What do the kind people of Murfreesboro, Tenn., a city of 126,000 about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, think about Muslims?

It's complicated.

Read all 1,800-plus words of today's Washington Post takeout on the "midsize college town" (aka the sixth-largest city in Tennessee), and the difficulty in making broad generalizations about the community's attitudes and opinions becomes clear.

However, nuance apparently does not buy exclusive real estate (read: Page 1) in the dead-tree edition of one of America's elite newspapers.

What does? Try the possibility of Islamophobia and intolerance in the "buckle on the Bible Belt." That'll get a story on the front page, even without a timely news peg (unless you consider events that happened five years ago timely).

Thus, below a headline about Muslims in a Tennessee town "holding their breath," this is the Page 1 lede where the Post acknowledges (sort of) that there's no actual news here. But now that Donald Trump has been elected president, who knows what might happen, so there must be a story here, right?:

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — It was here, in this midsize college town in the dead center of Tennessee, that a right-wing effort to ban Islamic law found one of its first sponsors. Here, too, a congressman co-sponsored a plan to “defund Muslim ‘refugees’ ” and local residents sued to block construction of the only mosque, a fight that ended at the Supreme Court.

The town’s Muslims carried on through all of that, raising their children, saying their prayers, teaching at college, filling people’s prescriptions and filling their tanks, contributing to the civic life in a city of 126,000. They felt the familiar grief and fear of reprisal last year when a Muslim man killed four Marines in Chattanooga, 90 minutes away.

Now Donald Trump — a man who has repeatedly cast doubt on the patriotism of Muslims — is the president-elect, and he has selected a national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has called Islam a “cancer.” And a deep unease has again seeped into the daily life of many here in this Muslim community of about 1,500.

There has been a smattering of post-election harassment and insults — at schools, in parking lots, on the road — but nothing to take to the police or put Murfreesboro back in the national headlines.

“Right now, we’re hoping that it’s going to be calm,” said Saleh Sbenaty, an engineering professor at Middle Tennessee State University and one of the founders of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. “But we don’t know if it’s the calm before the storm or the calm after the storm.”