ThinkBlog

I’m going to try to start posting some Linux tips, usage tricks and different ways of getting used to the TUI (textual user interface–id est, the command line). However, to get this thing kicked off, I’ll post a poem that some kind soul posted to the hh-unix Yahoo! Group. Enjoy!

[Push Love Nop Hack]

A soft purr murmurs upon lips,
ever so gently follows the throbbing.
Linger, o’Linger…. gentle wisps,
of air passing those lovely lips.

So forth follow, and follow back,
to be lost, without direction.
I seek thee, and hope thee…
Hope that you… indeed seek me.

Heart pounding I have no choice,
I am left with only one decision.
To go, forth following I go
and back I follow until gone.

Silent Words, Bits, Bytes,
you Nibble, and I hlt.
90-NOP, and mov add div
push pop, hlt. I am 90-NOP.

more, grep, su hostname, whoami.
Be what you will, with me be what we.
So forth mov, push, jmp and.
mul pop ret 90-nop - su.

o’Linger sweet, give me reason,
give me life, show me new,
and I will show you without
forth going, to be gone, so I come.
a purr murmuring on my lips,

The throbbing, see I and so
I see, 90-nop heart hlt.
push pop, jmp, call.
int 10 ret ret ret.

You are root, I am luser.
Heart throbbing, hacked.
90-nop heart hlt.
you su and I 90-nop nop nop.

luser group user read
write append user lead,
say and I follow, follow
forth and follow back,

Back forth I follow and so,
nop nop nop,
su
I am hacked.

-Cyan, a dedication to love from the mind of a programmer.

The other day, I was running a somewhat new route down Pelham Road from my apartment during the middle of the day. This is unusual, because frankly, I like running much more so during the night, and haven’t really run in the day since my sprint-and-high-jump bout back in high school track training days. Well, as the sun beamed down on me, veritably sizzling my flesh, I was thinking of something: my newly-exchanged DVD, π (Pi), the 1998 Sundance Film Festival winner and all that jazz. A review of the actual movie is a subject for another blog entirely. It was as though, while I was thinking of that movie, I thought of the piece of plastic on which it had been recorded, and all the materials that went into making the movie itself; and then I thought about the sun beating down on them. The disc itself, the computer on which I played it, the pressboard props, the soundstage in which it was filmed, the hot glue and the caffeine … in the relentless light and heat of the sun, all would crack, fade, corrupt. They would thus show their true natures: that is to say, they would return to dust and be found transient.

Thinking about that long enough will remind you of what really matters. Am I chasing the transient when I could breathe the free air and bask in the crisp sunlight, focusing my attention on that which proves all else false? (In case you don’t have it yet, I’m using the sun in this case as metaphor for God. )

[I’ve been meaning to post some solid stuff on here that doesn’t fall just into the categories of geekdom and Linux tweakage.  What follows, I hope, won’t be the last post in a different vein!  Have a good week, folks.]

Last Thursday, I decided it had become too pleasant an evening to spend it indoors, although I had a great deal of biology homework to do, and a number of very long chapters to read.  So I drove into my old neighborhood—less than five miles away from my apartment as the crow flies, which is one of the odd things about having lived for almost twenty-one contiguous years in the same general area—and parked just outside the locked gate of the parking lot at the neighborhood pool.  There I sat, reading and studying, until finally it was getting late and my neck had come to express its great distress at my posture.  The pain in my neck, as a I drove home, came to be a sharp pain that didn’t begin to subside until I realized I was as tense as a steel G-string and made a conscious effort to let go of the stress.

That got me to thinking about how I tended to handle my stresses in life: instead of letting God take them and handle them, I tried to shoulder all those things and be Chief Executive Officer of the microcosm that is my life.  Life’s not meant to be like that; the Lord says, “My yoke is easy; My burden is light.”  He’s for real, that’s not a joke; the only catch is, you have to have faith enough to let go of the stress you’re hanging on to.  When I, a Christian, don’t let God take it, I get all overwhelmed and stressed out and—although I jest about the words themselves quite frequently, as my friends know—I literally gnash my teeth in rage and anxiety trying to handle it all.  That is, until I realize “Oh, yeah, God’s Almighty and I’m not.  Maybe I should just let go.”  And I do.  But by that time, I might have become a nervous wreck or a raving lunatic: sometimes I don’t bow a knee to God’s sovereignty (His governance over my life) until my jaw and neck are sore from having been clenched up all day, and maybe I’ve spat words like bile at someone with whom I became impatient—often in my own family or among my closest friends.  Not cool.

