There Seems to Be a Mountain Between Us

It is November 2024. Elections are over. We are devastated on campus. I wake up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe, but I have to get up early for chemistry tomorrow, so I swallow my fear of dying in my sleep and close my eyes again. I call my parents as soon as the sun hits my windowsill, but my dad only says it “can’t be any worse than Reagan.”

All day, I feel deeply for everyone I meet. When I pass a girl, we lock eyes for a second, and then we stare at the ground. We know.

Horrifying statements are made against women and minorities on Fizz. I delete the app for a while.

I attend a meeting within the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Studies department. Tablewide confusion is expressed toward the decisions of Southern state constituents for the red wave we witnessed in the election. I speak up: “If we tried to reach out to low-income, red counties, inspire interest in the humanities in those counties, and fund more programs dedicated to achieving higher education, they’d come around. They feel abandoned. Nobody seems to care about them except this one guy who claims he’s going to ‘fight like hell’ for them. That’s all they hear.”

Despite a couple of nods, I am shut down. It boiled down to the same old “Those people will never get it,” and “they’re too tuned into their right-wing media,” and, the one that is all too commonly expressed: “Don’t they get that they’re doing this to themselves?”

I don’t know, do they?

It is December 2025. I’m back home in Eastern Kentucky. I tell my mom that I don’t want to hear anything from the rest of the family about the election.

But no one talks about it.

It is January 2025. It’s about that time, now, and my brother thinks about watching the inauguration. But he decides it’s not worth it. “It’s not even going to be outside,” he says, and so we play some Mario Party instead.

During winter break, the election does not seem to be the focus for many people around. It is pretty much life as usual — visit the family, have soup beans and cornbread, and send my mom’s 2012 Chevy Impala to my uncle because it’s out of commission again (this is pretty much a monthly thing, somehow).

It is February 2025. The Department of Government Efficiency sinks its claws into the government. Federal workers are being laid off for little to no reason. Part of this whole “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiative, right? It’s entirely chaotic. Government jobs as well as medical and teaching positions tend to be the most stable for the area. But, a lot of government employees, for the first time, are scared of losing their jobs. They’re probably some of the best workers in their whole office. Unbelievably kind, hardworking, dedicated. But they’re scared now. And some declare they’ll never vote red again.

Oh, and Pikeville is underwater again. There are tornadoes, too, and I remember 2012, when I didn’t think my mom was gonna leave her shift alive and my brother cancelled his Florida spring break to be there with us. Will we get Federal Emergency Management Agency aid again? I’d bet my nonexistent derby horse that we won’t under this administration, but I know Gov. Andy Beshear will still try his best.

I still think Beshear would’ve been a better running mate than Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, but the red-winged vultures would have started circling around the uninformed the moment he vacated his seat. I’ve shaken hands with Matt Bevin, our last republican governor, at the state fair. He seemed nice. In 2018, he tried to take away teachers’ pensions. No one liked that. We tend to know what is best, but sometimes, it’s hard to see the reason for the televisions between us.

It is March 2025. My family is mortified at the possibility of losing disability and social security benefits because the person behind the chainsaw “hain’t never been a lumberjack once in his life.”

Peaceful protests and outcries at town halls are popping up across a lot of red states, and it isn’t even summer yet. I come from a district with one of the largest Medicaid enrollment rates outside of New York or California. People finally see that Rep. Hal Rogers — who has run uncontested for years — isn’t doing us any favors. ’Course, I’ve known that for years, but sometimes it takes a thing like this to pop the Fox News bubble and the Facebook echo chamber.

It is May 2025. I am homesick. I miss my old Kentucky home deeply.

Though I hold no right-wing sentiment, I feel the elitism oozing off the walls of Amherst as it does with any institute of higher learning. Honestly, back home, it feels like even University of Kentucky students look down on community college graduates like me. I don’t believe a majority of Amherst students have a clue as to what Eastern Kentucky looks like, nor have they ever been up a holler and witnessed the true hells of poverty.

