Published: November 11, 2006 11:56 pm      

Don’t get defensive about Yankee digs

I could not help laughing at the article airing the conflicting ideas on the question: “Who would want to live in Mississippi?” — aired and rebutted by the respective congressmen of New York and Mississippi.

I really plead with people to stop defending Mississippi to the Yankees, and denying their elitist put-downs of our state. If we do that, we might encourage more of them to move down here, sooner than they are likely to do, anyway, as soon as they can afford to do so.

The question “Who would want to live in Mississippi?” perhaps could be the source of one or more degree papers on that rather deep question. If anyone has a “pet” image of the “flavor” of Mississippi population divisions and quantities, it could be well to dispose of it. Whatever it is, it is likely to change, in a very short period of time.

I have traveled in substantial areas of the state, hardly, if at all, ever seeing anything but a traditional Afro-heritage face. It is possible to go into other areas, and feel that the state is becoming Vietnamese as fast as it can go.

I have strolled through a campus in a major South Mississippi university, and hardly saw anything but a Japanese-looking face. After visiting scores of fast-food and many motel offices, it is easy to presume that those occupations are fast-becoming East Indian or Pakistani, in flavor.

The number of East Indian and Phillipines-heritage physicians we have in the state certainly suggests some number of positive responses to, “Who would want to live in Mississippi?”

I have sat eating in a Wendy’s not that far from here, with the place mostly filled with current-national persons of Japanese identity, all speaking in that language.

There are areas, not that far from here, with very little to suggest that you are not walking around in the nation of Mexico. I have stood in lines, sometimes 30 or more feet long, at a Wal-Mart check-out, where every other person was carrying a sleeping bag to purchase, and never hearing a word of English spoken in that entire line.

At least SOMEBODY seems to be finding a positive answer to that rhetorical question: “Who would want to live in Mississippi?

It is hard not to wonder if the people who MOST “would want to live in Mississippi” are the original occupants themselves. An early thing taught in real estate school, was that nobody ever “owns” property (even national governments.) All we do is to hold it in some form of tenancy, for a period of time, followed by someone else, down through the course of history.

It is extremely interesting to me that the people who have lived here, in their own legends, since 600 A.D. and perhaps as suggested by carbon-dating of their artifacts, for thousands of years, before that, they seem to be doing pretty well “wanting to live in Mississippi.”

A bit of study into the dual aspect of their extraordinary ability to earn money, added to the privilege of adding new lands to tribal territory, it would not be a bit surprising, if a century from now, either all, or perhaps most of the state, once again, was back into tribal tenancy, at least for a time in history.

Northern put-downs of Mississippi are certainly nothing new, or surprising. I have always urged people not to deny these digs.

The congressman from New York is to be thanked and congratulated for saying “who would want to live in Mississippi? I am satisfied that most Yankees will move down here as soon as they can, anyway.

People are already pouring in here from every point of the compass. If all the Yankees moved down here at one time, we could hardly handle them all.



Bob Van Devender

Union, Mississippi