Sam’s Ministrations on Life

… or at least that is what the fine people of Alabama believe. I have just spent two days in the heart of the deep south… and I mean deep. Let’s just say I knew when I had gone past the point of no return… it would be around the time a mud-splashed, rust-stained pick-up with a gun rack and a stars and bars flag went flying past me. Let’s just say I crouched a little lower in my plastic Saturn and hoped that no one would realize where Wellesley was. I exit the highway and am driving down a rode hoping I don’t blow a flat, or break down because I would have sworn I just heard a banjo, and I’m sure some fella in overalls would come from the nearest double-wide, drag me into the wilderness to a shed where he would pet my hair like Lennie from of Mice and Men and then use me for breeding and making the family bigger cause they is thinkin the whole doin your sister was slowly making them stupider. On that subject the people we met with believed that their school system was not so bad… they had gotten a D on the quality of their school compared to other schools in the state… mind you bama has one of the worst school systems in the country… so let’s imagine just how bad this is. All they really wanted to make their lives complete and perfect was a fancy restaurant… like a TGIFridays, or a Red Lobster… you know some fancy place to bring a date where you can sit down and don’t get served via a tray. Their number one sport is “mudding”… and they have large areas where they go and race their trucks and ATVs. Apparently it is very difficult to keep a workforce because people just don’t show up. To even get people to come in on Monday you have to promise them gift cards and fruit baskets. Man, why am I even bothering coming into work? So then in several of our meetings the conversation turned to why it was that these people were so lazy. It was decided that it was generational and that all the people b/w 20 and 30 were inherently lazy. This would be the inevitable point when everyone would turn to me and ask me why it was that my generation was so lazy. How does one answer this? After explaining that I didn’t really group myself with the above I suggested that maybe it was b/c people my age know they have options for jobs, and there will always be another one, and that no one stays in a job longer than 4 years anymore. This then led into the typical walking to school barefoot, uphill anecdote… but I acutally believe them in this case. We next moved to the discussion of the “minorities”, or “those people”, or the “poor folks”. Apparently I can be happy though because although my age group might be lazy, “those spanish folks” are really hard workers b/c they are all immigrants and here illegally. If we weren’t referencing the hispanics we were talking about ‘the blacks’. I heard two things that I must pass on. One was a positive reference to what “good hard workers those ‘clean’ blacks are”… and then reference to a black ball player who shared a last name with one of the stakeholders… he mused whether or not his family might have owned the players family as slaves once. I am also fairly certain that a murder took place in my hotel room at the holiday inn express as there was a suspect large red stain on one of the boxsprings and fairly large drops on the other boxspring. Whoever it was bled a lot, and you would think they would want to clean it up a bit, at least bleach it so it wasn’t red… but no, why bother. So let’s just say I went out to my car to grab one of my barn sweatshirts to cover my pillow with… because I would choose sleeping with the smell of horses over the suspect pillows. Anyways, let’s just say that it was experience… one I hope not to repeat too soon, or all that often… as a simple girl from the Northeast I am not at all accustomed to the wild ways of the hinterlands.

… and next onto Kentucky for a week at Fort Campbell.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.