...and then a man rode through the lines bearing a white flag.

[DFW]

40. I go back home regularly

But downtown Atlanta and downtown Dallas are, alas, not representative of the south, even today. They are our shining beacons that we can present to the world, but they are not what that majority of us are. Otherwise, our governor would be named Bill White or Wendy Davis. Georgia would not be trying to put a gun in every hand if the place was like Atlanta. Go outside of Dallas and you run into the kind of people for which Tom DeLay gerrymandered Martin Frost out of a district to insert Ted Cruz. The enlightened among us are not the majority yet, far from it. Outside the centers of enlightenment, there is still a lot of darkness out there, I'm sorry to say.

I know WE don't sit on the veranda all day, but in the small and medium sized towns where the bright and the able go elsewhere to live and work, the old mentality DOES persist in far more pervasiveness than is comfortable. We can't improve it if we don't recognize it.