ThinkBlog

[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.]

[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.]