Going Home (2024)

"May no act of ours bring shame."

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I.

I went home last weekend for the first time in several years, to the place where I grew up and where my parents still live, to a college town in central Pennsylvania with a prominent football program that’s situated in the literal epicenter of a battleground political state. I watched, along with 111,000 other people, as my alma mater lost for the 900th consecutive year in eminently frustrating fashion to Ohio State. I listened to the hometown fans openly boo the only black head football coach they’ve ever had. I got angry about the game, and then after a few hours I got over it. I walked around town with my partner, who developed a fascination with the lead baton-twirler in the marching band. I spent time with my parents and saw my good friends and bought another Penn State hat I didn’t need and ate at an idiosyncratic French cafe that used to be a hokey 1950s-style diner back in my day.

You start to see things differently when you gain some distance from the place where you grew up; you start to think about the ways your hometown shaped you, and you also start to think about the ways you’ve tried to escape its limitations. You used to view the towns outside of your town, the parts of Pennsylvania where your little blue university-town oasis leaks into red America, as dead-end places full of people with no hope. Now they feel more like charming rural villages, small and welcoming in every way except for the political signs on the front lawns, which serve to remind you of the stark divide.

Once, many years ago, you joined a fraternity in this town. You did it because you were 19 years old and you wanted to establish a new life for yourself in the town where you grow up, beyond the friends you already knew. You met some good people in that fraternity, and you met some truly abhorrent people. The same guy who introduced you to R.E.M. also spoke in the kind of openly racist terms that you hadn’t ever really had to confront, partly because you grew up in a town where minorities were exceedingly rare. There was a thing during that fraternity’s rush meetings where a minority would come up for a potential bid, and a handful of bigots would whisper, You know the rules, and those minority students would never get a bid to rush the fraternity thanks to the cowardice of the minority. And you thought to yourself, This is stupid, but what can I do about it? They’re the ones in charge.

You were young and timid and you mostly just tolerated it. You spent time with the people in the fraternity who weren’t as abrasive, but even a few of them sometimes said things that made you cringe. You viewed their racism and misogyny as a character flaw, which was a product of your own limited worldview. You didn’t know who you were yet. You were in a position of privilege, and you had never really been cool before, and you just wanted to throw parties and break rules and meet girls; eventually, long after you graduated, your fraternity would break so many rules that it would get thrown out of its own house.

You left your hometown, moved to a small city, and the moved to larger and even more diverse cities. You realized how cloistered you were; you were lucky and you were naive. You could not have imagined that decades later, you would return to your hometown just days before the most polarizing election of your lifetime and realize just how much those same lines of demarcation had burst into open air. One thing my fraternity never cared much about was politics, but now, the political signs were right there, on the front lawns of the sprawling houses, and they felt like a warning, as if to say, You know the rules.

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II.

There is a ritual to attending a major college football game: That stunningly huge assemblage of people, the marching band, that mesmerizing baton-twirler, the rhythmic chants of the student section, the singing of perhaps the most poignant alma-mater in college sports (Key lyric: “May no act of ours bring shame/To one heart that loves thy name”)…

You become more aware of it when you haven’t been back for a while; you gather with people who dress in blue and white and bear the same allegiance to this place as you. For a moment, you feel like you have something in common that transcends this moment, and then in the fourth quarter, you see a young Penn State fan—perhaps a fraternity member—in a Trump 2024 hat and you realize that it’s not so simple, that we are a collection of allegiances and attitudes that often seem completely at odds with your own worldviews.

I don’t know what happens after this election, but then, no one knows what happens after this election. People wanted change, and so they chose chaos and disorder and vitriol and racial politics over decency and stability and competence. It is all very confusing, because the views of the same type of people who once were my fraternity brothers now feel like a threat to the future of this nation. (“One of the reasons that it’s such a difficult day for me and people like me who are losers today,” said writer and broadcaster Dan LeBatard, “is that if I view that as a threat and then you view that as your preference, you become a threat. Like, that’s the America that I live in and I didn’t think it was the America that I lived in.”)

People often refer to my hometown as Happy Valley, but that always felt like a gauzy nickname that overlooked its real problems. This was a place where, in the late 1940s, a black man couldn’t get a haircut; this was a place where people of color are still woefully underrepresented and whose leaders can’t even find an acceptable way to address the issues; this was a place where, in 2024, half of the population voted for a man who speaks, every day, to those people who live by their own perverse and bigoted rules. They don’t have to hide anymore; they don’t have to whisper those words in dank fraternity-house basements. They can plaster the words on their front lawn, like a threat to all who pass by, as if to say, This place no longer belongs to you. And I don’t know what happens next, and I don’t even know what to do about it, but for the first time in my adult life, I fear that they may be right.

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