“YAKISTAN”
“ I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” Luke 4:24
My stunningly beautiful, albeit highly infuriating Rural American hometown has a ubiquitous sign by the highway. It is meant to greet you or gaslight you as you drive in.
Welcome to Yakima The Palm Springs of Washington
At first, you’ll be charmed by the welcoming gesture, next you’ll be confused, and then you’ll realize it’s a joke.
This isn’t Palm Springs. This is Hell.
If you are LGBTQIA+, an unmarried woman with goals beyond reproduction, an academic, not Evangelical, don’t resemble a Viking, or are god forbid an atheist; you’ll be terrified and look for the nearest exit.
If you bravely hang around, consider the following.
Don’t come in the Winter. Just don’t. It’s a long story. There might be an avalanche on the pass, you’ll need chains and studs on your tires, or you’ll be stuck in Seattle. It’s a whole thing.
Just trust me and wait until Spring.
Upon your Equinox arrival, perhaps you’ll take your life in your hands and meander downtown. You’ll notice the jail that is built right across from the library and a coffee shop, because that makes sense.
Or, you’ll get trashed with tourists during Spring Barrel Tasting at a local winery. While enjoying the sublime vineyard scenery over Cabernet and processing cognitive dissonance; you are likely muttering to yourself, “what is this gorgeous, godforsaken place?”
Let me tee it all up for you.
A few years ago, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles hosted a Llyn Foulkes exhibit. I was transfixed as to why his nihilistic, brilliantly depressing imagery resonated. When I read that he was from Yakima, it made sense. He survived the land that time forgot, and he got out. As did our hometown football hero Cooper Kupp. Successfully coming out of Yakima radiates a certain, something. However, if you dear reader and/or bewildered wine tourist are not a professional athlete or renowned artist, here’s how it probably went for you.
On your typical sunshine filled day in Yakima, there are drive-by shootings, carjackings, home invasions, or daily contributions pursuant to crown title of #1 in the nation for auto theft. Someone will assault or kill someone maintaining its undefeated reputation of one of America’s most dangerous towns.
On any given afternoon, geographically challenged Pacific Northwest racists and white supremacists will wave the Confederate flag outside of the Fred Meyer.
You’ll drive by an anti-choice billboard with a grossly enlarged fetus as yet another vital public school funding levy fails. You’ll see Rural children going hungry and without coats, mittens, or appropriately funded schools. You’ll see the foster system heartbreakingly overloaded and reloaded. Classist and racist Plutocratic judges will seize homes while ripping babies away from poor women, working class women, and domestic violence victims. You’ll observe a revolving door of vulnerable children continually recruited and/or murdered by gangs. You’ll see no childcare infrastructure and countless children home alone raising younger siblings. You’ll witness child labor and child marriages. Then you’ll notice forty-five more antichoice billboards and realize it’s nearly impossible to access contraception.
To stay on brand of doing the opposite of any semblance of anything remotely helpful for the common good, Yakima will, yet again, vote against something nice and beneficial for the community like oh say a beautiful arts and cultural center because they want a parking lot by the Olive Garden.
You’ll gaze at charming mom-and-pop local businesses struggling to attract customers while a gigantic line simultaneously forms around the block at Applebee’s.
If something possessed you to visit in the 1990’s before the wine boom, the Religious Right wouldn’t have allowed fun things like wine tasting. Instead, you’d be treated to the Christian Coalition protesting the movie Showgirls. It never seemed to dawn on them that Kyle MacLachlan was from Yakima. To that end, I have always been extra embarrassed about the CC’s performative fiasco. Elizabeth Berkley said something very nice about my hair in line at Urth Caffe. As I thanked this gracious goddess, I hoped she couldn’t sense my humiliation that my irascible hometown protested her film.
