Abandoning the South - Democratic Underground

frustrated_lefty

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Thu Nov-16-06 05:33 PM
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Abandoning the South

Now that the midterm elections are over, it’s safe to assume we will be seeing threads with titles like “Should we be done with the South” with increasing frequency. You’d think people would learn. John Kerry previously claimed he didn’t need the South running up to the ’04 election. The very people who express a willingness to abandon an entire segment of the country are, quite often, the same who crow with glee over the wisdom of Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy” without realizing the irony. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a person who currently lives in the Northeast, although the majority of my life was spent in the Deep South. I’m one of those pesky Katrina survivors who have lost everything and since been diagnosed with PTSD, so that probably colors my perspective.

With that said, there are certainly reasons why it might be desirable to abandon the South. It’s an unfortunate truth that southerners on average tend to be less literate, less educated than their fellow Americans. The South is undeniably the center for blue collar labor in America; you’ll find no technological bright lights like Palo Alto or Silicon Valley or Boston south of Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Southerners tend to vote against their own best interest, tend to have a disproportionate number of fundamentalist whack jobs, display overt bigotry, misogyny, and racial tension, and would seem to want the 10 commandments tattooed to each of our foreheads. Infant mortality is twice as high in the South, no doubt due, in part, to those Texan mothers who keep butchering their own children. Poverty is rampant everywhere, but what northern city can boast that 50% of its working age population is unemployed? Quality education for your kids or yourself in the South? That’s a hard thing to come by, and generally costs too much to be accessible to most families. Income is lower in the South, total mortality higher, health care quality lower, rate of teen death by suicide, homicide and accident are all higher. By virtually any tangible index you care to measure, the South is the idiot stepchild of the nation.

So, why not abandon the South? If the dumb bastards can’t see the light in front of their faces, why should anyone give a damn? I have two answers to that, one personal, the other less so.

On a personal note, what makes you think you haven’t already abandoned the South? It’s going on a year and a half now, go take a walk through New Orleans. Ask yourself if the nation as a whole would tolerate that kind of devastation for so long in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Seattle, or even the Castro district in San Francisco. In any place BUT the South, that shit would be fixed. So, if you sit there gowned in the full glory of your enlightened wisdom and pc savvy, casually condemning the South for all its flaws, I wish you luck. In all likelihood, your attitude is going to turn around one day and bite you in the ass.

My other answer is less an answer and more of a solution. Provide educational grants. Lots of them. Lots and lots. Raise the minimum wage so a single mom can make a living wage and still have time for her kids. Increase funding towards Section 8 Housing. Increase funding towards HeadStart. Give your average southerner something to be invested in other than their immortal spirit. It’s that simple. Do that, and there will be no reason for bigoted questions like “should we abandon the South” to bubble up from deep within the recesses of “enlightened” minds.