Naughty Baptist

So, I make jokes about "What is happening to the South" about not being able to buy real grits, or find butter beans in the grocery store.

But, in all seriousness, when the hell did so many white, Southern men become bootlickers?^[1]

I'm not talking about just being racist - I'm well aware of that history. I mean the idea that cops can do no wrong.

I remember a family doing fireworks for some event for our church youth group. At the time fireworks like that were illegal in Georgia. Cops came out, asked the guy for ID, he said "no get off my land." At a Southern Baptist Church event.

Miners shooting at scabs. Rent strikes. Sharecroppers fighting land owners. On and on.

But now? I literally just read someone comment "If ICE arrested them they're not here legally." Seriously?

Far be it from me to put forward "The Dukes of Hazzard" as quality role models. But they were just good ol boys, never meaning no harm.

"Been in trouble with the law since the day they was born..."

"Someday the mountain might get 'em, but the law never will."

Yes, I know, they had a traitor's flag on their damn "General Lee" car, but the cops were lazy, corrupt, laughable, and not to be bothered with.

Uncle Jessie wasn't no damn lickspittle looking to rat out the Duke Boys.

Hank Williams, Sr. sang how "I got a shotgun, a rifle, and a 4-wheel drive, and a country boy can survive." His friend was killed by a mugger, so he wants to shoot him with his "old .45."

Grow our own food, make our own wine, even have our own tobacco. "And we can skin a buck; we can run a trotline."^[2]

Yes, macho - again, not holding it as an ideal. Just, WTF happened?

Some time after my dad died, my mom was telling me that she wasn't even sure if my dad's rifle was loaded. I went to the house, got it out of the case, confirmed it was unloaded. I knew it would be - Dad never would have put it away loaded. But best to be safe.

I remember mom saying, "I didn't know you knew how to check it." Yeah, Mom, I learned as a kid. I grew up around guns, I know how to safely handle them. It was just part of life, so natural to us my mother didn't even see it.

Same as cleaning a fish. Dad never really hunted as an adult, so I never did any of that, either. But I can build a house, quite literally.

I was taught to work hard, and be a good person, and that Southerners take care of their own. You help people who need help.

And cops... well, I wasn't taught to exactly avoid them, but neither was I told they were necessarily heroes, either.

So yes, it's sad and a bit sickening to me. People so far removed from their own heritage, from their own history, and from the experiences of our ancestors that they just bow down to billionaires and turn own their own.

If you had told me in my childhood that, one day, most Southern men would worship a rich man from New York, I would have laughed.