William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

[Solly Mack]

10. I was mainly woolgathering in type.

People are strange and complex and a wellspring of so much potential. But they are also capable of allowing the worst to take hold.

I don't pretend to know all the whys and can only speak to what I saw while growing up, but trips back home have shown me that a lot of the same remains.

The same fear, the same ignorance, the same belief that being white means the world should belong to you.

I've lived all over the U.S. and have seen variants of the same thinking in places outside the South, but there is something about the South - a sense of heroic tragic suffering - that fairly exudes from some white people. A wistful longing that simply doesn't make any sense at all. As if they the are the wronged but conquered foe living under the unfair oppression of the victors, stoically fighting against outside influences bent on taking their dream away.

It's warped. Mad. A complete denial of history.

And no matter how I sound, I will never understand it.