These are My People

“These are my people; this is where I come from…” sings Rodney Atkins in his country twang. And it resonates deeply when I hear those words.

I have spent the better part of this last decade walking away from where I come from. I got myself educated. I lived in a few big cities. Like so many of my generation, I once thought I could leave behind my backwards town and become educated, sophisticated, and successful. All along the way, I was taught—subtly and not so subtly—to despise where I come from.

But I have never been able to escape the ghosts of my past. In my mind, I have never escaped from the girl who once rode at a full gallop across the field, my hair streaming in the wind. I still pride myself on being able to shoot straight and I still turn up the country music while driving down back roads. And, when I walked the streets of Boston one night and heard Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” blaring from some upscale bar, I danced. Right there in the middle of the street.

And now I’m back home. A lot of my people wear jeans and boots and they drive old trucks. They have gun racks and I would venture to guess most of them have a weapon on them somewhere. They are plain speaking and often hard living and they will fight you if you disrespect them. They love the land and they hate it too, a restless and discontented people who are tired and frustrated by a world that doesn't seem willing to give them a break. They love their neighbors—most of them, anyway, and those they don’t like they usually put up with. They are traditionalists and are irritated by political correctness, irritated by city slicker language, irritated most of all with an elitism that says they are of little worth or value. My people will stand up for their town with an almost unbelievable arrogance, but on closer look, you will find that this masks a thinly veiled sense of inferiority, a deep knowledge that late capitalism has left them far behind, and an even more profound sense of failure and hopelessness.

And l look around me and say; “These are my people.” For better or for worse, in spite of all the “edumication”, they are still my people and I am still theirs. For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, with our deepest failures and our best gifts, I love my people. I want them to know that they have worth and value in this world. I want to sit with the despondent man I meet on the street and the woman I sit down with in some crumbling apartment and I want them to know that God came to us in a tiny two bit town in the middle of nowhere and loved us.

And just as I embark on this crusade, they turn to me and they embrace me and I realize that my people offer me the greatest gift of all—the gift of belonging.

These are indeed my people and our futures are bound together—not because I have so much to offer, but because they have welcomed me home.