Growing Up Sideways In The Straight And Narrow South [View all]

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Growing Up Sideways In The Straight and Narrow South

Growing up in the South can be an odd and peculiar experience. You don't realize how odd until you venture into other places and meet other people. When you are kids, you may think everybody has the same experiences. Hell, I know adults who believe that.

Imagine my shock when I found out that people didn't know all the battles of 'The Late Unpleasantness' in order and details of the generals’ lives. Didn't everybody have a picture of General Robert E. Lee hanging with all the family pictures. We called him Uncle Bobby for years.

Then there was CHURCH. We had to go to church no matter where we were. For as long as I can remember, I never liked church or any of it's auxiliary activities. I didn't want to be wearing a dress and listening to somebody wail about going to hell if I wasn't good. I figured my place in the Netherworld had been booked for a long time. There wasn't anyway around that. I didn't worry about the afterlife and decided to get my money's worth if I was spending eternity in the tropics.

I wasn't the typical Southern child to say the least. There was a five of us who spent a lot of time growing up together, and none of us conformed to the local norms. We got a good dose of church and local mores, but we never quite stayed in line or kept the right step. Our parents tried, but they wondered if we were changelings.

There were two major factors that moved us away from those norms when we were little. First of all, there was an independent streak in the family. We had a few rebellious role models. The second thing that lead us further astray was 'Mad' magazine. There was little or no access to a variety of views growing up. Rocky and Bullwinkle were great teevee models. Mr. Bunny Rabbit on the Captain Kangaroo was a budding rebel. Beyond that, we were on our on.

Our parents did vary from many in that they bought comic books for us, and they assumed that 'Mad' was just a larger type. Little did they know that it was a veritable gold mine for wayward youths. We learned Phd level snark and mockery from 'Mad'. Nothing was sacred, and that was fine with us. That magazine looked at the world sideways, and we adjusted our sight lines accordingly. They stayed that way.

The five of us were a tribe of independents within a culture of lockstep belief. As soon as we got out from under our parents, we never set foot in church again. We didn't openly rebel earlier against going because it wasn't worth the hassle. We went and listened to the rhetoric and compared it to reality. That honed our sharp view of religion. Our attitude toward it is quite jaundiced.

It is the Bible Belt, but a belt can only support so much.