This is not really a political rant per se, more of a promised response to a comment I left on a post featured at A New York Escorts Confessions. I’m not ranting against the post (since Alexa is posing the site on its educational values and not its political rantings), but the site linked in the post called Fuck The South (sorry for the language). Now this site could be just created all in fun and parody, or it could be how the author really feels… I don’t know. I do know that the site lumps everyone south of Wyoming together as one group and makes some very generalized statements about us.
First of all, being a Georgia boy born and bred and still living here, I see two Souths, the traditional South made up mostly of the southern states east of Texas and the other South that is more traditionally clumped together as part of the West. Usually when you think of the South, you bring to mind the old cotton fields, mansions, slavery, green farmlands surrounded by trees, features more prevalent east of Texas.
Now to the site. “We should have let them go when they wanted to leave….” , we didn’t all want to succeed, in Georgia it was a bitter issue that pit brother against brother — literally. “Fighting for the right to keep slaves…”, if I remember my history correctly, the succession was more about States rights over Federal rights. Slavery was already on its way out of Georgia before the succession. “How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America….”, we just barely consider ourselves part of the rest of the country, basically we just like to left to our own devices and we sometimes feel like we aren’t even part of America much less feel like the real America.
“Cause we(the north)(sic)… founded this country…”, I hate to burst your bubble but Georgia was one of the original thirteen colonies and a few of the founding fathers came from here and/or represented us. “Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons…”, yes, we have a lot of gun owners here in Georgia, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that thinks the constitution allows a person to keep assault weapons. We use our guns to hunt.. for food! (I was raised on the philosophy of your eat what you kill.)
” All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you…”, yes, we do get more than we pay in NOW. Remember Jimmy Carter? Just because we voted for him overwhelmingly for president twice, when Carter lost the re-election to Reagan (where was the North then?), Georgia was punished severely for its support of Carter by being excluded from Federal money and having many of the programs it did have cut severely. Even after voting Republican for the next two elections, Georgia was still being punished. Then in 1992 we help elect a Democrat. So now we get one penny more than we pay in to the Federal government, but since we are one of the poorest states we don’t pay in that much either.
Morality. Georgia actually is grouped in the states with the lowest divorce rates (.38% of the population) in the country as of the latest available numbers. While the murder rate is high in comparison to many other states, Georgia is one of the states that is showing the most improvement in reducing the rate. We are not perfect and we don’t pretend to be any more moral than the rest of the country. Yes, there is still a rampant number of homophobes in this state and they tend to panic at the first mention of homosexuals, which explains that amendment that is already being challenged.
No, the South is not perfect. It is as flawed as the rest of the country and it tends to vote and reflect the rest of the country. We are as varied as the North. No, I’m not happy that Shrub won, and I’m not happy that amendment defining marriage passed, but I did my part to fight it and in the next four years I see many more of my fellow Georgians marching with me.
And I really hate people who generalize.
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