Over fall break, I voted in my first election. But that wasn’t the biggest “first” I experienced. That week, I was also called something I had never been called before: a “fucking libtard.”
Standing with my friend outside of Taco Bell around 9 p.m. on a Saturday, looking across the street at a group of teens our age exiting McDonald’s wearing hoodies with plaid pajama pants and carrying brown paper bags with grease near the bottom, wondering why those teens just called us fucking libtards — how did I get here?
Or, the better question is: How do they know?
For fall break, I flew back home to Kansas. It was a quick trip, in and out; my mother said that the time between family weekend and Thanksgiving was too long, so either I came home, or she would fly up to Baltimore. It was cheaper — and less humiliating — if I flew home for almost a week when most people left campus anyway.
While I was home, I delivered lightning-round, speed-dating-like summaries of my first two months in college to my family who hadn’t seen me since I left. I drove my car down memory lane — or, rather, 119th Street and Blackbob — to the ice cream chain where I worked and the high school where I had spent the previous four years of my life. I refamiliarized myself with old trails I hadn’t walked in months, nearly stepping on a copperhead because my eyes were pinned to the horizon.
I voted, too. It was more convenient to drive up to the local library on Oct. 19, the first day voting opened in my county, rather than mailing an absentee ballot to Baltimore.
The night after I voted, I met my friend for dinner. We walked down Blackbob carrying soda-fountain Diet Cokes that we threw into a trash can before stopping inside a Taco Bell to pee. While my friend used the single-toilet bathroom, I sat in the lobby with a Spirit Halloween skeleton. It was wearing a Taco Bell uniform and covered in cobwebs, holding an empty large soda cup in its bony hand. When my friend was finished in the bathroom, I took his place; when I was done, we left the Taco Bell.
That was when the fateful incident occurred. As my friend and I resumed our walk to nowhere down Blackbob, we heard the plaid-pajama-wearing, greasy-bag-carrying teens shout: “Fucking libtards!”
My friend and I fell quiet, looking at each other before we kept walking, and the teens from the McDonald’s piled into one car and drove away. That was it: a tough yet spineless conflict that dissipated into nothing. Still, the moment stuck with me.
Was I a libtard — and how did they know?
For my stay in Kansas, I packed three shirts I had brought with me to Baltimore, figuring for the rest of the days I could wear the clothes I kept there. By coincidence, the three shirts I packed were all red. The morning I voted, I walked up to cast my ballot at the local library like a baseball player batting for the wrong team. Surrounding me were old couples dressed in red staring down young people wearing blue, and there I stood in front of the privacy-screened voting machine checking the box for Harris/Walz in my conspicuous red polo.
Reeboks with white socks; brown-belted jeans; a red, short-sleeve polo; and a white, long-sleeve undershirt, the American-flag-branded “I voted in Johnson County” sticker emblazoned over my heart: That’s what I was wearing. From across the street in the premature dark of an early, fall night, what could have sold me out as a “fucking libtard” to these teens who knew nothing else about me?
It must have been the way I walk. On sidewalks, I avoid the cracks and keep to the right side like I support a wealth tax or free healthcare for all or even ownership of the means of production in the hands of the public.
If it wasn’t the way I walk, then it was my voice catching currents in the air and crossing the street over to them by the McDonald’s. Perhaps they thought I spoke in the bass register of a man who believes in increased background checks on gun owners or a ban on assault rifles.
Maybe it was the way I put my hands in my pockets. From across the street, it’s possible those teens used their imagination to fill in all the wicked tools a libtard like me could be hiding in his jeans: folded-up slips of paper with the number of Planned Parenthood, a map with the circled location of the nearest abortion clinic or even a dose of Plan B.
That was all news to me; I didn’t know a person — let alone me — could walk like a socialist or have a voice like a bleeding-heart, anti-gun liberal or carry himself like a pro-choice “wokist.” By walking out of a Taco Bell onto the sidewalk with my friend, I hadn’t meant to frighten those teens and provoke them to hurl names at me, as if I were a brown bear they encountered on a hike: “Hey, bear!”
I made a note to myself that I should be more careful with my presence, be more mindful of whom I may be disturbing or endangering in my environment with my ideology. I would need to hammer something akin to a deer-crossing sign into the ground to warn people driving with their children in the backseat.
Like I imagine Bigfoot does after people take a photo of him minding his own business in the wilderness, my friend and I continued walking into the night, paying no mind to the teens or what they called us: “Anyway...”
Riley Strait is a freshman from Olathe, KS majoring in Writing Seminars and English. His column, "In Medias Res," translates from Latin to "into the middle of things," shares narratives that bury occasional insights within fluff that often leave the reader wondering, "Did I ask?"
