Real America

Alecia Pawloski
4 min readAug 26, 2018

For the past few days my Twitter timeline has been sprinkled with comments about Salena Zito, the New York Post columnist and alleged Trump voter whisperer. I first became aware of her in 2016, when like many other liberals from a small town, I was wondering Did I miss something? It turned out I had not, at least not in a grand sense. I unfollowed her on Twitter shortly after, having engaged with her indirectly only once, saying she had a shtick. She didn’t like the accusation. A year or so later she would comment on something I hadn’t tagged her in, obviously searching her name.

What angers me about Zito is not so much her exaggeration of quotes or fabrication of Real People, it is the disdain she so obviously exudes for the people she proclaims to be a champion of. What is it about about these people she meets that she feels the need to turn them into someone completely new?

I grew up in Dover, Pennsylvania. It is a small town about 20 miles south of the capital in Harrisburg. When I graduated there were maybe five Black kids in my class. When I was in tenth grade, I unknowingly befriended a neo-nazi ( after I found out I refused to speak to him, shortly after that he would change his views and denounce the movement). There were confederate flags everywhere — Pennsylvania, the great Southern state. Dover consisted of farmers, hunters and grandmas who went to yard sales. My high school was closed on the first day of rifle season. Despite growing up in a place we’d now call Trump Country, I was a liberal Democrat from the time I could vote. Doing for others was something consistent with my soul and I never saw that manifested in the Republican party.

Three years ago my mom, who was a small business owner in Dover that specialized in only American made goods, was murdered by a man in a neighboring small town. It was all over the local news for months. A few weeks after her death, my sister and I opened her store, Shoppe American Made. The neighbors and friends and regulars poured in. Somewhere there is a newspaper article with a photo of a man probably in his sixties, hugging me and crying. I thought about this photo many times after the 2016 election, thinking that man probably voted for Trump.

I moved to Maryland shortly after my mom’s death. I needed to get out. Out of my apartment. Out of the state. I moved in with a woman I barely knew, someone who would two years later become my wife.

Disappointingly, I did not move to the familiar streets of Baltimore ( where my brother and several best friends lived) but to the suburbs of Harford County, so similar to where I came from, albeit with a larger “down town” area.

During the run up to the presidential election, I watched in horror via Facebook as high school friends supported Trump and championed his racism. I felt betrayed by the people that told me they adored my mom and then voted for someone who is the antithesis of who she was. I hated where I came from and I washed my hands of it.

But I had to return. To visit my mom’s grave. To deal with her estate. To see my family. To sit among the places she loved. There is an antique mall between Dover and my house that I visit every time I travel that route. I rarely buy anything, I am not an antiques buying type of woman. But I will spend an hour walking the floors. Because I once walked them with her.

It was not all obligation though.

I marched with a few of my friends from high school at the women’s march. They still live in the area where we grew up. A few other friends surprised me when they would share or comment positively on my posts about the current political climate.

My wife and I have started visiting state parks and a brewery on Sundays. Almost always these breweries have been on farmland, in the middle of Trump Town, USA. Today, the brewery we visited had a sign posted for our local Democrat. The owner started the brewery from nothing. I saw the pictures of how he built it himself. His beer was delicious.

What Salena gets wrong, by design, is the monolith of Small Town America. For sure there are hard core Trump supporters and sad stories of those who feel lost. But that story does not translate to every small town in America if you are really trying to talk to the people that live there. Someone like me is not hard to find. Until the last few months, I’ve had a heavy social media presence. For at least a year after mom my died, you could find newspaper articles about her and my advocacy. There are progressive people I grew up with and progressive groups where I live and that’s just what I, one person, know about.

Salena doesn’t want you to understand the people that make up this country, she wants you to conform to the idea of America that she’s decided should be and for this, she and her enablers should be ashamed.

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Alecia Pawloski

Lover of books, wine and dogs; in no particular order. Advocate for abused men and women. Aspiring writer.