THAT, in turn, got me to thinking about an animé I used to watch incessantly with a very dear friend of mine back when we were both in high school.  Have you ever seen Ghost in the Shell?  That’s the one.  Despite its sometimes-racy content (which seems to have been the standard for most intelligent animé, meaning, that which is not geared towards children or sexual deviants], unfortunately), it contains a valuable lesson for us in letting God take care of our “stuff.”  ”Waiting on the Lord,” if you will.

Let me set the stage for you here.  “Major” Kusanagi is a woman whose body has been replaced with cybernetic parts and whose brain has been largely augmented with various interfaces for accessing all the different kinds of networks and computer systems in the world (the year is 2029, by the way), whose job is fighting high-tech crime.  Kusanagi and her partner, Bateau (who has also been bionically altered/”enhanced” in various ways), basically end up trying to infiltrate this certain place (where and why aren’t relevant at this point).  Ever impetuous, Kusanagi disconnects communications with Bateau and goes in by herself.  A large, auto-piloted, cloaked tank of sorts guards what she’s trying to get to; so, from her position on a ledge in the middle of this structure that looks like a sort of neo-Parthenon, she shoots out the glass ceiling to short out the cloaking mechanism, jumps down from her perch on the ledge and onto the top of the hulking tank.  (Remember, she’s cybernetically enhanced, so folding vectors in a single leap from a height that would shatter “normal” bone is not implausible.)  In an attempt to disable the tank, she tries to rip the cover off of the control box (think “fuse box of the future” here), but try as she might, she cannot.  Her muscles ripple and bulge; the tension builds and builds within her body until finally, she makes one last desperate pull, exerting all her enormous strength and will into bending back the box—and fails: her arm tissues rip, suddenly exposing Kusanagi’s metal endoskeleton in a rushing of blood and rending of flesh.  The Major has successfully yanked her own arms out of their sockets, both shoulder and elbow, and they fall lifeless from the tank; utterly spent, Kusanagi falls limp to the cold marble floor of this temple structure, at the foot of the tank, which has been moving up and down violently in an attempt to buck her off.  Having finally succeeded, the tank reaches for Kusanagi’s head with a clutching device not unlike what modern deep-sea divers use to nab things in geothermal vents.  Slowly, it picks the Major up, dragging her lifeless, arm-less body slowly vertical from the floor, now wet with rain and sharp with glass from the ceiling she so hastily shot out.  When it has her at knee-level, the clutching-device in which rests her expressionless head begins to turn counter-clockwise: it will snap her neck.

Just then, though, Bateau comes in with a police helicopter (I believe … it’s been a long time) and several front-mounted chain guns and utterly destroys the tank.  For Kusanagi, the threat has ended, but at the cost of her own body and energy; she cannot move, nor even blink, being so utterly shattered by the effort she exerted.

Here’s my point.  She could have waited, and called in backup, which she’s fortunate to have had anyway.

How many people try to dive into tackling their problems without a second thought to whether they’ll be able to handle them—only to find that it’s a thousandfold more stressful than they thought?  Still, many, quite including myself, have plowed into it, guns blazing, cleverness at work: I’ll shoot out the ceiling and take it on….  I’ll [do this] and it’ll be enough to work around my problems!  I’m strong enough, I’m tough enough!”  Perhaps especially Christians are ironically vulnerable to this kind of thinking: comforted by verses remembered, like Romans 8:31, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” or Psalm 31:24, “Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who hope in the LORD,” or again, Psalm 91:10-11, “No evil will befall you, nor will any plague come near your tent. For He will give His angels charge concerning you, to guard you in all your ways,” we forget that we need God’s help in order to be thus blessed.  Those are all wonderful, encouraging verses to lovers of the Most High; but sometimes we get bold and forget that apart from Him, we’re dust.  Solomon knew he couldn’t tackle his problems when he wrote in what has become the book of Proverbs (28:25-26), “An arrogant man stirs up strife, but he who trusts in the LORD will prosper. He who trusts in his own heart is a fool, but he who walks wisely will be delivered,” or Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling,” or again, Isaiah 5:21, “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight!”  We forget that God has graciously placed friends and family in our lives to help us through stressful times, and has promised His very own hand in our dire situations if we just slow down long enough to ask and wait on the Lord.

