racial prejudice. Whites can turn for help to white neighbors with good connections in the plant. Blacks turn to black neighbors without them. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

44 " Left or right, we all happily use plastic combs, toothbrushes, cell phones, and cars, but we don't all pay for it with high pollution. As research for this book shows, red states pay for it more—partly through their own votes for easier regulation and partly through their exposure to a social terrain of politics, industry, television channels, and a pulpit that invites them to do so. In one way, people in blue states have their cake and eat it too, while many in red states have neither. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

45 " [T]he Tea Party was not so much an official political group as a culture, a way of seeing and feeling about a place and its people. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

46 " In the life of one man, Lee Sherman, I saw reflected both sides of the Great Paradoz--the need for help and a principled refusal of it. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

47 " Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.

I first experienced reaching out and being reached out to as the child of a Foreign Service Officer. In my child’s mind, I had been given a personal mission, parallel to my father’s, to befriend the people of all the foreign countries my father’s job took us to. I was instructed to reach out, I imagined, to people who spoke, dressed, walked, looked, and worshipped differently than we did. Had my father asked me to do this? I don’t think so. […] Curiously, I felt that same gratitude for connection when, many decades later, I drove from plant to plant with Sharon, and when I talked to the many others I met in the course of researching this book. I felt I was in a foreign country again, only this time it was my own. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

48 " Given such an array of challenges, one might expect people to welcome federal help. In truth, a very large proportion of the yearly budgets---in the case of Louisiana, 44 percent---do come from federal funds… "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

49 " But Republicans put God and family on their side and 'we like that. The Scripture says Jesus wants us to be about his Father's business.' Their faith had guided them through a painful loss of family, friends, neighbors, frogs, turtles, and trees [from the pollution left by petrochemical companies in Louisiana's Cancer Alley]. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

50 " Lee, who had borne the guilt of polluting public waters and been cheated by a dishonest official at a tax office, wanted to feel vindicated. The tax office was corrupt, and taxes themselves were connected to dishonesty, he felt.... At issue in politics was trust. It was hard enough to trust people close at hand, and very hard to trust those far away; to locally rooted people, Washington D.C, felt very very far away. ...[Everyone] felt like victims of a frightening loss--or was it theft?--of their cultural home, their place in the world, and their honor. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

51 " They were braving the worst of an industrial system, the fruits of which liberals enjoyed from a distance in their highly regulated and cleaner blue states. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

52 " They had children to take care of and felt wary of supporting any environmental movement or federal government action that might jeopardize them. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

53 " The basic feeling around town was that one shouldn't get too hung up on the environment, feel too nostalgic for cleaner times, or be too retro; that wasn't what residents were 'supposed to feel.' That's because a fracking boom was on, and many new industries were on their way to Lake Charles to process the natural gas it freed from the cracked earth. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

54 " An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

55 " think they overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

56 " The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten, like the female half of the Nuer. Coming "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

57 " If the power elite want to forget about pollution, and if they impose structural amnesia on a community, you need an omnipotent mind to remember how things once were. You needed, the Arenos felt, God. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

58 " the more that people confine themselves to likeminded company, the more extreme their views become. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

59 " couldn’t they join a good fight? The coastal land of Louisiana had long been slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. The state’s coast provides 40 percent of the nation’s wetlands, and its commercial fisheries provide a quarter to a third of the nation’s seafood. Experts agree that a major cause of the land’s subsidence is the extraction of oil and saltwater intrusion. Over the years, oil companies have dredged hundreds of canals and laid down pipeline through which oil drilled in the Gulf has been piped inland. Saltwater seeps in along the canals, killing grasses that once provided protection against Louisiana’s frequent tropical storms. Since 1930, the state had already lost an area equal to the size of Delaware—an average football field every hour. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

60 " A Lake Charles-based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally's very dear friend and worl-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both woman had joined sororities at LSU. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other's houses. Each loved the other's children. Shirley knew Sally's parents and even consulted Sally's mother when the two go to "fussing to much." They exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts and jointly scoured the newspaper for notices of upcoming cultural events they had, when they were neighbors in Lake Charles, attended together. One day when I was staying as Shirley's overnight guest in Opelousas, I noticed a watercolor picture hanging on the guestroom wall, which Sally had painted as a gift for Shirley's eleven-year-old daughter, who aspired to become a ballerina. With one pointed toe on a pudgy, pastel cloud, the other lifted high, the ballerina's head was encircled by yellow star-like butterflies. It was a loving picture of a child's dream--one that came true. Both women followed the news on TV--Sally through MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and Shirley via Fox News's Charles Krauthammer, and each talked these different reports over with a like-minded husband. The two women talk by phone two or three times a week, and their grown children keep in touch, partly across the same politcal divide. While this book is not about the personal lives of these two women, it couldn't have been written without them both, and I believe that their friendship models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right