How to Be Fair

Our daughter Q led us across the road from her dorm, then down an opening in the trees where the concrete underfoot had long been split by oak roots, that curved gently down into a wooded path that followed the Mill River. This late in November, most of the leaves had fallen, but the tall trees still looked dignified as trees do. We walked for a few miles, talking about next semester’s classes, where she might study abroad, what she has enjoyed eating lately and with whom, how she likes to check out a Mary Oliver book from the campus library and read poems on the log we just passed.

This is exactly why we were visiting Q this past weekend — to get out of the noise and compression of New York, to walk in the quiet woods, to be on either side of our daughter and talk a little about everything but mostly about nothing. She goes to Smith, an all-women’s college in Massachusetts that has generated uncountably many firsts for women and one that attracts students concerned about being a person in the world, particularly a marginalized one. She chose Smith because of its special intersection of place and purpose, and though she is only starting her second year, she has found a home for herself that didn’t seem possible in New York, which offers many places but most are crowded and loud.

Northampton, MA barely seems real. It’s a beautiful small town with a brick, double-wide main street where cars must stop (frequently) for pedestrians in a rainbow crosswalk. Apart from a CVS and an Urban Outfitters retrofitted grandly into a former bank, there are no chain stores, just a series of small, locally owned shops and restaurants, many of which fly pride flags. The prominent church in this quaint downtown is Unitarian that advertises “room for families and people of all ages; for seekers, doers, those who want to work for justice, and those who need respite from the pressures of their daily lives.” People everywhere wear a wide range of functional wools.

Throughout the weekend, we noticed that the restaurants and sidewalks seemed more crowded than usual, more parents walking next to their children than one might expect without some scheduled large college event. The more we thought about it, the more my wife and I came to believe that many people were in town for the same reason that we were — to comfort their kids and themselves, to get away from what apparently is everywhere. And to look around Northampton and Smith is to see precarity in every corner. This town, this educational institution, is a place where gender and women are subjects of intellectual and moral attention, worthy of care in the fullest human sense. After the recent election, it’s hard not to worry about this place and so many like it.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been thinking about the election and how to understand its causes and portents. Some of the easiest explanations — say, that another supremely qualified woman of color was passed over for a promotion in favor of an obviously unqualified white man — seem correct but also incomplete. We’ll probably never know the reasons why nearly 8 million fewer people voted for the Democratic candidate in 2024 than in 2020, almost 600,000 fewer in New York City alone. It’s definitely true that housing is way too expensive in New York, as it is in many cities across the U.S., as is childcare and health insurance and so many other things, even as the charts and graphs show the economy roaring ahead. It’s also true that the richest people in the world played an outsized role in this election, either directly or indirectly in Trump’s favor, but here again that seems like perhaps a necessary but not sufficient condition for the result.

Most puzzling for me is how Republicans apparently weren’t penalized for how they talked about people in this country, whether citizens or immigrants or simply anyone who fell outside their idea of American or person. They were allowed to pivot, for example, from admitting that the story of immigrants eating pets in Springfield was in fact completely made up to the position that “even if made up the story was getting at something really important.”

What was that something? I’ve come to believe that one compelling core theme of this election was unfairness. Trump has made unfairness to him personally his primary message and guiding principle — the 2020 election, the accusations of wrongdoing, the lawsuits, the civil judgments and criminal convictions, the in-depth reporting, the judges who’ve stymied him, the people who’ve worked for him who insist on being paid — all unfair to him. The most unfairly that anyone has ever been treated, in fact, we’re told.

But Republican messaging in general is shot through with it: It’s unfair that eggs and bacon cost so much, that too many people can’t afford a house, that people were allowed to flood across the border to take jobs that most Americans wouldn’t do, that asylum seekers receive any public benefits at all, that that some people can’t say what they truly want to say because they’d be called racist or sexist, that Taylor Swift made an Instagram post, that they have to think about people’s pronouns, that McDonald’s stops serving breakfast at 10:30 am, that elementary school books mention the power of empathy, that a coach can’t pray to Christ quietly with a public high school football team at the 50 yard line after a win, that women and people of color are taking jobs and being admitted to prestigious universities. Regardless of whether any of these unfairnesses are true or personal, Trump reminds people, and gives them permission, to feel like things have been unfair specifically to them.

Take the Republican anti-trans emphasis in the campaign’s final days. At first blush, the strategy echoes the old Karl Rove playbook from 2000 of adding anti-gay-marriage measures to ballots in swing states to help turn out Republicans who will also vote for the Republican presidential ticket. It’s not clear how well it worked, but the advertised harm — that the institution of marriage just is between one man and one woman — was pretty abstract. Eventually, if anything, the unfairness of restricting gay marriage ultimately cut the other way. Marriages of same-sex couples don’t directly or obviously impact those of heterosexual couples, and any reasons for denying legal recognition ends up seeming unfair to them.

But the anti-trans position seems to fit better into the unfairness packaging that it usually arrives in. If we allow males to just declare themselves female so that they can dominate sports, the argument goes, that’s unfair to my little girl on the swim team. I can see how this kind of message would resonate with lots of folks in a way that gay or interracial marriage might not. Even the smallest town has youth sports, and often the smaller the town the bigger the sports.

Whatever its power, the anti-trans unfairness position collapses almost immediately the second you begin to think about it. Trans people don’t just “declare” themselves male or female like flipping some sort of switch from pink to blue; they have made an deep and difficult decision, arrived at over a long period of time, necessary to make their lives better or even endurable. Being trans in America is also dangerous. Why would anyone choose to endure what trans people face in the U.S. just for a couple of mass-ordered medals?

Besides, sports have never been fair in this way. Go to any school football or basketball game or swim meet, and someone will win, often by a lot. Better yet, think about the middle and high school teammates and competitors of Katie Ledecky, who at 15 won a gold medal in 800-meter freestyle at the 2012 London Olympics. Is it fair that many girls’ time in the pool happened to overlap with Ledecky’s? Unlucky, maybe, but not unfair. Participating in sports at any age provides a recurring, vivid lesson that there is always someone faster, stronger, more skilled, more dedicated, genetically outlying. That’s just the way it goes.

Q and I have a thing about used bookstores, and the cluster of colleges around her part of Massachusetts has spawned some good ones. We hit Gray Matter Books as usual, but we also wanted visit a couple of others north of town for the first time. As we exited Northampton, we saw a cluster of people at the roundabout holding giant Trump flags and signs. The drive took us through small towns, most showing signs of hard times, and all with Trump signs here and there.

We left Q on Sunday with new books of poetry, a pile of snacks from Trader Joe’s, and two servings of my wife’s homemade pho. We wanted to take another walk in the woods, but the clouds and wind were acting like it was November in the Northeast, and we decided to head back to NYC. We hugged Q a little longer than usual, which, given the usual, is a pretty long time. We did not tell her that things over the next many years would be good or even okay because they’re not going to be, and anyway she’s smarter than both of us and already knows.

Many people voted the way they did because they believe that they have been treated unfairly. They also believe that the remedy is making someone pay for it. Many of those who will end up paying, including those whom we care about, will do so not just unfairly but unjustly.

It’s unfair that the world into which each of us has been thrown refuses to say what it means and who it’s for. It’s unfair that so few have so much at the expense of so many. It’s unfair that so much real fear and struggle can be monetized and exploited. People will suffer. We have to go into the woods, and we have to come out.