How many times have I done that?  How many times this week have I charged ahead into my problems, tackling them with all my strength and force of will, and with the AK-47 of determination, only to run out of ammo and jump on the problem’s back only to find myself at its feet, spent and rent from limb to metaphorical limb and with my neck in its clutches.  About the time the motor starts whirring, I give up trying to handle it myself, realize I’m completely powerless, bewail my impatience and ingratitude, and fall facedown before the Lord in supplication for His help.  Jesus is swift with the chainguns, folks.  He can vaporize your problems quicker than thought—because He’s all-powerful, and I’m not.  (Anybody who’s known me long enough to see me a nervous wreck over a test or a paper can testify to that!)  Instead of admitting I need backup—shoot, I need God to be first in line!—I just charge in and try to hold on to my prideful way of thinking.  How many times have I been on the brink of breakdown because I tried to do it myself and balance my will, my habits, my expectations, and my stubborn beliefs with the changes God wanted to bring about in those areas?  Hmm.  No one wants to admit that, but anyone who’s experienced it can concur that the answer remains a constant.  Too many.

Kusanagi was restored.  I’m leaving out a lot of plot in saying that, and those familiar with the manga won’t want to take the metaphor too far, but still—she was repaired.  So will God lift us back up when we humble ourselves before Him after a fall.  But the memories, and the consequences of not having waited, will still remain with us, just as the memories and horror of being punished by the tank must have stuck with the Major (I say this with the understanding [hope!] that the reader suspends disbelief in the reality of the animated world).  The Lord is willing to help, but if you go it alone, He’s not going to force Himself on you.  Call on Him, though, and watch as your spirit gains the “peace that passes all understanding.”

… Such were my thoughts last Thursday.  I’ve been putting off writing that for a week, but typing it tonight has the effect of taking one’s own medicine—man, I’m wigging out about this Bio test tomorrow!  But it’s all good, and here’s why.

This day has been enormously productive–except for the past hour and a half, which I spent finding out that for some reason one of the CAT5e cables I crimped works to go between the cable modem and one of my NICs, and the other doesn’t. ::sigh:: Whatever. Now, off to run–and more homework!

I remember waking up this morning two years ago and watching the towers fall over and over on CNN, NBC, and all the other TV news services. That was a turning point for me in my life–one of those wake-up calls where you stand there and realize, “Hey, I haven’t done anything worthwhile yet. If I died today, what would be my eulogy? `He wasted his life’?” Over the weeks and months that followed, I prayed to increase and sharpen my faith and for the ability to use what I can to do what I could for God.

So, at the risk of being cliché, where were you and what were you doing and thinking on 9/11 of 2001? Comments please!

Haha, MAN this stuff is fun when it goes right. Using the following commands, I’ve been able to mirror www.ccel.org onto my Windows box (thanks, 120GB HDD) via the Linux box and smbmount:

# cd /var/www/html/mirrors; mkdir wgot; chown mike:mike wgot
# mount -t smbfs -o username=mike,credentials=/etc/smb.auth,uid=mike,gid=mike //tek1/wGetGUI /var/www/html/mirrors/wgot
# su mike; cd wgot
$ wget -c -x -p -m -t10 -w2 –random-wait –waitretry=7 -U “Mozilla/4.03 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4u)” –referer=”http://www.ccel.org/” -k -b -a mirroring.log -nv -A*.* http://www.ccel.org/

Isn’t that sick in the best way?