Anyway, assuming it’s a present day visit, and there are no Ross Perot signs dotting the lawns; you’ll have heaps more Cabernet to absorb your experience. At this point, you are feeling your broken soul surrender to dystopian undercurrents of despair. In a last gasp of optimism, you’ll fight it and wonder, hey why there isn’t a four year university? Yakima has such charming collegiate town potential with its breathtaking natural beauty! Oh, the academic heights we’ll go! Suddenly you’ll daydream of picturesque exposed brick columns and high ceilinged halls of higher learning. Then, you’ll hear long standing and entirely believable local mythology that when given the choice between a four year university within city limits or a county fair, the town went with the fair.
You’ll observe despair in the eyes of weary locals as the remainders of your innocence evaporate. Reality sinks in as you whisper whelp I’m stuck. I guess I’ll plant a church or start dealing meth, cuz I really need work.
You’ll go back to your designated driver’s car and find out that it’s been broken into and/or stolen. You won’t sleep a wink that night because you’ll be terrified of a home invasion.
Home. Sweet. Home.
My beloved Yakima is a tough-paradoxical-infuriating-hard-scary-beautiful-complicated-pull your hair out-scream into the void kind of place. I perpetually miss it and then after about eight minutes, I remember staring at Mt. Adams during my teenage years plotting my escape. Then I miss it again, go back, and try again to make it better. I’ve done this futile loop so many times that mental health professionals have forbidden my return. Each visit, I hope that I won’t feel the same haunting and oppressive patriarchy I felt the last visit. It never works. But, my fatal flaw is my relentless hope that things I love will improve when they don’t.
If I go too long without seeing the river, the orchards, my lifelong childhood friends, and the Summer thunderstorms, I feel like I’m losing anchor on my Rural American roots. Home makes me write, create, and after a childhood of being surrounded by maniacal American Taliban extremism, made me a lifetime activist. I’m homesick for a place that I never feel safe in, and never feel quite at home outside of. It made me who I am and whenever I introduce myself they’ll brightly know that I’m from Yakima.
While you can’t exactly replicate the joys of Ice Blocking in Metropolitan America, there should be more opportunities back home. Whatever good I encounter, I run a system of equations in my head, i.e. I wish this resource was accessible back home/how do I get this back home/ I’m so lucky to have access to this/how do I get it back home?
Often, it’s the opposite. I wish that Rural America with the mountains and my tight knit community was here. I often go up to the hills of Malibu because it looks similar and eases homesickness. Lately, I’m fielding vivid and haunting dreams of home. But, after two decades, I still can’t really go back. Odysseus returned to Ithaca after twenty years, but I haven’t found the safe point of entry for a true homecoming yet, even as Troy burns.
My beautiful homeland can be a land of despair and abject poverty. Like all extremist run and economically depressed areas, terrible and wonderful people coexist. Well, perhaps coexist is a strong word, but they are all in the same land area. Somewhere in that horror show of terrifying ethnocentric bullies, Agricultural Industry Plutocrats, and Religious Warlords are a band of thoughtful, progressive people overflowing with wit, creativity, and gigantic hearts. Their grit, grace, generosity, and kindness gives hope in a despairing place. They daily endure very harsh realities and many are terrified of extremists, fanatics, Judges, Civil Court, Family Court, and the carceral system. With the little they have, they still fight for a more equitable town and country.
Much like Los Angeles, there is a small rich, white ruling class that would very much like to keep it that way, and they do. They wield a feudalistic, economic chokehold. As a result, everyone else is on their own to survive while competing for scant jobs and resources. It’s no way for a community to live, much less to thrive.
No place is more beautiful and difficult. Yakima means home. Home means fear. Yakima is not safe for most people. The town has earned some offensive names over the years, including Yakivegas and Crackima, but none so prophetic as Yakistan.
Following 9/11, the Stryker Brigade consistently conducted military exercises for tactical Afghan missions. at the Yakima Training Center (formerly the Yakima Firing Center). Like Afghanistan, the terrain includes high desert, arid climate, difficult Winters, rolling hills, and rivers.
The similarities don’t end with topography.
