Mass Media & Politics
November, 2015
Helen Sparks: Making America Great Again
At the center booth of the Saturday Barber Flea Market in Burlington, 77 year-old Helen Sparks sits in a rocking chair, knitting Christmas-colored yarn. Next to her sits a table filled with pocketknives, plastic charm bracelets and an array of treasures that others may mistake for trash. Her chair is faced away from potential customers and toward her husband, Jay, who sits at a table nearby selling miniature statues, doormats and scented oils.
Sparks is a registered Republican, but she’s voted on both sides of the party line. In fact, she’s never missed an election. It was her father who taught her the importance of voting, and today she tries to stress this point to Jay. “My vote ain’t worth nothin’,” he mutters from his chair nearby.
Sparks shakes her head, “I keep tellin him, ‘if you ain’t gonna vote, you aint got no right to complain!’” She leans in and whispers, “I’m gonna try and make sure he votes this time around.”
Sparks has a typical grandmotherly appearance, she wears a pale pink t-shirt and a small gold cross around her neck. Her smile is warm and makes her eyes crinkle behind the frames of her glasses.
Sparks’ life has been a series of overcoming hardships, including not only the loss of her first two husbands, but also of four children. She prays for a better life for her grandchildren, which has led her to put her support behind one man: Donald Trump.
Blue-collar education
Sparks married her first husband at age sixteen. “Let me tell you right now, my Daddy should never have let me do that!” She said, “but all my friends were getting married, it was the thing to do.” At age sixteen, Sparks would have been a junior in high school. Soon after graduation, she and her husband began having children, so she didn’t get the opportunity to go to college.
According to Derek Thompson, a journalist at The Atlantic, the best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree. Thompson says that when our people’s lack of education is coupled with our country’s dependence on globalization and outsourcing, folks like Sparks essentially get “trampled” by the system.
Over the years, as trade deals have been made and companies have sent their labor overseas, blue-collar workers like Sparks have been left with the short end of the stick. In order to compete, their wages keep getting cut until eventually their companies shut them out completely.
An ABC News poll shows that Republicans with a high school education or some college but no degree are 75% more likely to vote for Donald Trump than a Republican with a college degree.
Seemingly, the only options left are to try to compete for other low-wage jobs, or go back to school. But obtaining a degree or a specialty license requires a significant monetary investment, which isn’t feasible for many Americans. The bleak outlook has caused many Americans, like Sparks’ husband Jay, to give up on Washington and the political scene. Which makes the candidacy of Donald Trump and his promise to shake up the status quo all the more appealing.
Social Services
The wage gap coupled with an aging population has led to a substantial reliance on social services, including an ever-growing dependency on Social Security, which Sparks collects monthly. She also receives a small check from her former employer of 21 years, Glen Raven, a local textile company, “It’s $108. That’s it, that’s half a week of groceries.”
When asked about Trump’s stance on Social Security, Sparks pauses her knitting and pondered the question for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said, “bless his heart, he jumps from one subject to another and I’m just not smart enough to keep up!”
What she knows for sure is that there are people who are taking advantage of government’s social services, more specifically, “the Mexicans.”
She describes a scenario in a grocery store, where a ‘Mexican’ couple pulls up to the checkout with two shopping carts. One cart is filled with food, paid for with government dollars. The second is filled with alcohol, which is paid for by a bundle of cash. “If these people can afford all this extra, they shouldn’t be taking our tax dollars for their food,” she says. “I think there should be guards at the grocery store. You know, watching over them,” she adds.
Fox and Friends
When it comes to news, Fox is king. Millions of Conservatives tune in every night, and Sparks is one of them.
“I watch Bill O’Reilly every night at nine o’clock,” says Sparks. “I think he should run for President, I’d vote for him three times over.” She also watches about six additional hours of news every day; “I listen sometime from 4:30 to 10:30 in the morning. Or I’ll watch some during Supper. Then at night of course there’s Bill.” Sparks says that she watches CNN sometimes, but her television is mainly switched to Fox News.
Stutts can regurgitate the network’s rhetoric effortlessly. First, Barack Obama is to blame for her overall state of dismay, “he doesn’t have enough common sense.” The first lady is not without fault either, she says Michelle Obama “sticks her nose where it doesn’t belong”—in our public schools. “She needs to stay out of our children’s lunch rooms. Nobody wants to eat that stuff, even the teachers bring their own lunch.”
At that moment, a black man and his daughter walk by her booth. She leans in a bit and lowers her voice, “that’s not because they’re black though. That has nothing to do with it.” She nods to herself and goes back to her knitting.
At this point, there’s only one demographic we haven’t discussed: Muslims. Sparks thinks they should be held in camps, “like we did it with the Germans in World War Two.”
She is referring to the internment camps for German Americans that were created under President Roosevelt’s Alien and Sedition Acts. Looking back, those camps are seen (to most) as an obvious civil rights violation.
The way we were
Built on traditional Baptist values and what some may call an outdated school of thought, Sparks believes that America has “gone to hell in a hand basket” and Donald Trump is the answer to making things closer to the way they used to be.
A time when women weren’t “trying to run the world” and minority communities kept to themselves. A time when it was appropriate for a schoolteacher to slap a child for misbehaving and prayer was commonplace in the classroom. A time when a gallon of gasoline was thirteen cents and a loaf of bread was a nickel. When children used their fingers to count instead of calculators and wrote things by hand instead of on a computer.
That was a time when life was simple and made sense to Sparks. Her nostalgia for a time long gone has left her frustrated with a society moves on without her.
And her hope for the future lies in the hands of Donald Trump.