I “upgraded” the webserver one last time on a major scale tonight. I’ve been working for the past few days (well, since the eighth, my last post) on migrating all the data from databases and webpages over to my newly-installed and upgraded Red Hat Linux 9.0 server. That’s running in my old Penguin full tower case, in my closet, with ethernet cables snaking around the bases of my walls from the den (the room where my Windows box, cable modem, and five-port hub sit atop one another in ascending order). Only two fans in the case right now though, and only one of those is an exhaust fan, so I downclocked it back to 466MHz for the time being. As such, I modified the front page to only show the past seven (7) posts, but have added a calendar and pagination function via the upgrade from b2 to b2evolution. I learned (quickly) how to set up Apache server and MySQL on Linux. For future reference, the trickiest part about that is setting up the root user with the mysql command:

# mysql -a root
mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR root@localhost=PASSWORD(’the_password_you_want’);

I’d forgotten this and it took me a solid hour to find it in the man pages. Goodness! Migration from b2 to b2evo was a snap as far as databases go, though, needing only to copy the folder from C:\mysql\data\* (on my WinXPpro box) to /var/lib/mysql/* (on the Linux box). I ran the install scripts but quickly realized it was going to take some serious hand-tweaking to get this to run the way I wanted it to. I had to delete the references to blog.header.php from b2 in my index.php file (the thing you’re looking at right now, yeah, that CSS template I hand tweaked over the course of a week and wasn’t about to toss away, tnx j00) and modify a few other variables. I didn’t discover the back-office (so-called) to the blog interface until after I’d gone in through phpMyAdmin (an EXCELLENT tool—I wouldn’t be using MySQL without it) to edit the appropriate table by hand (in this case, b2evo_blogs. Having gotten the main blog to interface with the MySQL tables and tweaking the permissions (so much chmod’ing through SSH from my WinXP box here folks) so that my counter, statistics, and RSS QOTD would work just so, I then proceeded to hit up the b2evo forums about how to change the format of the Archives and Categories lists; I’ve still not tweaked that to how I want it, but that’ll have to wait until after I get some real work done. Updated the templates for each of the subfolders in the site (”humor,” “mirrors,” and “essays,” thus far) and got the color and CSS settings on the calendar to work just so that it would squeeze into that little space and still be visible (note to self: “font-size: xx-small; font-style: ultra-condensed; font-weight: 100; color: #08C;”). Everything else looks good for now.

Setting up Samba was exceedingly difficult; the catch seemed to be in the “Local Security Policy” under Administrative Tools. Until I tweaked many of those settings, smbclient wouldn’t connect to my WinXP shares (this SMB setup is only enabled internally—nono 31337 hax0rz, kk?), and until I set “smbpasswd -a mike” via commandline on Linux, the Windows server acted like it had gotten slapped in the face every time it tried to connect. Ugh. But it’s so worth it: seamless integration, I can edit the website remotely through a locally mapped network drive, and download files through the firewall/server to my Windows box transparently. Now, that’s networking.

Having completed all that on the server-side, I shut down Apache and uninstalled—yes, uninstalled! ::gasp::—MySQL on the Windows box, then did a “regsvr /u iconv.dll” from Start -> Run… to be able to delete [C:\WINDOWS\System32\iconv.dll]. Why is that significant?

This is the whole point! All of it comes down to this! Check out this sequencing.
I bought a bunch of new Antec blue LED 80mm case fans to cool my new case because, well, I had a new case. This gave me the bright idea that I could eliminate noise by replacing my 6000RPM 60mm CPU fan with an 80mm case fan using an 80-to-60 adapter (c.f., the adapter by PC Toys), so I did that, which gave me the bright idea that I should go ahead and just overclock my machine now that I could safely and quietly. So now it’s running like an Athlon XP 1800+. The primary reason, the best reason I could see, for putting the new(er) Windows machine in a new case is so I could put the Linux stuff that had been previously retired to good use in the huge tower that’s very cumbersome to carry about (to Columbia and back, for instance). Even if I didn’t migrate cases, I would still want the mobility, and if the webserver were on a non-stationary system, well, that just wouldn’t work too well for those midnight blog-desires. Or something. AND!—upgrading systems gave me the perfect excuse to upgrade blog supporting web-ware! So I did. So if I’m going to move cases to have two machines, I need to reduce noise and heat by placing at least one out of sight and earshot; what better dampening place than my closet? (Especially with the winter months coming up, free cooling even when the rest of the place is toasty!) Hence, I went out and bought and learned how to use a Radio Shack crimper (thanks go to Jeff for the suggestion of where to buy), and crimped myself a couple of long CAT-5e cables from the leftovers my previous roommate donated to me from his previous job (thanks PJ!). Setting up this stationary, solitary, separate, firewalled server allowed me to migrate the entire webserver away from my Windows box onto something more stable. This, in turn, allowed me to shut down the Apache and MySQL services on this Windows box, which again, let me uninstall MySQL from my system. And that’s almost the end of the whole thing.