Both regions have homegrown extremists that destroy and pillage everything. Just as there were clear reasons why the Taliban was so successful at rapidly taking over Afghanistan there is much to learn about how those same dynamics play out in our nation. In examining the parallels between Afghanistan and Rural American areas like Yakima, we must consider the following.
For years, Afghan women and Afghan activists saw the nightmare coming of the Taliban retaking power. They were clear about what was needed to ward off extremism in their communities as well as how to protect loved ones from terror and recruitment. Their requests were routinely ignored. If key powerful players listened instead of imposing their Plutocratic agenda, then Afghan women could have saved their own communities and by extension their country.
Another key reason that Afghanistan quickly fell to the Taliban was that the government in Kabul was corrupted by defense contractors, speculators, and outside interests. The people acutely felt their government’s greedy abandonment. Instead of a democracy for and by the Afghan people; it had become a corrupted pay-to-play playground government for a few Plutocrats rather than the local population. So in essence, it wasn’t worth fighting for.
Sounds a bit like D.C.
After the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, the rapid surrender was due in part to promises of stability by the Taliban (however disingenuous). Rural areas already weren’t sending daughters to school, and they desperately needed stability and food. As religious extremists and terrorists always do, they cravenly weasel their way into vulnerable communities by offering basic necessities and their version of security. They do this in exchange for sacrificing education, women and girls, LGBTQIA+ people, bodily autonomy, and freedom. They took over Rural Afghanistan first, then the cities.
Sounds a bit like Rural America.
So, with that same frightening and intersecting tinder box window, the Democratic Party’s reckless abandonment of Rural America and hindrance of progressive candidates puts them in terrifying company. Their negligence has put the nation on a fast track to an extremist takeover. These Rural communities have been ravaged, misunderstood, and under resourced for decades. To complicate matters, the areas have disproportionately fought decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq only to return to a homeland further devoid of meaningful opportunity. So, what was already a hotspot for extremist militia recruitment for decades now has the ravages of two decades of communal war traumas folded in. The local ruling class has no interest in making it communally resourced and fully equitable.
Furthermore, there has been little meaningful infrastructure investment such as urgently needed schools, jobs, hospitals, community centers, and enough teachers, doctors, and healthcare workers, to accommodate and holistically support the existing local population and various new population flows. There are just a handful of hospitality jobs catering to wealthy wine tourism that ultimately benefits the Agricultural Industry’s regional monopoly.
Do the math. In any part of the world, if there are not enough resources and investments to holistically sustain a community, extremists move in. They exploit the gaps and there is conflict.
Sounds a bit like Afghanistan.
Each day in Rural America is terrifying. It feels like nobody sane or caring is driving the fire truck, much less safely steering it to cool off and nurture the region. But, there has been an extremist inferno raging in plain sight and devouring everything in its path for decades. It seems that only now that Plutocrats have mildly (albeit barely) noticed at Brentwood cocktail parties that there even is a Rural America, much less a Rural America operating as Hades base camp ushering in a domestic Taliban.
Having seen inside the colossal stupidity and inner workings of the egomaniacal Democratic Party machine (which is an enraging story for another day) and growing up around the extremism and poverty that festers in Rural America, I will tell you that unless there is a concerted pivot, this is not going to turn out well. For all the same reasons that Kabul fell, even liberal bastions may ultimately fall to the American Taliban.
Why would vulnerable Rural people fight for a government that isn’t at all fighting for them? With the exception of a handful of representatives like Sec. Deb Haaland, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Patty Murray, and even Rep. Acasio-Cortez (who given her background as a bartender understands shared class struggles affecting Rural people in the hospitality industry), Rural America is generally represented in D.C. by those with little interest in the local community. Usually, these representatives only serve the very affluent and/or Industry kingpins like Coal, Oil, Agricultural, and Gas such as Sen. Joe Manchin.
Moderates, progressives, philanthropists, wealthy activists, and peacemakers must find sustainable points of entry to wholly engage Rural America to ward off extremist takeovers and engage these regions. These initiatives must be community led and locally driven or they simply won’t work. Rural America is diverse and nuanced. It has an entirely different set of needs, social structures, and set of norms. It’s impossible for incurious outsiders to understand.
