In response to?my Democratic colleagues on the coasts, in the urban enclaves, we have a problem. This problem is that the Democratic Party has abandoned the Dixie. My home is a joke to you. I live in South Louisiana. I know you folks think we are all inbred, drunken louts who go to church and screw our cousins. We are the ?flyover states?, the ?red state takers? and the ?Bible Belt?.
We seem to be one of the last groups that it is ok to openly stereotype and make fun of. That is fine. Really, we get the joke. We live it.
What I have a problem with is how the national Democratic party has decided to write off the whole South. There are lots of Democrats here. From educated progressives (the Clinton’s are from Arkansas, as some will remember, and Molly Ivins was from Texas), to the poor, the disenfranchised, and those who have been gerrymandered out of all relevance call the South home. Passionate Liberals who fight for the rights of everyone in states that may have as few as one or NO state wide Democrats or liberals in office have been finding themselves on their own more and more.
We have seen our social safety nets slashed, our educational systems ravaged (post Katrina, 90% of all New Orleans schools are now charters) and our states all but sold to energy, lumber, and mining interests. After Deepwater Horizon, Gov. Jindal has tried to go to bat for for their gross mishandling of one of the worst environmental disasters since Exxon Valdez. Actually, it is far worse. At least the captain of the Valdez was found guilty.
Drink your lattes, laugh about us down here in the South. Without us, you will continue to lose election after election, until the Repubicans have their pretty, shiny, libertarian Corporate and Theocratic paradise. We need you, as well. You see, we donate, we help the national candidates. We hold rallies, we do voter registration drives. We drive loads of people from churches on Sunday to vote, in those areas where the Republicans have not removed that option. You know, so the ?wrong sort? does not get a chance to vote.
In some ways, my urban, educated and oh so liberal colleagues, you are just as bad, just as classist, and just as racist as those Republicans you whine about constantly. We are not all poor white trash, we are not all fundamentalist nutjobs who support creationism. We need help down here in the South, not derision, not back handed political dealing, and most of all, we need SUPPORT. If you continue to abandon us, all you will have left are your little enclaves.
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