I uninstalled MySQL for one simple reason: that one little ~850KB file, iconv.dll. That’s it. That’s the only real reason. All the other stuff just kind of came along for the ride, because it seemed like the next logical step. But the reason I bought a new case, new crimper and RJ-45 terminators, new case fans, 80-60 adapter; the reason I crimped the wires, overclocked the machine, set up Samba, set up Apache & MySQL & b2evo, the reason I upgraded the blog, the reason I ended up rearranging and cleaning up parts of my apartment due to all this shuffling of computer parts—is because of Gaim.

That’s right. Gaim. The best instant messenger client available on the net. MySQL installs on its Windows servers a certain iconv.dll, which conflicts with the GTK+ 2.0 for Win32 iconv.dll, which is not installed in the %SystemRoot% directory (so it basically gets pre-empted). Well, without the use of this particular GTK+ 2.0-supplied iconv.dll, Gaim won’t run. Read about the bug report I filed on SF here. So it began, those two or three weeks ago … and it ends with a happily upgraded and overclocked two systems that are both running better than before. All because of Gaim. So! Don’t ever let anyone tell you that it’s not the best IM client out there!

Or, maybe I just need not be so über-OCD. Ah well. It’s all good fun. Now I just have to buckle down and focus full-heartedly on school and extracurricular mess, since I’ve been dividing my time so irresponsibly.

Uh, did I mention I just ordered an unlocking kit … ?

Wait until the end of the super long end credits!

If you’re patient enough, you’ll a get preview of the next episode…

Though… it’s just the same anyway! :>>

This one made me laugh out loud. Rhymes With Orange is probably one of my favorite comics, and I don’t have many. In fact, I probably lost my sense of humor back in high school. Still, this one left me laughing aloud for at least three solid seconds. That’s it for tonight; have a good one, folks.

Click here to view; if I’d put it in this window the formatting would be screwed up if your res is lower than 1024×768.

In other news, I just formatted the text so you can now actually see the dotted-underline of the parts of the text that are under a “span” heading of “help.” It occurred to me the other day that you really can’t tell unless you mouseover it on accident where I’ve added “helpful hints” within the text (except for links, which usually have some alternate text/title on mouseover anyway, just because I like being thorough). I also changed the cursor for the mouseover on “help” and “link” classes, but having a crosshair (as it is just presently) over every link on the page might be a bit annoying once the novelty and techno feel wears off. Comments, anyone?

Just spent the weekend (except for Sunday) in Columbia. It was a great time, but it was as if I couldn’t feel much of anything, except a vague euphoria or anger, and often the two were commingled. I believe the culprit is my having had at least one of the so-called “energy drinks” every day for the past two weeks. (Maybe it was just the fact that the 8.3 ounce cans in which most of them are packaged resonated with something deep within that still feels some sort of affinity for the recognition of the format of an “old-school” filename on ye olde FAT [DOS] file systems.) All that speed tends to make one numb. I think I would have had a much better time if I hadn’t overdone it, but I observe with ironically, predictably, 20/20 hindsight that when that sort of obsession takes hold, it usually has to burn itself out for me to pay any attention to the fact that everything around me–within and without–is failing quickly.

