Earlier this week, we had some weather that was very close to summer weather in the South: a nasty thunderstorm that went on for hours, knocking the power out and initiating a tornado watch. Thunderstorms in New England typically last five minutes, ten at the most, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. It gave me a really memorable, hilarious experience because I drove to the art supply store, to go somewhere with both air conditioning and electricity to wait it out.
I’ve lived in New England for a long time now, but I’m still nervous driving in snow. On the other hand, I learned to drive in thunderstorms and they don’t bother me a bit. I could see other drivers nervously checking out the sky. Some of them pulled over. Others hydroplaned. It was the first time since I moved to New England that I was the only competent, confident driver on the road, which cracked me up.
And that made me reflect on Mississippi and Alabama, the two states I grew up in, and the South more generally. Supply your own not-alls — if your experience of the South is totally different, that’s fine. I’m speaking in terms of my own understanding based on my own experience growing up there, constantly straddling the line between poverty and lower-middle-class among the people commonly called “white trash.”
Things I Miss About the South
Southerners prize freedom and are typically a lot more willing to accept and expect personal responsibility than Yankees.
While this has its trade-offs—I really did not have any way to access therapy or hearing aids without Medicaid, which I didn’t qualify for in the South because the income limits are absurdly low—I’ve come to think that the occasional person like me slipping through the cracks is probably an okay trade-off for a cultural ethos of personal responsibility. The typical Southerner’s reaction to a problem is not “why isn’t the government fixing this for me?” and I think that’s a huge positive, one we desperately need.
Southerners typically draw a sharp distinction between children and adults.
Adults were always introduced to me as Mr. or Mrs., and the height of familiarity was for an adult to become “Mister Firstname” or “Miss Firstname”. I was expected to “sir” and “ma’am” all adults, and I still knee-jerk to doing so when anyone seems likely to be thirty seconds older than me. I resented this growing up, but I heartily approve of it now. It is good for children to understand that adults are not their equals. It can protect them, for one thing—if they’re taught that adults do not have secrets with children. It’s good for kids to think of adults as different from them, people who have more power, but also more knowledge and insight. They should be striving to earn the right to be taken seriously by adults, and they should have to earn it through learning to demonstrate maturity, rationality, and good judgment.
Southerners do performative courtesy, but that’s not a bad thing.
The joke that “bless your heart” is Southern for “go fuck yourself” is funny because it’s true. Southerners, especially southern matriarchs, are fully capable of a genteel, smiling viciousness.
But why does it work that way? Because courtesy is the white noise of life in the South. People say please and thank you and excuse me. They let other people cut in line if they have just one item to check out. They wait to be given permission to use first names. This has many benefits. Kids who grow up that way learn to think about others and to present themselves with poise.
Southerners prize hard work and respect success.
Since leaving the South, I’ve much more often seen hard work regarded as something to apologize for, discussed in terms of bad work-life balance, a cause for depression, or pathologized as workaholism. People are much more likely to attribute their success to luck or “privilege” than work, and this is bad for everyone, especially the kids who soak up these attitudes.
Southerners distrust authority.
Before COVID, I thought of this as a mostly-bad thing. Now I think of it as a mostly-good thing. I had a conversation with James Lindsay once about the Confederate flag. We laughed, recognizing that if people from the rest of the country would just STFU about it for ten years, it would vanish on its own. People still wave that stupid flag because they’re repeatedly told not to. While there’s a child-like aspect to that, being child-like isn’t always a bad thing. Children demand to know why they’re being forced to do a thing, and the world would look different, post-COVID, if more people were child-like in that way.
A Bad Thing About the South
I needed to leave the South for a lot of reasons, and one of them was that a very toxic kind of Christianity is dominant there. People in the lower classes are often quite literal in their application of the book of Proverbs, for one thing. But for another, people often use their Christianity to go way too far.
I’m not talking about the city council meetings that start with prayers “in Jesus’s name” or the time that I saw a public official cast demons out of the room before calling a vote. That stuff—inappropriate mixing of government and religion in big, obvious ways—mostly gets taken care of these days through official channels.
I’m talking about smaller, interpersonal things. The proselytizing in Wal-mart. The Chick tracts in the pockets of clothing you try on. Most importantly, the efforts to evangelize kids regardless of their parents’ wishes.
For just one example: a friend of mine had her child in public school for first grade. The school had two first grade classrooms that were joined by a closet, which used to be a bathroom if I recall correctly—a small, dark little room. Both teachers were devout Christians, and they referred to this room as “the prayer closet”. When one of the children was upset or had a problem the teachers would take them into the prayer closet to pray with them in secret. No parental knowledge or consent was sought for this religious indoctrination, during school hours, from public school teachers.
That makes me every bit as angry as all the stories I’ve heard about public school teachers helping kids socially transition at school and keeping it a secret — keeping any secrets — from parents. Any adult taking any unrelated child into a closet for any reason is making that child more vulnerable to predators, even if the adult is not a predator and their intentions are not malign in any given instance. No matter how well-intentioned the teacher, taking those kids into a closet to pray with them was entirely inappropriate.
