There are many rules we live by in the South that I don’t remember ever being taught. I’ve just known my whole life that they were so. Stand up when a lady enters the room. Shake a man’s hand when you meet him. And under no circumstances do you scratch a lottery ticket with a penny. I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that they ain’t antiquated and unnecessary in a modern world, but I will tell you I’ve never seen someone come away a winner on a Jumbo Bucks when they didn’t use at least a dime. Could be Abraham Lincoln gettin’ one last dig in. Heck, I don’t know. I sure wouldn’t blame him.
Southerners are big on values — values that often don’t make a lick of sense in the times in which we live. But if you’ve spent any amount of time down here, you know that “that’s just the way it’s always been” is the end of any polite debate you’d attempt to have on such a subject. If you go to a funeral home with your shirt untucked, someone’s Aunt (let’s call her Tookie; that’s a fun Southern name) will flick you behind the ear with the power of a shotgun blast and drag you (by that same ear) to the bathroom so you can correct this heinous faux pas.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Aunt Tookie could explain in great detail, limb by limb, the family tree of every character on “The Bold and The Beautiful,” “General Hospital” and (my Granny Bain’s favorite) “The Young And The Restless,” but I’d bet you the Moon Pie warming up on my dashboard that if you asked her why we tuck our shirts in, she’d stare at you so dumbfounded she’d have to readjust her teeth before finally saying, “that’s just the way it’s always been!”
Seriously, why? Is it because we have to show off our Dale Earnhardt belt buckles? Is it cause we think it makes us look slimmer? (I assure you, for many of us, it does not. Tucking in my shirt makes my belly look like I’m auditioning to play a drunken auctioneer on “Green Acres.”) Also, don’t you reckon the person who made that shirt wants all of it to be seen? Granted I’m sure she’s got bigger issues, what with her being 4 years old and working in a sweatshop somewhere near Bangladesh, but still.
And please, for the love of God, don’t get me started on the whole “take your hat off when you’re indoors” nonsense. I started going bald when I was 19 years old, and I had no intention of sporting a comb-over to dinner with my girlfriend’s family no matter how much her old-fashioned daddy insisted. We were in a Chili’s, for goodness sake!
Another rule I was taught when I was a kid was that you should treat people the way you wanna be treated. There’s a verse in the Bible that says something similar, but you don’t have to starch a collared shirt every Sunday morning to figure out you shouldn’t be mean. Ironically, some people seem to think that by going to a building once a week they can do and act as they please and present themselves as better than those of us who stay home and watch football instead.
It seems often that the values certain people care about so much are the superficial ones that you can employ to disguise your true self. Because the same people who shudder at four-letter words will call you an abomination before God because you don’t pray to the same one they do. The folks who think you are rude for not saying “yessir” and “no ma’am” will scream “BUILD THE WALL” to a group of brown-skinned fellers whom they’ve never met before. A group of people who, for all they know, could’ve been born and raised in Alabama. And the worst of it is that their children will scream it in my wife’s second grade classroom, even though, as Jesus would say, “forgive them, father, for they know not what they do.”
Unfortunately, those are the values that will rub off on your children. Because that type of hate and wickedness is not inherent; it is taught.
I think some of us need to ask ourselves which values actually matter and which are just theater. I’m not a religious man, but even I know it’s called the Golden Rule, not the Golden Suggestion.
But sure, keep on banning books you disagree with while holding the Constitution in your other hand. Keep picking and choosing which parts of these “holy texts” you want to invoke as gospel and which ones you wanna ignore cause they unfortunately line up with policies that will have you pay more in taxes.
Don’t worry, you’re still good people! Sure, you’ll tell someone to their face that they’ll burn in hell for loving who they love, but at least you won’t do it while wearing white after Labor Day.
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