MIDDLETOWN SUMMER 2025 DIRECTIVE:
Does Muncie have a culture congenial to people with my identities?
Qs: What identity or identities are important to you? These might include race, class, ethnicity, and/or gender/sexuality, but they may also include others (Job-related? Familial? Related to hobbies or enthusiasms? Religious? Political? Other?)
my identities? for me, this concept coexists with the idea of “roles” played within societal context so i see my identities heavily tied to social roles and expectations. i suppose i can gather a few monikers for myself: scientific/artistic intellectual, skeptic, martial artist, foodie, gardener, outdoor enthusiast, non-theist, father, spouse. i have constant awareness of class and race distinctions, too, but i do my best to cultivate a non-prejudiced point of view, i have built a habit of checking in with my own self-awareness of same. while i do not consciously identify as any race, per se, i do my best to remain salient of the fact that i, nevertheless, come from a certain background. i also do my best to keep in mind that these categories represent semantic distinctions rather than concrete spacetime events or systems. in other words, they come from the human mind in order to aid the human mind in managing the universe in discrete chunks to avoid overwhelming us. they allow us to sort and filter meaning from noise – but even that noise can have meaning if seen through the correct ideological lenses. i use such roles and “identities” as constellations of behavioral interactions mapped within a sociosemantic network. they loosely define how i behave and who i share those behaviors with.
Q: How do these identities impact your everyday life (if you think they do)?
honestly, since the pandemic, i have disengaged with nearly all of my old hobbies and activities. this comes mostly from sheer shock at the aggressive and willful ignorance of people about social, political, and medical issues. the thought of training or hanging out with folks who believe George Floyd “got what he deserved” or that masks “are for cucks” does not appeal to me – the latter because martial arts and sports often involve lots of close body contact and if you have anti-mask views or, even worse, anti-vaxx beliefs then i want nothing to do with close OR near contact with you. this does not represent a mere difference of opinion: believing vaccines cause harm and refusing to wear protective gear presents a very real danger to everyone in the vicinity of that person. if someone held the opinion that they should be allowed to drive their car on the sidewalk, we would not let them – that resides outside the bounds of civil, logical, and reasonable discourse and behavior and respectful difference of opinion. their opinion would not work, it would be wrong. i have also made the following analogy: someone who has a freely bleeading open wound dripping or even spraying blood all over the place enters your house, office, grocery store, or any non-private space- would you allow that? i think that i can say with a fair amount of certainty that we would shut that down immediately and hard. “but,” they say. “it’s my opinion that i have the right to bleed all over you and your house.” spattering blood in a place that does not belong to you and you alone does not fall under the tenets of civil disagreement. that opinion would be wrong. it represents an extreme pragmatic problem with safety and basic courtesy of cleanliness and disease control. it impacts others outside of themselves and therefore you have some agency in their actions. anyone that manages a public area, cleans bathrooms, works in health care, etc. knows and has received training in universal precautions, cleaning protocols that minimize biological contamination/disease spread through contact with bodily fluids. for similar reasons, we don’t mix our potable water with our sewage, eat rotten food, or drive on the wrong side of the road. ALL of those things involve more than just YOU and therefore you do not get to decide for everyone. i could probably come up with a dozen more examples. i don’t recall any controversy surrounding those practices or ideas. for some reason, the pandemic mask-wearing and social distancing fell into some nefarious category for many people even though it involves the same principles except with viruses. rendering these safety protocols just a “difference of opinion” could mean long term illness and complications for me up to and including death. the following famous quote applies here: “my right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins.” so, i have found it very difficult to re-engage with anyone who holds such “opinions.”
my religious and intellectual stances do not rise to the level of clear and immediate danger like the subject of my rant above but they have often caused friction, too. however, i do not think i act in an inflammatory manner but if i choose to engage on those topics, i do my best to represent my mindset honestly, accurately, and matter-of-factly. unfortunately, people often see such disagreement with or lack of respect for their beliefs as disrespecting them as a person and as discourteous and rude. i have learned to expect some level of conflict and misunderstanding living in this part of the country no matter how polite or friendly i behave. i have also had to develop strategies for avoiding such conflict that work most of the time.
Q: To what extent is Muncie a good place for someone who shares these identities? Why or why not?
as a knee-jerk reaction, i would say: Muncie does not represent a good place for those of similar worldview. only on campus do i have any semblance of peace of mind but even there a midwestern “risk averse” paradigm remains solidly in place. “better safe than sorry” represents a strong refrain which goes against what i think stand as core values in academia- like critically challenging the status quo on any and every topic and practicing open innovation and creativity. even so, because of the university’s influence on diversity of ideas and culture, Muncie does have a small community of “subversives” or “Bohemians” that usually do better at accepting viewpoints not their own.
Q: Rreflect on your time as an EDLM contributor. How has the experience been for you? What have you gotten out of it? Has keeping diaries (and answering directives) changed your sense of everyday life? Of Muncie? Of anything else?
cons? let me begin here. my biggest problem with this diary project comes from the lack of formal confidentiality constraints. i believe that handling this project with a double-blind anonymizing system in place would have resulted in deeper and richer engagement. diarists could have sent to an anonymous dummy email account OR uploaded documents to a shared folder somewhere with only their diarist number marking who they are OR one person monitors the email and randomly assigns diarist numbers to the individuals – there are any number of well-developed procedures out there that could have been used. pros? of course i see some! having said what i did above, i signed up do this knowing confidentiality would not be perfect and stayed the course to produce entries because i find this kind of history not only worthwhile but vital for anthropological and historical purposes in our data-lossy information ecosystem. unlike the past, future historians will not have handwritten letters or other such documents to rely upon. how many texts and social media posts and emails disappear into the ether everyday due to tech failures or deletion or trapped info because someone lost their password OR someone died and their account is locked, etc., etc.? of course, we have video and photo content to make up for it somewhat but even most of that will suffer the same fate as the above text content. no one can duplicate the “boots on the ground” view of life from people actually living here. in our own words. i have become more aware of how others around me live their lives so a small extent. we all get glimpses of the Lives of Others in books we read, movies we watch, plays we attend, but knowing that the stories and rants and confessions i read in the Diaries come directly from genuine humans living their actual lives makes a huge difference. in their own words! it feels a bit like a community, the diarists, each participating in something for the long view but from the small scale. microhistories and prosopographies focus in on the analysis of individuals and amalgamations of representative individuals from the past; the Middletown diaries provide a bit of micro-autobiography so that the voices we experience do not emerge from behind a curtain of editors or scholars but from the minds of the people themselves, speaking directly to us. again, in their own words. on a more personal level, it has afforded me a point from which to kick off and exercise my writing muscles while also becoming aware of how others nearby perceive life in Muncie. i have participated because i wanted to contribute a small slice of my own worldview to posterity. knowing that i am injecting my own odd and off-color perspectives into the historical stream seems almost like a duty to me because i want the off-beat and non-mainstream in this attempted chronicling of 21st century Midwestern daily life which definitely no one should characterize as monolithic. the majority of this midwestern culture tends towards conservative, traditional old-fashioned values, yes, but enough of us home-grown misfits exist here that i liked the idea of making sure we had some representation. maybe i did not go big enough with this facet of my purpose? whatever, i have enjoyed it.