As someone not old-enough to know how we came to look upon southerners as intellectually inferior compared to people from other parts of the country, I understand perfectly now why that perception might again be in play.
Rightly known for their hospitality (at least as long as you didn't look or worship differently from them), I first experienced it on a family vacation to Kentucky and Tennessee. Of course, as a ten year-old I wasn't engaging anyone in conversations about civil rights or segregation.
No, I was marveling at the natural wonders of Mammoth Cave and the Smoky Mountains, being intoxicated by the century-old vapors in the smokehouse at the Henry Clay mansion and falling in love with a caramel-colored race horse named Traffic Judge who insisted on following me and two siblings around the fence of his (or her) enclosure.
The passage of time has obscured the reasons my parents gave as to why we couldn't take our newfound friend home.
Not so many years later I began to learn about the Civil Rights movement. And the older I got the more plain-spoken my lessons became. The venom displayed by so many in that region was hideous. Ugly. Appalling.
I'll never forget the footage of people spitting on and screaming at the five Black children being escorted into Little Rock High School and the rage that contorted those faces into something not quite human. Or the unprovoked and entirely unjustified treatment accorded the marchers who crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge on March 7, 1965.
No one was going to tell southerners what to do. Or who they could or couldn't hate. If they wanted to treat Black people like the material we flush down toilets, well then by God they were going to do so.
After rejecting the Democratic party en masse when it sought to stop their overt mistreatment of Blacks, that defiance has again flared to new heights.
Acting in the interests of the common good, a mostly Democratic coterie of politicians and public health officials have urged Americans to mask and get vaccinated in the hopes of containing the Coronavirus before it mutates into the variant capable of killing all of us.
Without a single, coherent reason, a largely-Republican contingent has resisted these measures each and every step of the way.
Being asked to wear a lightweight mask amounts to 'tyranny'. The virus is a hoax. And most-pathetically, their brainless, middle-school obstinacy proves they are indomitable. Impervious. And immune.
I'm not even going to touch the hypocrisy of their “my body, my choice” rationale.
And for a time, it was debatable. But as vaccines have become widely available and the sentient portion of our population took advantage of them, the resistant continued to resist. Centered in the south, it is those very states that have suffered the highest infection rates from the Delta variant.
And it is precisely that portion of the population who knows what random and capricious bullshit science is. For the rest of us, this outcome couldn't be more predictable. They ignored the virus, pretended it wasn't a 'thing' and still clutching to their cult leader's words, insist it still isn't.
But even after their cult leader admitted vaccines were important and that they should avail themselves of them, they booed him. While Mount Everest straddles the border of Tibet and Nepal, the Mount Everest of Stupid rests squarely in Cullman, Alabama.
Even as their children are hospitalized in record numbers and the availability of ICU rooms evaporates like spit on a Las Vegas sidewalk. Even as surgeries can't be performed because hospitals are stuffed with unvaccinated patients. And even as our health care workers teeter on the edge of exhaustion
As a once-popular comedian observed “You can't fix stupid.”
This is the fallout from the political party that once called itself the 'Family Values' party. Apparently that includes preventing school districts from protecting your kids from a stubborn and persistent virus. How about it, Ron DeSantis?
I would like nothing better than to indulge Republicans and their COVID death-wish. Taken as a group, they're a largely despicable and ignorant one. America's weakest link. The phrase 'thinning the herd' springs to mind.
But unlike southerners and their misplaced hospitality, I have no interest in providing COVID-19 a forever home. Yeah, I know. You're the fearless one. I'm the snowflake. I get it. Right up until the moment you or your kids are wheezing on a ventilator and having second thoughts about vaccines.
I'll keep that in mind as I read your obit.
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