I fully appreciate the reality and value of regional culture. By culture, I mean the beliefs, customs, arts, behaviors, and “way of life” of a particular people. By regional I mean a particular place within an array of interdependent but dissimilar places. Think “knuckle” and “nose” and you’ve got it.
Knuckles are rough and tumble and distinctly unlike soft and pliable noses. But the region that knuckles occupy doesn’t work without connectivity to noses, and to all the systems and regions in between. We saw how Hurricane Harvey helped the Texas Congressional delegation, who voted against Hurricane Sandy relief in 2012, discover that knuckles and noses – Texas and New Jersey – have much in common. Let’s hope that their come to Jesus geography lesson lasts for a little while.
It might also help if these Texans, and all rural regions generally, knew that they won’t have to pay for Hurricane Harvey – just like they didn’t pay for Hurricane Sandy. That’s because blue state regions – the 500 counties that voted for Hillary Clinton vs. the 2,600 that voted for Donald Trump – pay most of the taxes in the United States, earn most of the money, account for two-thirds of all U.S. productivity, and rely less on welfare systems. If Texan Ted Cruz and his red state confederates got the smaller federal government they ask for, blue state residents would get tax cuts, and red state residents would get cuts in services.
Pesky facts aside, let’s celebrate our regional differences, and all that makes local culture inimitable and distinctive. Take pride in Southern Heritage if you’re a child of the South: bathe in the moonlight, smell the magnolia, read some Faulkner. If there’s whiskey, drink it, if rapture is imminent, rapture away, tote those guns, and by golly, go wrestle the devil. And go ahead, love your monuments, too.
But consider, please, putting up a few new monuments. Perhaps one dedicated to those Blue County – Hillary Clinton voting – Taxpayers? You know, the people who’ve subsidized “our way of life” for at least the last three-quarters of a century?
No? Okay. Let’s keep cutting off our nose to spite our face.