Take, for instance, this entire past month. Except for this past week, I’ve been working, going to school, designing a webpage, setting it up on my Windows box, and then setting up a Red Hat Linux 9.0 box and crimping my own CAT-5e cables to run the server into my closet (…why? I could explain it, but it sounds as ridiculous as you might think), learning PHP/Apache[.conf]/MySQL snytax, replacing cases/fans/&c. and generally overloading myself on purpose, though unconsciously. I think I’m coming back into normal mode now, but man, it’s been a wild and painful ride. As I recall, I did this last year around this time too. Maybe it has something to do with hormones, or weather patterns–or I could, novelly enough, take responsibility for it myself. I think I’ll do the latter; the partaking thereof has a more satisfying aftertaste. So to speak.

[WARNING: this is a rant that WILL offend you. Take it with the grain of salt that I’m generalizing and I know it–there are many a fine and true gentleman and many a dear, true lady in South Carolina, many of them in my very own family. But this is a wake up call to every bigot who won’t befriend a Northerner because of his or her state of origin.]

There should be a sign written in gothic script above every sign that says “Welcome to South Carolina!”–it should read, “Abandon hope of fellowship, all ye who enter here. (Unless you were born here.)” Having a few friends from out of state, not to mention a young ladyfriend from Syracuse, and having grown sensitive to the discomfort of those who weren’t born here or at least didn’t grow up here after having lived for a short while in Louisville, I’ve learned that Southern hospitality really isn’t what it used to be. Most of my best and dearest friends were from New England or the upper Midwestern United States when I was growing up, so I thought (until I was older and, thus, radically disillusioned) that everyone was as up-front and friendly all the time, everywhere.

Not so! There is a conspicuous bigotry in at least South Carolina (I won’t speak about other Southeastern states in so broad a way, having not lived anywhere else all my life—which is a point I’ll get to in a second) that says you can’t, for one, be an educated man who uses a phrase like “conspicuous bigotry” in casual conversation without drawing stares from the Stupid-is-Cool crowd. And let me tell you, the Stupid-is-Cool crowd is all-pervasive. You know, New Yorkers are some of the most refreshing people I know, especially the ones from NYC. Why? Well, they come off as rude, for one. That, in itself, is refreshing, because the only difference between Southern folks and Yanks is that the latter group are more likely to tell you straight up, no games, to your face, bluntly: “I don’t like this about you.” With Southerners, especially South Carolinians that have been here their whole lives, they’ll talk about you over the gossip fence–be that fence made of picketing, chain-link, or Ether–and then when they see you they’ll shower you with carefully-wrought compliments and flattery. I would know: until I hit bottom and turned back to the Lord, I participated in such forked-tonguédness! Furthermore, Yanks won’t beat around the bush if they can’t do something for you. Southerners pride themselves in being able to “balance” a load of fifty thousand things they have to get done by lunch time for a million people, but really all of it ends up having to be either done halfway or cancelled with letters of several hundred words each apologizing for what a terrible heathen they are for having agreed to it in the first place, knowing they wouldn’t be able to carry out their self-imposed calls of duty. If I use a long string of a sentence that’s parenthetical as this paragraph in casual conversation, the Southern so-called “lady” will snicker at me as though I don’t know how to “properly” construct a conversation and stay within the bounds of some certain dogmatic, tacit rules governing some esoteric segment of etiquette that only applies in certain situations on certain holidays.

If you strike up a conversation with a Yank, and he thinks you’re odd, he’ll tell you. Yes, he will. But that won’t be an insult–in fact, it’ll be a blesséd thing, because he’ll be honest enough to tell you what’s on his mind. You might well say the same for him. But it won’t mean that you two can’t be friends; it just means that, from the get-go, you’re recognizing that you’re different from each other. Down here, you talk to a “lady” or a “gentleman” that just doesn’t care a hoot about whatever it is coming out of your mouth, s/he’ll lead you on: s/he’ll suffer your presence for that conversation, perhaps even years, without telling you “Look man, I don’t care. Leave me alone.” Isn’t it better to be honest than to cover some junk up in the name of a false courtesy?

