Yeah, I was in grade school when the Dukes of Hazard was on. At the time, I felt very hard done by because we weren't allowed to see it at my house. My parents said it was because they didn't want us getting any dangerous ideas (this was after my brother accidentallu set my hair on fire while we testing out some "bombs" out in the woods we made my mixing chemicals from down in the basement. As you do. After seeing a promo of Dukes of Hazard where they blow up an outhouse with a bow and arrow. Yeah, we were 'those' children.
My parents were weirdly conservative. It wasn't religious for them, it was more tied community behavior. They kept to themselves and were avoidant of a lot of things. They kinda looked down on a lot of people, but they weren't snobs. Like, my dad was headhunted a lot as an engineer but he would never consider a job in a wet county. So, it was a shock to me to go to college and go to a grocery store and hit the beer aisle. By that point, I knew there were special stores that sold liquor and they had it at grocery stores too, but I never imagined it would be a whole aisle. Packed floor to ceiling. On both sides.
So anyway, what this has to do with the Dukes of Hazard is that growing up, I'd go off to school and all the kids are talking about Dukes of Hazard episode and how cool it was and I felt left out of the know and hard done by.
Because my parents never explicitly said why we weren't allowed to watch it. They couldn't. Couldn't risk one of us letting something slip that would jeopardize our safety.
Same thing with the drinking. There was an attempted lynching in Alabama last summer. Alcohol was involved. It almost always is. Bunch of men sitting up nursing their grievance and stewing about it. Women sometimes too.
I got in trouble at work for calling that situation what it was last summer. Not bad trouble, but you know, "a talkin' to". All the way over here in Arizona.
Because it made people uncomfortable. And it was another white woman, and also a busybody, who was made uncomfortable and complained.
I was grown before I came to understand the efforts my oarents made to keep us from that shit, and why the needle fails to move.
It wasn't enough from the families trying to raise just kids. Not anywhere near enough. It's self segregation. But these people will turn on "traitors" and they have institutional backing. So what can you do?
They found a mass grave behind the county jail in Jackson MS. I don't know all the specifics yet, but it's going to be ugly. It's being reported as an aside. Hundreds of bodies, that they're selling back to the families, upon request, for a proper burial. I don't know if filks aren't getting the ramifications here because it's being reported as an aside to another story, or just don't care. How could you tell?
