Tough Love for South Carolina

Oh South Carolina. You are my home, my heritage, my marrow, and very often my muse. You’ve given me so much over the years, and done so much to shape my character that no matter what I do or where I go from here, your deep and abiding lessons will always be with me, shaping most every thought and action.

Though ours has never been an ideal relationship, I still have never abandoned you in my heart. While it may be true that you’re a lot like an embarrassing alcoholic uncle, always turning up to say the most inappropriate things at the most inopportune times, I’ve stuck by you, because that’s what family does.

Recently though, you’ve started to alarm me a bit. Your formerly harmless eccentricities have started to look a lot more like paranoid schizophrenia. Because I love you and because I want you to become the state I’d always hoped you could be, I think it’s time that you and I had ourselves a little intervention.

Before you start thinking it though, I’m not doing this just because you embarrass me at times; I’m doing it because your behavior is hurting those of us who love you most.

As I alluded earlier, you’ve never exactly been the country’s most ideal citizen. Whether it was flying the Confederate battle flag over the State House dome for almost four decades after not-so-subtly raising it during the middle of the civil rights movement, or electing a former segregationist “Dixiecrat” Presidential candidate to eight consecutive terms as a U.S. Senator, you’ve never been the type to play nice with those other, more genteel states.

Your track record speaks for itself. You’re consistently ranked near the bottom in good things like K-12 education performance, college graduation rates, and per capita income, and you rank near the top in all the bad things like HIV/AIDS infection rates, domestic violence rates, violent crime rates, and premature birth rates. These things have been common knowledge for a long time, but because of your devil-may-care attitude and your unwillingness to deal with real-world problems, you’ve largely ignored them.

All those things I mentioned are bad, but over the years I’ve learned to let most of them go, to chalk them up to the historical quirkiness befitting the first state ever to secede from the United States. Besides, those things aren’t really the sorts of things people talk about. Even those notoriously rude Northeastern states know it’s not polite to make fun of your neighbor’s deficiencies.

What’s been happening lately though, is a different sort of thing altogether. The crazy that you used to keep mercifully hidden, the sort of stuff I always knew was there but had thought was comfortably buried underneath several layers of appropriate decorum, has recently been let loose. And as your crazy stampedes across the land like some sort of mad elephant, I’m left to wonder what we’re supposed to do with you, South Carolina.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, lately you’ve been giving me too much to handle all at once.

First, you gave me an ineffective, extremist governor who, it turns out, spent many of his days galavanting across the world on the state’s dime to have an affair with his Argentinian “soul-mate” and then compared himself to the biblical King David when trying to explain why he doesn’t have the decency to resign.

As if that weren’t enough, you turn right around and give me a senator intent on painting himself as the Duke of Wellington out to give President Obama his “Waterloo” by killing health care reform, the same man who once declared his support for banning openly gay teachers from teaching in public schools. South Carolina, your junior U.S. Senator is such a reactionary demagogue that he makes your senior senator—a pretty conservative guy by national standards—look like a red-flag-waving communist by comparison.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me though happened this past week, and predictably it involved one of your elected representatives.

This past Wednesday, during a televised speech to a joint session of Congress on health care reform, President Obama was openly and loudly heckled by someone in the audience. After saying that the proposed health care bill would not cover undocumented immigrants, someone shouted “you lie” at the President. Leaving aside the fact that President Obama was, in fact, correct in saying the bill will not cover undocumented immigrants, the real problem was actually shouting “you lie” at a sitting president during a speech to a joint session of Congress. For my part, I was sitting on my couch watching the speech, pleading with Providence to please let the person responsible for this incredibly disrespectful outburst be from somewhere, anywhere else besides here.

As you already know, South Carolina, the heckler was the Congressman from your 2nd District, Rep. Joe Wilson.

I wouldn’t mind the national embarrassment if it weren’t for the fact that when you do things like this you hurt what others are trying to do in their own individual communities within your borders. My hometown of Spartanburg is going to great lengths to modernize itself and attract new “creative class” residents who are fast becoming the cornerstone of economic progress in the new century. When I read things like your governor comparing himself to an Old Testament king, I start worrying what those “creative class” people think of us.

They don’t move to places they perceive as culturally backwards. If our state’s elected officials sound like reincarnations of John C. Calhoun then it’s pretty difficult to make an argument to those “creative class” workers that we’re a forward-thinking bunch. So those of us in places like Spartanburg who would love nothing better than to see our cities thrive are left fighting against a perception—perhaps unfair—that we’re all just as crazy as your elected officials are, South Carolina.

I’m not a hard guy to please. I know you’re never going to go completely clean and give up the crazy sauce, but I’m having this heart to heart with you hoping that maybe you’ll see that what you’re doing ultimately hurts you and those who care about you.

You’re better than the way you’ve been acting lately, and I’d like to see you pull yourself together a little bit. I need you to be more than the sum of your history for once. I need you to be my friend and partner for a change, instead of being the guy I’m always apologizing for. If you won’t do it for me, maybe you should think about doing it for yourself and your future. Pretty soon, there won’t be much room in America for your kind of regression anymore.

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.