vol. 4 issue 14
Greetings,
Earlier this week, just as the Supreme Court handed down yet another divisive reversal of law, I was accused of being an East Coast elite. In the South where I am visiting currently, them’s fightin’ words. The accusation stung because it’s not true, even if my accuser made it seem so automatic, so certain a fact. The venom with which it was said created a frisson of fear in me.
Here’s the fuller picture: I was born in the South, and I can tell you I’d much ‘ruther have been the barefoot little briar who spent her days fishing before I got packed up 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.
Ironically, it seems that in the end, being a little yokel wouldn’t have mattered much anyhow. 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.
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. To that end, I fear we’re headed for trouble, seeing as there seems to be a general acceptance of, if not entitlement, to attack people we likely have more in common with than not.
It makes me wonder, who is profiting off this hate and anger?
Follow the money: who are the messengers of specialness, the wizards of whipping you into a frenzy? Whether it’s by painting us in flat, 2-D renderings as either East Coast Elites or Southern hayseeds, someone is appealing to a sense of us either being better than or victimized by the other. Why?
All I know is that anymore, it’s easy to feel like that little girl who was bullied out of her native tongue. But that little girl me doesn’t care if she’s Southern or Eastern, or Northern, or Northeastern by way of Southern. That child me just wants to know she’s safe from harm, not hated because someone is profiting off turning her into a villain or a victim.
The adult me just wants to be an American primarily, and a Southerner, Northerner, East Coaster incidentally. Seeing through the rouse of division to the other side, none of us is special, but all of us matter. Who profits off the obfuscation of that? It’s worth asking every time we might feel the need to hate the “other”.
Peace,
Whitney
Who profits off you hating me?
As a California surfer who moved from Australia to a New England liberal arts college and then an Ivy League grad school, I know exactly how you feel. In the end, I owned it and reveled in it. Now I live in the South and when someone here calls me a Yankee, I tell them, "Look at map, Southern California is further south than North Carolina." Freud's narcissism of small differences is alive and well.
Hi! Fellow Substacker here.