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While rightwing rabidity spreads beyond Dixie, how long would the GOP anti-governance league endure without true believers below the Mason-Dixon line? Of course, southern Democrats stand complicit with the radical right, as when condoning the triumphant “drill, baby, drill” mantra (deep-water drilling, fracking and the XL Pipeline), maligning Obamacare, tolerating racism, or ignoring global warming.
Evidence Outrages Wishful Thinking
What triggers my focus today is not South-bashing but a compelling summary entitled These 9 Maps Should Absolutely Outrage Southerners. For once, Huffington Post understates: these maps should outrage America. What the graphics dramatize is the startling consistency of southern backwardness, qualifying as America’s third-world. And if Creationist buffoonery thrives, a stunted region will “secede” intellectually from the modern world, along with scientific skill-sets that assure jobs, higher pay, and economic mobility. Too many states, not only southern ones, wholly distort education to close rather than expand young minds, leaving the rest of us to cover for the “undereducated numbskulls” at large.
Oddly enough, this vaunted land of plenty is anything but. Not only is Dixie our most impoverished region, with minimum minimum wages, and the least economic mobility, it has less affordable medical coverage, the most obesity, the highest teen births, and the highest cigarette usage. Per Wikipedia, the South has lower percentages of high school and college graduates, lower housing values, and lower household incomes. Because southern life expectancy is lower and death rates higher nationally than for all racial groups, one appreciates the century of black migration north. The South, however, boasts lower taxes, less union solidarity, and much more lax business and mining regulations.
A final, unexpected zinger for those who want to go back to Dixie: the South qualifies as our least€ť happy region. That conclusion follows Gallup's “€ťState of American Well-Being” survey, €ť which assesses emotional health, physical health, healthy behaviors, life evaluation, work environment and access to basics, like food, water and shelter. Less unexpected but equally disturbing is a most telling measure for cultural integrity: the eye-popping southern incarceration numbers. High national incarceration rates (led by Louisiana’s jaw-dropping 1600 inmates per 100K residents) plague southern states (9 of the top 10). In contrast, that hotbed of crime called New Jersey jails fewer than 300 inmates per 100K. Packed prisons may answer to hard-hearted southern cops, or unforgiving prosecutors, perhaps Southern comfort grows more “criminal types”. But since racial minorities fill up southern prisons, the convicted not only lack work and life opportunities but the wherewithal to hire top legal eagles.
Circling the Bible-belt
And more, for nothing bespeaks Southern defiance of modernity like its direct geographic overlap with the fundamentalist Bible-belt. Instead of many minds, cultures, and books, Bible-thumpers glorify one man-made, heavy-edited scripture not simply as the absolute guide to morality but absolute dictates of an invisible deity. Oy vey. Curiously, ancestors of the African cargo forced into bondage have transcended religious tunnel vision with far more grace. Ancestors of slavery outgrew their abuse, demonstrably more tolerant and compassionate today than those still look for justification of bias from that Old-time religion.
Listen to Rick Perry’s rumbles of justified insurgencies by victimized whites, or Rand Paul’s defiance of majority government, or Ted Cruz rebellious disruption. Or the Kentucky Baptist minister, Matt Singleton, with his peculiar take on education: Outsiders are telling public school families that we must follow the rich man’s elitist religion of evolution, that we no longer have what the Kentucky Constitution says is the right to worship almighty God. Instead, this fascist method teaches that our children are the property of the state.
Ah, the painful irony of reversal: were not all black children for centuries the unequivocal property of the rich elite that scorned non-white human rights? Now that’s systemic fascism. Thus salaried "leaders" insult our intelligence by hallucinating their children are property of a fascist€ť state that simply values enlightenment. Do pious dimwits get the spirit and letter of their own exalted holy book?
Let’s end with revealing research that offers hope for the South while correcting propagandists who link prosperity with the Protestant Ethnic. Check out Atheism Linked to Economic Innovation, with the startling subtitle: Two economists find an association between the percentage of non-believers in a state and the most productive sort of entrepreneurial activity. Time to replace the Protestant with the “Skeptics Ethic”.€ť
Trumping the Old-School Mime
Lookyhere: the percentage of a state’s residents self-described as Christians is “robustly correlated” with a lower score in productive entrepreneurship. Interestingly, say economists, the percent of the population that is atheist/agnostic is positively related to a state’s productive entrepreneurship score. €ť Apparently, religion imposes opportunity costs on time and resources otherwise devoted toward productive entrepreneurship, thus creating psychic costs to pursuing worldly gains.
That ties in nicely with what needs to be done. If productivity in this world ultimately levels the playing field, providing means and money for a healthy, humane nation, with improved medical care, job training, and emergency disaster support, I say reconsider religious and cultural biases. Pundits left and right bemoan the decline of America but what if modifying backward belief systems, like those revered in the South, could reverse the descent. After all, did not the 19th Century advance by rejecting the slave culture based on racial discrimination? Did not the 20th Century go one step further, rejecting public and legalized discrimination, confirming that separate is not only unequal but wrong. It’ s not regional or national redemption yet but it’s a direction.
Thus, I don’ t resent funneling taxes collected elsewhere to our neediest region (if under federal, not state oversight). No doubt, we should do more. As well-meaning missionaries bring civilization to the backward, the American majority should look upon the South not as a hotbed of extremism, or tantrum-throwing secessionists, but a great opportunity to offset inherited downsides. Already, Dixie demographics are changing, young southerners are abandoning fundamentalism, and new, darker-skinned neighbors with Hispanic names are moving in (along with older, liberal northerners). What if the South changes in the next century as much as it has in the last?
A healthier, better educated, less fundamentalist South lifts all boats, with the prospect of healing, not worsening the sectional divisiveness that drives so much rightwing demagoguery. If in fact we are only as strong as our weakest link, time to focus on that link, and consider how to help break outmoded, entrenched rusty southern chains. That means recognizing the South is different, even wayward, but capable of change. If cultural evolution is our guide, then today’s pitched battle between modernism and fundamentalism will eventually honor progress and greater enlightenment. Now that’s a Noble Cause a wise majority can get behind.
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