Invitations to make guest presentations to Sunday School classes come along occasionally, usually in the Methodist or Presbyterian field.
I go into these venues delicately. I had enough conventional fundamentalist upbringing to remain squeamish talking non-spiritually on Sunday morning in a church house, especially about being politically partisan, even as the classes that invite me tend to be dominated by people seeking exactly that.
I try to go where the class leads me, such as Sunday when a participant pleaded that we not let the class end without my talking about Rex Nelson's in-the-family criticisms of Sarah Sanders.
That's the main topic people raise with me these days. On Friday night at the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame banquet, four people said quietly that thank goodness Rex and I were calling the governor out. But one gentleman looked me square in the face and decried that Rex had joined Asa Hutchinson and me in Walmart's back pocket.
As it happened, I found myself rather organically immersed in a theme of sorts Sunday. I concluded the class by saying darned if I hadn't, in spite of myself, offered something of a spiritual message. Secularly humanist, perhaps, but spiritual.
Class members listened closely and were complimentary, so I thought I'd share the message with readers.
One of the overlapping and underlying chasms in the country today is urban areas versus rural ones. Thinking about that reminded of a forthcoming book due out in summer from a woman from Clinton named Monica Potts. It's called "The Forgotten Girls."
Potts went away to Bryn Mawr and The New York Times, and landed a contract to write this book inspired by the different life outcomes for her and her best girlfriend while in school in Clinton. Both excelled until one didn't. One escaped while one didn't.
Potts came home to Clinton to write the book, and, from that experience, wrote a guest essay along the way for The New York Times. She tried in that essay to explain something from the other side of the real world to her academically and professionally advanced friends on the liberal American coasts.
It was that they didn't understand rural folks and might be better-served if they tried.
She wrote that these rural folks aren't so ignorant as to be voting, as so many on the left lament, against their own interests and for, in Donald Trump, a fraud who is playing them for fools. She wrote that folks in Clinton know what Trump is and that they vote for him anyway based not on their economic interests, but their values.
Those values are largely that they work hard for $40,000 a year and make that income stretch by being disciplined. From that experience, they resent government overspending and resist local taxes or fees for the library or an animal-control system. They carry resentments, the strongest against the liberal politicians who use their tax money to bail out people who don't live by their take-care-of-yourself principles.
They don't adore Trump necessarily. They love the what-for he gives the politicians whom they believe have it coming.
But, Potts wrote, all you need is for your car to break down in Clinton to see that the person instantly pulling over in his pickup to help will be wearing a MAGA cap.
I told the class that we can't begin to bridge this chasm of dysfunction until we ridicule less and understand more.
That prompted me to close by saying we need "Jason Isbell voters."
He's a guitar-playing poet from rural Alabama who spent years drunk before getting sober and emerging as one of the great musical artists of our time. He writes profound and moving lyrics that blend his rural background with his evolved and progressive insights.
State Sen. Clarke Tucker, the best member of the state Legislature, is a big fan of his and directed me recently to listen to Isbell's song titled "Outfit." He said he thought that I, as a house painter's kid, would identify.
In that song, Isbell adopts the voice of his dad telling him not to live in that trailer in the family yard until he's 23 and not to settle for working with him painting houses. Dad wanted his son to go forth and seek to thrive. But he gave him a few admonitions, one of which was never to refer to what he was wearing as an outfit and another to call home every year on his sister's birthday.
Get better than where you are from. But don't forget where you're from. Honor it. Cling to it while you run from it, and vote one way without disparaging the other. And don't get fancy.
As for why the sister would be assumed still to be at home while her brother evolves ... maybe reading Potts' book will help with that.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.