I left/fled Yakima in 2002. Since then, I have tried to educate on the realities of Rural America and engage anyone who could potentially help. Generally, people, looked at me like I was describing Mars rather than the interior of their crumbling nation. I don’t try anymore. Interpersonally, it’s too exhausting. So, I’ll say it more broadly. Productively engaging Rural America starts by humbly understanding the lived experience and harsh realities of Rural life. Like oh, say the aforementioned extremists and avalanches. And no, dear Plutocrat, skiing in Aspen doesn’t count as Rural engagement. Instead, supporting the local hospitality workers’ right to unionize or helping them with crushing student loan debt might be a start. Meaningful engagement involves checking access privilege. It involves getting over the destructive Neoliberal classism that brought the country to this terrifying brink of an extremist and fundamentalist religious takeover in the first place.
Take, for example, the sudden destruction of beauty salons during the pandemic. These devastating losses destroyed the social fabric of entire Rural communities. Just like in Afghanistan, Beautician work is one of the few semi-decent paying jobs accessible to Rural Women. It provides a haven from abusive men where women have some agency over their lives. Rural Beauticians are local breadwinners and social connectors. Their salons are safe, social cornerstones of the community. The pandemic, coupled with a horrid social safety net decimated that.
Unsurprisingly, leaders have done little during Covid for most working people. From teachers to restaurant workers, to Beauticians and Cosmetologists, legislators did not deliver a meaningful recovery. If they had, it would have directly helped Rural women and uplifted their respective communities. That would have warded off escalating extremism. In fact they did the opposite. Recent horrible legislation was passed to make life even harder for Beauticians to pick up the pieces of shattered livelihoods. I was raised by a community of badass Beautician lionesses. These women lifted each other up daily, and let me tell you no one had a better handle on the needs of the local community than they did. So, maybe don’t treat the local aesthetician at your Rural vacation spot like shit. She may be caring for an entire Rural community.
Getting an understanding in your bones of what it’s like requires people with class privilege and bandwidth to actively listen to Rural women and local progressive activists. It necessitates building desperately needed schools, hospitals, community centers, art centers, and good paying jobs. It involves removing the limited options for most poor Rural people of “Jesus or Jail.” It requires rich, white people to stop making fun of those with bad teeth from these areas. Instead, they must understand why they allowed policies without Rural dental and universal healthcare access to flourish in those regions in the first place.
Resourcing vulnerable areas to ward off extremism and recruitment is not a novel concept by any means. It’s the same story in every under resourced area whether South Central or South Yakima. Extremists always target and recruit in under resourced areas that the State neglects and/or terrorizes. Sure Broadband access is vitally important, but those are only raindrops when an ocean of resources is urgently needed right now.
As the NYT wrote, you can figure out Yakima, you can figure out America. Rural progressives certainly have, but have yet to encounter a single Plutocrat to give a damn, or even understand what a dam actually does for Rural America.
Rural Women have always known exactly what needs to be done. They experienced extremists overtaking their communities, recruiting their sons, and radicalizing local men that systematically abused them and their children. Their communities endured extremist Churches and leaders terrorizing their daily lives. Yet, their pleas for resources remain unheard. Generally, these overlooked people include Rural Black Women, Indigenous Women, Rural Ethnic minorities, Rural working poor women, Farm Workers, Rural Healthcare workers, Rural Progressive activists, Women of Faith, Rural Beauticians, Rural LGBTQIA+ people, Rural Teachers, Rural Veterans, Rural Artisans, Rural Sex Workers, Rural Domestic Violence Victims, Old German Baptist Women, Mennonite Women Amish Women, Family Farmers, Ranching families, LDS women, Homeschoolers, and countless more.
When leaders finally listen to under resourced and Rural people and meaningfully support their respective communities, it may prevent the ominous label of “Yakistan” from becoming the nation’s looming reality.
There are countless Rural Progressives like myself ready to lead the way.
