Yeah, I know we're as red as red can be. I know we're at the bottom in every category, from education to industry to culture to civil rights. In this largely democratic area, we feel very abandoned by the rest of the country. Our democratic representative in Congress is our great hope, and our two GOP senators our terrible sorrow. What joy there will be when Trent Lott retires! Our state legislature, unfortunately, undermines us at every turn, and now they are attempting yet another egregious assault, while the world looks on and does nothing.
Our state legislature is attempting to make Mississippi the first state in quite a long time to have
not one single abortion clinic in the entire state.
Mcjoan wrote a story that hit on this on December 28th, and another was done on the feminist blog
Women's Autonomy and Sexual Sovereignty Movements. Both refer to an excellent
Frontline program that aired on November 8th of 2005. Anti-choice individuals and groups such as Terri Herring and her
organization are well placed to lobby for this type of legislation, in a state in which even the Dems consider themselves a "party of life".
This in a state in which we rebuild casinos instead of schools, churches before hospitals. This in a state in which we are willing to execute the oldest convict ever, and where an apparently innocent man languishes on death row. This in a state with the worst racism, classism, infant mortality, etc.; you name it, we got in spades. As an example, when I moved to our neighborhood here (a place we chose for proximity to my husband's job, after having an hour and a half commute in the Dallas area), I was asked to sign a membership agreement for use of the community marina. We were informed in no uncertain terms that the purpose of this agreement was to "keep the blacks out". 90% of the population of this town is non-white. The poverty rate here is outrageous, and unemployment is unbelievable. At anytime of the day or night in the small town where I live, you can find people ambling down sidewalks, clustered on corners. Some clutch bottles, some push strollers; many just turn their faces to the wall. The number of these seemingly aimless wanderers has increased dramatically since Katrina. At the public school in this town, almost all (possibly 100%) of the students are black, and most live below the poverty line. Average ACT scores are 14. Most well-to-do (read "white") people either home school or send their children to private school. There are no secular private schools or day care options. Gotta love the south.
No wonder Mississippi has stood for so long as a belwether for the right - the left has washed their hands of us. It seems as if Dems have given up on the south as a whole. This is ridiculous, and if you would get out and talk to some folks down here, you'd know it. I grew up in Louisiana, and I will always consider myself a southern girl. I know so many good people, so many liberals. We're down here, folks. We aren't as scattered as you think. We want to help, really we do. We buy the signs and the T-shirts - we blog when we can get access. We stay as up on the news as we possibly can, and we tell each other what we've missed.
Most of what we've missed is you guys. When Howard Dean came to Jackson, he was surprised at the crowd. Not me. Our problem is a lack of leadership, a lack of organization, not a lack of willingness. I the last year, I've fired off hundreds of LTEs, notes and emails to senators, congressmen, mayors. I'm not the only one. I've written NARAL and NOW and Planned Parenthood - none of them have an active chapter in this state, or at least, no one has responded to my repeated pleas for help, or at least information. I have sought for activist groups of every stripe - the ones I have found are disorganized at best, and many vanished after Katrina. At least the Feminist Majority Foundation took my phone number and address and offered to put me in touch with other people wishing to organize as they called. I intend to phone NAF tomorrow to see what they have to say about what they've got going on down here.
Come ON people, show us some LOVE! We need you! We love you! We'll feed you, we'll sing for you, we'll take you out to shake your booty. Come in the spring and we'll strew flowers for you. It makes me cry when I hear and read about people who say they hate the south. That isn't us. Alot of us have just been given up on, and don't know any better. A lot of us do know better, but don't have the tools or know-how to get our message out. I see people all the time say on blogs, "Move to a Blue State." Honey, moving to a blue state isn't an option for those of us who can't afford to scratch out a living in Mississippi.
If anybody knows any active groups in Mississippi that I haven't found, let me know. I want to do something so badly, but I just don't know how. And if anyone has some extra time on their hands and no cause to devote it to, well, I can think of a few. If you've got money burning a hole in your pocket, there's plenty of Katrina victims still walking the backroads here, trying to figure out what happens next. And there's plenty of women who want to preserve the option of deciding whether or not to bring another child along to suffer in this storm and sorrow-stricken environment.
Oh, and the dems ought to pay a bit more attention to Baker in La-06, too. The population of that area more than doubled after Katrina, just like every other place south of I-20, and there's no telling what that did to the area demographic there. I'm guessing, since it's mostly people who relocated from NO, everything's leaning a little more to the left, and his seat may well be up for grabs, if anyone tries. But I s'pose we'll just write that off as a loss, like everything else down here.