I want to talk frankly about the south hate here

[jsmirman]

7. First of all, you sound awesome

and I can't thank you enough for what you do for the critters. If only - if *only* - there were more people like you on this Earth.

There's no question that good people down South need more support rather than less support - I always found it fascinating to talk to the girls starting an animal advocacy chapter at their school in South Carolina, where they faced an even different climate from what we were used to here in the mid-Atlantic.

I almost chose to go to law school in Alabama to try to take on this sort of fight.

For one - please help us out in some of these threads to help people around here to see that at a progressive website, it is terribly sad when people who love animals and people who love the environment are viewed as the enemy, or as easily discarded collateral.

For two - please help those of us who might get our views denigrated/dismissed because we come from a place like New York, where many seem to imagine we would simply die if we ever stepped foot outside our bubble of pollution and concrete. Some of us, you know, have traveled extensively (and not glamorously), and we get very tired of being treated as though we are some lesser species.

In return, I will continue to do what I have been doing, which is to say that region bashing is counterproductive bullshit and to tell people to knock it off wherever I see it pop up.

I will say that Mississippi gets a special place and I may be unable to restrain a little chuckle when Mississippi does something ass-backward or ridiculous, which comes from Mississippi being a pretty unique place in a region of unique places, from the hilarious arguments between two of my best friends in college (from Mississippi and Arkansas, respectively) about whose state sucked worse and was actually the single shittiest state, and from my unusual familiarity with Mississippi, as I studied it exhaustively for seven years and eventually wrote my college thesis about that state. And still can name most of the pre-1865 counties.