Wow Witz, you clearly hate where you live and that's a pity. But you make the entire south sound like barefoot, bucktoothed, religious zealots who like nothing more than a good lynching. I assure you, the places I've been have been perfectly lovely spots to spend a week or two and I can't imagine why a few months would not be the same. My family and friends who live in Arkansas, Florida and North Carolina all love their homes.
SWOT, if you like the ocean, the Gulf coast is lovely. Arkansas has some of the prettiest scenery I've seen...as do the Smoky Mountains in TN and KY. Wyoming is also quite nice - Montana is nicer.
Heck, if you can afford it, visit all 50 of them!
Lil, last year I moved to the bigger city and really like my home. Unfortunately for us that's not where we first lived, and it's
not where the RV parks are. I'll thank you to keep your words out of my mouth, because they don't even belong there. I know what I know, and it's clearly different than what you have seen in your part of the world.
I
have had you on my ignore list for several years because clearly you and I don't see eye to eye. Unfortunately when other people quote you making making comments about me, I can still see that, and couldn't help but see what all the fuss was about.
I know that in the way I was brought up, when every Tuesday afternoon I see four guys with shotguns in a pickup truck with a 3 foot by 5 foot Confederate Flag flying off the back delivering a White Supremacy newsletter to every driveway, they aren't just "proud of their Southern heritage".Perhaps that's different where you grew up.
When I sit at the Rotary meeting and listen to a speech advocating the elimination of food stamps because "of the Cadillacs driven by women - let's face it we all know I mean black women - picking up their food stamps when they clearly don't need it" when I know that there hasn't been any such thing as "picking up foodstamps" for decades, I know that their motives are less than altruistic.
When I get 5 minutes out of town and see literally
miles of trailer parks (not RV parks) full of 40 year old single wides with plywood instead of windows and three or four children dressed only in a diaper playing in the what can only in theory be called a front yard because actually it's a fenced in mudhole full of old cars and broken toys, I don't think that those people are have actually had the opportunities I have had.
When I meet someone and tell them I'm from Oregon, and 2 minutes later he tells me he needs to leave the table because he "can't stand the liberal stench", I think he's a jerk. But when he proceeds to call across the road to me for the next two years "Hey Bob, (or Joe, or Tom, or whoever he's with that day) see that woman over there? She's from Ohreegone. I can smell the liberal stench from here! Yuckity yuck yuck yuck." I think he's a jerk and that all of the people who would let someone scream that type of BS at a woman on the street have issues with politeness.
We've run into the same thing in every small town we've visited between here and Atlanta and down through Soutch Carolina & Florida. I don't know why you don't see it. but I find it repulsive that someone would try to excuse flying a confederate flag as pride in heritage (I say that as a great grand-neice of General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson), and that it's reasonable to fly it in defiance of people who might be offended by it in the days and weeks after a racist massacre at a black church.
And when I've met with and spoken with my friends from NC and SC about how little I understood about what it would be like in a small town 5 miles outside of the biggest city in NC, they admitted that they didn't tell me because "it's just the way it is and you were already on your way. But you'd best be careful who you speak your mind to."
Forgive me if I don't feel as though that as an outsider I - or any outsider that I've spoken to - am treated with "southern hospitality." Anything but. But don't call me a liar.
If I offend you, I suggest you ignore me back, as I intend to go back to doing to you. You and I are very different people, and that's as much as I can do to not say how offended I am by what you say, because I know that you care as little about how offended I am by you as I do about how offended you are by me. In the meantime, keep your opinions yourself, because I am
not at all like you and you don't have a clue what goes on in my head, what I've seen, or what motivates me. Nobody calls me a liar or tries to make me look hateful without hearing back about it.