The opioid epidemic rages on, and I witness my family, my friends’ families, my co-workers, and my neighbors torn apart by it. I witness towns dissolving, and a third of the surrounding county still falls below the poverty line. I witness construction on my way to the bright lights of Lexington … the uncompleted work goes on and on, and it has been that way since before I was born. Why? The pool of federal money kept drying up faster than the water in my town’s public pool, which used to provide free entry to kids on the most impoverished streets. It hasn’t been filled for years.

It is quite bothersome that right-wing writers blame inclusionary measures for what’s harming our country, argue that Democrats didn’t appeal enough to the uber-right and their often hateful messaging, or say that anti-immigration policies are appropriate in any way. It’s more worthwhile to consider former Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat as a failed attempt to court moderates when the Democrats should perhaps have been moving more left and delivering on the monetary and labor promises of yesteryear.

Kentucky has taught me to be kind, welcoming, and committed to helping one another even if you yourself ain’t got a pot to, well, y’know in. I still remember 2016 when my red-hearted high school classmates lambasted Vice President JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” because of his mischaracterization of his “old Kentucky home” as lacking in the bootstraps department.

Our issue is poverty, poverty, poverty, and more inescapable poverty than I could ever express here. Our problem is Republican congressmen who redirect our disdain for our monetary situation toward minority groups for no other reason than to escape unscathed. After all the damage they’ve done, why are Senators Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell now siding with Democrats during this second Trump admin? McConnell, at least, is retiring. Well, don’t let the screen door slam on the way out — that’s our good screen door, thank you very much.

I can’t pretend that the state of acceptance back home is all peaches and cream or that the state’s history is a clean slate — no part of this country is perfect. There’s still a lot of unlearning and outreach to be done. I don’t blame my friends back home who are desperate to escape. I’ve been there too, praying for the day I could flee to Amherst. But I see so many of us who choose to stay, and I realize that I cannot change anything back home from Massachusetts. I cannot afford to leave behind the youth that may be reared by intolerant blood. They deserve to have a community that accepts them.

To my friends back home who remain fearful of this administration, I remind you there are still people who stand up for justice against racism and for queer pride even in deep red counties. Despite the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky cancelling their graduations specifically for queer students and students of color due to the state and federal administration’s anti-DEI policies, there are still student organizations on campus working to provide these celebrations again. Also, Bellarmine College, Berea University, Centre College, and Transylvania University, alongside Amherst College and 500-plus other academic institutions, have signed American Association of Colleges and Universities’ open letter against the Trump administration’s encroachment into the freedoms of academic institutions.

There is no exceptionalism at work here, but instead active change as education and economic disparities are being challenged and solved within our communities, and as our communities become more diverse. It is baffling to hear it said, without thinking, that a majority low-income region that includes so many racial minorities, activists, disabled people, and queer constituents, deserves everything coming to them due to misinformed voting or when they are trying to effect change.

People do not believe me when I say southern hospitality is real. No, no — we’re “backwards and ignorant.” Sure. It’s true sometimes. But, I’ve been paraded around up here by other students to laugh about my accent and my Appalachian quirks and phrases. Ad nauseum. Sometimes, I can reclaim it. Other times hurt.

I do not claim to speak to all right-wing areas of the country, only my own slice of Kentucky. From my experience, taking time to investigate the origins of others’ beliefs is worth doing — not only so that we can better understand their viewpoints, but so we can better our arguments, too, and perhaps find commonality.

Until we bridge the gap, no one is going to effect change, and that has to happen on both sides. Even though I’m proud to be Appalachian, I will not let Appalachia off the hook, either. We have been shielded for too long by our mountains, which protected us until they came for our coal. Appalachians love to say coal keeps the lights on. But it keeps our folks filled with cancer. Keeps our lungs black. Keeps our mountains crumbling. Keeps our lives miserable.

I fear for Kentucky. Between the greed that circulates in the upper echelons, the state of the tariffs that our woefully uninformed population did not understand, and the uncaring outside world, it seems we are doomed to decline into even deeper poverty than can be fathomed.

Being at Amherst is a dream come true. I’ve met people from all walks of life, broadened my horizons, taken advantage of the liberal arts open curriculum, and removed myself from the mountains, if only for a little short time. But god, if I don’t miss those mountains.