Lakeside

On November 9, 2016, I watched from my Lakeside, Virginia home as the dam against America’s worst impulses proved too fragile to contain the coming flood of Post-Truth born racism and authoritarianism. I began Lakeside within days of this shock.  What I found here made profound sense. Too many are merely treading water, hardly able to articulate that the American Dream is a prop fashioned to disguise a Potemkin America.    The genocide of this land’s indigenous peoples forms Lakeside’s narrative spine.  Under the patchy neighborhood lawns, there lies a pre-colonial “Oughnum”, or “good hunting land” in the indigenous Algonquian dialect.  I confront my role as a settler-colonialist whilst simultaneously seeking to better understand the disenfranchisement, anger, and paranoia engulfing and consuming my white, working class neighbors. If I were born of, for instance, my neighbor Frank’s parents, raised in their house and educated by the same macro and micro cultures, wouldn't I also be – if not exactly Frank – rightward leaning like Frank and quite foreign to my present, privileged self?