Who profits off you hating me?

Be mad at them, not one another

vol. 4 issue 14

Photo: Andre Hunter.

Greetings,

Earlier this week, I got accused of being an East Coast elite. Yes, I am still down South where the skeeters are very happy to see me and don’t give one damn where I got my education.

But anyway, the accusation stung because it’s not true, even if my accuser made it seem so automatic, so certain a fact.

I can tell you I’d much ‘ruther have been the barefoot little briar who spent her days fishing, dodging gators, turning over rocks for crawdads, and generally fancying herself a little Southern US version of Mowgli, before I got packed up lock, stock, and barrel, and schlepped Northward where the y’alls were harassed out of me until I just gave in and started talking like a television news anchor from nowhere.

Today, though, I am wondering about that little hick I was who was displaced and reshaped into something that was deemed more desirable than what it was feared I might become if I kept on saying “ain’t” and “’ruther”. Seems nowadays saying “y’all” is cool, and Southy mouthiness is in the ascendent, making bank for reality TV producers, country music moguls, and Reese Witherspoon.

So, maybe being a little yokel wouldn’t have mattered much anyhow.

My heart is still hers, and it still beats for here, even if my tongue got trained away from it. And I don’t hate my fellow Southern Americans, any more than I think they’re justified in calling my fellow East Coast educated ones elitist or worse. (I do think Northerners are crap at making corn bread, but it’s not like that’s a crime.)

If anything, I love my country deeply but feel stupid and unable to come up with anything much insightful today on a day when folks up North and lots of other places, too, are hopping mad at the “yahoos” down here for being too dumb to get what’s obvious to any thinking person about a woman’s right to protect her body and control her destiny, about not arming every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to feel his macho bulging out of his pocket, about just letting people be whatever gender they want to be since it is a made up construct anyway.

I guess it all comes down to how one’s way of thinking and talking gets framed by whoever can profit off of shaping it to their need for power and control. I fear we’re headed for trouble, for carrying out mob rule against people we have more in common with than not.

Such an accusation against me was painful and angry – it assumed I thought I was better than others. But I am the other, because there is no other unless someone needs there to be.

Who is profiting off of the hate and anger of us?

Who wins when people can so automatically hate someone else for not agreeing with them? Who is putting into our heads what the “ideal” of anything is?

People are taught to hate. You might be born angry, but murderous for not being considered more special than another person? That’s someone else’s shame — or need for you to feel ashamed — being dumped on you.

Who profits from shaming you? From making you think that if you can’t prove you are in fact superior to others, you will be left out of having access to resources?

Follow the money: who are the messengers of specialness, the wizards of whipping you into a frenzy? Whether it’s by painting you in a flat, 2-D rendering as an East Coast Elitist or a Southern yokel, someone is appealing to your sense of either being better than or victimized by the other.

I leave you and y’all to it. I can’t figure nothin’ else to say.

All I know is that today, I just feel like a little girl who doesn’t care if she’s Southern or Eastern, or Northern, or Northeastern by way of Southern. The little girl me just wants to know she’s safe from harm, not hated because someone is profiting off of making her into a villain or a victim.

Peace,

Whitney