If you disagree, just imagine that it was your kid—but instead of a prayer closet it was a dharma closet, where the teacher took your six-year-old to instruct her on the concept of no-self. Or a prayer corner with a rug facing Mecca, where the teacher took your child to instruct him that faith in Mohammed, the true prophet of Allah, would help him overcome his problem.
Absolutely not okay, and yet when my friend complained to the principal of the school, the response was essentially to wonder what was so wrong with her that she didn’t want her child to receive this loving, prayerful attention from public school teachers. Teachers, she was told, need to take every opportunity to help children receive God’s intervention.
Trade-offs Are Universal
Of course, everything has its good and bad points, including the various regions of our country. One of the most valuable and life-enhancing freedoms we enjoy as Americans is the freedom to choose where we live.
I love New England now. I love the four seasons, the deep American history, and the charming aesthetics. I love the introversion and standoffishness, even while I miss Southern courtesy. And thunderstorms.
Maybe I will go back for a visit one of these days.
And maybe I won’t.
What I’m Working On
Because I enjoyed flexing my snark muscles on Jill Biden’s dissertation in this very successful post, I’m now giving the same treatment to Michelle Obama’s thesis from her undergraduate degree, in sociology, at Princeton. The title of her paper is Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community. It will be published like the Biden dissertation—a significant portion available for everyone, the rest behind the paywall. I’m enjoying these enough that I’ll be taking requests for the thesis or dissertation I should do next after that one. I made a special deal on annual subscriptions for anyone who wants to convert to a paid sub so they can read these.
I’m also working on something (that I won’t paywall) about the different types of ways that people handle their trolls, haters, well-meaning-but-annoying commenters, and other types of social media interaction.
Three Things Worth Your Time
Tulsi Gabbard was on Megyn Kelly discussing Biden’s speech to NATO yesterday. I make no claims to any deep level of understanding of these issues, so I’m not saying I think she was right about everything. But she made more sense to me than anything else I’ve heard about the issues she and Kelly discussed.
I included those repeated caveats because I know that I don’t know nearly enough about foreign policy. One reason why I enjoy
‘s ongoing history series so much is that he’s been reading and studying history all his life. He has a wide perspective and is both a gifted writer and teacher, so his posts are very helpful. I also know him well enough to know (we’re friends offline) that he’s not writing from any agenda beyond enjoying helping other people find context and understanding. Lack of some deeper agenda is a very difficult thing to be certain of without personal knowledge of an author, and I’m grateful I have that in Dan’s case.I’ve worked at remedying my deficits in this area some, but they kept stalling out because I’d read something and realize I needed more context, and that produced three or four more areas I needed to read, and often I needed context to understand the context. History is not like math, who knew? It’s not something linear where you can build up your knowledge in a careful, logical way, one methodical step at a time. Dan’s series is helpful and enjoyable to me and may be to you, too.
I recently watched the entire four season run of a show called Mr. Robot. It is not — I repeat, it is absolutely not — for kids. If you have trauma issues of any kind, you should choose with great care both when you start it and when you watch each episode. It has repeated elements that you may find triggering throughout, often many in the same episode. Again, if you have a trauma history you should be very careful. The friend who recommended it to me has great wisdom and gave me enough of a warning that I chose to delay watching it until a time of year when there was a lot of daylight and I could be outside a lot, as that helps me process things that are heavy or intense. I also sometimes waited an extra day or two before watching the next episode, as it brought up things I needed to process.
Having said all that — the show gets so much right about trauma and how it affects people that watching it was a profoundly helpful experience to me. I felt understood and affirmed in a way that I had never felt before over an extended period. Individual episodes of individual shows had sometimes gotten things right — Nog’s PTSD in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 is well handled, as is B’Elanna’s self-harm in Star Trek: Voyager. (I wrote about the latter here.) But this was an entire series that gets everything right, and the overall story is engrossing, interesting, and very well written and acted.
Short Personal Update
I didn’t get the job I most wanted, but I have dozens of other applications out and many processes at various stages. (I’m looking for a new job for a variety of good reasons as discussed here.) Your continued prayers, good wishes, etc., and any leads are appreciated. What sort of job am I looking for? I’m a senior data scientist with excellent skills in mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, data visualization, Python, and particularly helping normies understand math. Stakeholders almost always accept my recommendations when I present them, because I’ve got a knack for helping them understand the math that the recommendations are based on. Looking for any remote position using my skills. (Open to periodic travel to headquarters, but for now I still need to be remote—being remote keeps me as efficient and effective as possible since control over my environment allows me to keep my PTSD from being an issue. As well, I’m ideally set up at home with excellent technology to handle all issues related to being deaf, and my therapist and the rest of my support system here is not mobile or replaceable. Relocating is an option in a couple more years, just not yet.)
Thank you in advance for your prayers, good wishes, and any leads!
I would only leave the South to go west to the Rockies, and probably move back after the first winter. 😂
Interesting points for certain. Since I have only lived in Texas, which is not really the South, I can’t really comment on most of your writing except that, just like you and Robert Heinlein, I deeply approve of formal courtesies.
Nice artwork.
Sorry about the job quest so far, but you already have learned the most important lesson: Never Give Up.