Another difference that is almost completely removed from that part of the diatribe is that the South is, as I believe Flannery O’Connor put it, “Christ-haunted.” You can’t go anywhere and meet people without them asking you what church you attend: it’s obligatory that if you live in SC—the buckle of the Bible Belt, after all—you go to church. This means you get a lot of disillusioned people that call themselves Christians and practice all sorts of nonsense that directly contradicts that name and title. Unrepentant, hard-hearted buggers that are serpents under the wool infest the churches down here. We’ve become so complacent down here in SC that a man and a woman can fornicate umpteen times a week but go to church dolled up in a suit once in that time for an hour and call themselves pious. When I was at Clemson, I drank myself under the table more than once and was popping more pills than I had prescriptions for, and then tried to turn around and sober up every once in a while to talk about God. Friends, that’s not Christianity: contending intellectually for a faith that you don’t have is idle agreement at best, blasphemy at worst. When people wear the name of Christ, they have an obligation to uphold that, or they put that name up to shame because of their actions. It took a strong slap in the face and a move away from the Upstate SC area to wake me up to that truth a couple of years ago. How does this tie in? Well, dog gone it, if a man from NYC is an atheist, he’s at least going to tell you straight up when you start spouting Christian stuff that he’s not all about it. Lip service, on the other hand, is the name of the game for Southerners. How many people have been turned off from the Word of God, not because it was harsh or that it presented the holy wrath and deep compassion of our Lord Jesus accurately and concisely, as some people claim—but were turned off indeed by the rampant hypocrisy of a man that calls himself a Christian and refuses to follow the blesséd truth?

But mainly, the big rub is just genuineness and acceptance. People down here are completely fake, because they’ve been taught that’s how to keep the peace while simultaneously being invulnerable to social attack and being better than everyone else. It’s a sad thing, really. Many Southerners have this extra persona that they wear, sometimes throughout their lives even with their spouses and dearest friends, because they’re caged in all these chains of societal rules, none of which are written down. That’s the catch: if you’re a Northerner, I’m going to know it because I grew up in the South and I was taught all my life—indirectly, now—how to act around certain people and how to, essentially, be fake for the sake of some higher good (usually my own). That’s true of more people than I’d like to admit. You, having grown up in the “forsaken Elsewhere” (that being, NOT this side of the Mason-Dixon), are inferior in some fundamental way because you don’t know these rules, so I’m not going to let you in my clique. What utter nonsense! What wretched falsehood! How many Southern ladies and gentlemen, allowed to remain sheltered in this ignorance of their social statuses as mortals, have missed out on wonderful, life-giving friendships because of indigenous bigotry that told them they couldn’t be friends with someone who hadn’t been “in” all their lives? Or again, how many Yanks have been denied glorious fellowship by stubborn “gentlemen” and “ladies” who simply weren’t able to let themselves let go of negatively preconceived notions and old hatreds that should have died out a hundred fifty years ago?

Let go of this bondage, my fellow Southerners, that throng who are captive in the chains of old prejudice! Come to understand your own ignorance and destroy it by any means necessary, and breathe the free air! Make friends with those who are different than you—yes, even unto New England!

Here’s what brought this all on: I was sitting in philosophy class the other day and we were dialoguing about ancient Athenians. The Greeks believed that only barbarians (essentially, non-Greeks) could be made slaves; no Greeks could ever be made slaves, regardless. Terrible, isn’t it? Often, the slaves were more educated than the Greeks themselves—it was just that they were war captives or some such that brought them into bondage. Well, that’s what some Southerners still do—it’s like we’re taking prisoners of a war that ended 150 years back, holding old grudges. A Southerner will treat a Southerner cordially and smite the Yank—often obliquely, or behind his back—with harsh words and unwelcome. Let us, South Carolina, take heed of the lesson of Greece’s downfall! Let us welcome our fellow man with not only open arms, but with open minds and hearts as well!

Whew. I feel better; don’t you?

…and don’t even get me started on racism!

[Again, this was directed toward a generalized group, that being ignorant Southerners–especially South Carolinians–who believe that their societal structures and their bigotries run the world and that just because a person hasn’t been a part of that structure, that clique, from birth or an early school age, that they can be neither accepted nor befriended. If you know someone like that, be honest enough with him or her to tell that one to wake up to the beautiful reality that we live in a United States.]