Counter-Currents
1,147 words
Smoke from chemical plant fire in Conyers, GA on Sunday, September 29. Image source X
I’ve lived in the Atlanta area for seventeen and a half years. That’s at least seventeen years too many. The first few weeks were OK, though. I’ve wanted and tried to leave for years. Now that my departure date looms less than two weeks away, I get the sense that Georgia is saying, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Or to paraphrase Nietzsche, “That which is leaving should also be pushed.”
I thought Portland was soggy, but Atlanta’s ceaselessly maddening rain is one of the many reasons I’ve yearned to vamoose. Portland averages a measly 36 inches a year compared to Atlanta’s 50. Portland’s precipitation tends to be misty and drizzly, but Atlanta’s ferocious downpours make you feel compelled to build an ark.
Dozens of tall pine trees surround my house, and after a few days of deluges, the red Southern dirt turns to mud soup. In the six years I’ve occupied this abode, three trees have fallen due to the rain’s pummeling. One tree crushed my back deck to splinters. Another mangled the fence. One fell with a loud thump right onto the front lawn. Another time a tornado sent a 12-foot branch flying like a projectile missile into our roof. I’ve developed a severe case of hard-rain anxiety to the point that I’ve spent thousands of dollars having trees removed merely to protect the only house I’ve ever bought from obliteration.
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Much of this year has been consumed with fixing up this shack for sale. A week ago, after the sales contract had been signed and it looked as if we’d finally be fleeing the coop, Hurricane Helene blew through our downscale lakeside estate. My wife grew up in New Orleans and is still rattled by Hurricane Katrina. She I cuddled tightly in bed last Thursday night, clenching our jaws and fearing that the rains would send a tree crashing through our roof, squashing the house sale and keeping us stuck here. Georgia’s shoddy infrastructure tends to cause hours-long electrical blackouts if someone sneezes too hard. Helene dumped 11 inches of rain over two days, which is a record for the Atlanta area ever since they began measuring such things around the time that Reconstruction ended.
But our house remained intact. Crisis averted.
On Sunday afternoon, a chemical plant fire in Conyers, GA sent apocalyptic-looking smoke clouds billowing over Interstate 20, forcing evacuations in the immediate area. The toxic disaster’s epicenter was precisely 11.0 miles from the front door of the house I’ve been trying to sell. “Fantastic,” I thought. “Just when we’d escaped total ruin with the hurricane, the whole area will be condemned and cordoned off as a Superfund cleanup site.”
By Monday morning, all seemed safe. But on Monday afternoon, my phone blared with a warning that read:
Public Safety Alert 1:40 PM
Georgia Emergency Management Agency Homeland Security Agency on behalf of the Environmental Protection Division local area emergency LOCAL AREA EMERGENCY due to ROCKDALE COUNTY BIOLAB FIRE. The EPA is MONITORING air quality for CHLORINE AND RELATED COMPOUNDS. Chemical levels are UNLIKELY TO CAUSE HARM TO MOST PEOPLE.
“UNLIKELY TO CAUSE HARM TO MOST PEOPLE.” I guess we’re breathing “mostly peaceful fumes.”
On Tuesday during a routine medical exam, a dipstick urinalysis showed “abnormal” levels of ketones in my pee. A quick and frantic phone search of my precise levels said it was five times over what was considered “life-threatening.” It said I might have already suffered irreversible organ damage. If I didn’t move fast, I could enter a coma and die. My attending physician—a black woman like nearly everyone in Georgia seems to be these days—did not dispute that I should probably flee to an emergency room.
The ER, which is the only barely efficient one I’ve visited during my overlong stint in Georgia, was abnormally overcrowded because other hospitals had been shut down due to the mostly peaceful chemical disaster. The place was jammed with fat, feral, wheezing, coughing mutants straight out of an A. Wyatt Mann cartoon.
It took four hours for doctors to see me, and it turns out that both me and my black female doctor had misread the results. My ketone levels were fine for a urine test, but they would have been deadly if found in my blood.
But being in that emergency room only hammered home the idea that by remaining in Georgia, I am living on stolen land—land that has been stolen from black people. When I first came here in 2007 and was renting a weekly motel, I felt as if I’d taken a wrong-way turn and somehow wound up in Nigeria. I’ve been drowning in the state’s ublaquity for nearly two decades.
This is a state that almost elected Stacey Abrams as governor a few years ago. It’s a state that ran Herschel Walker for the US Senate. Atlanta hasn’t had a non-black mayor in 50 years.
Out of all American states, Georgia ranks third for total number of blacks, behind only New York and Texas. It has the third-highest quotient of blacks, behind Mississippi and Louisiana.
When people think of “the South,” they typically think of Klansmen and lynchings. They hardly ever seem to think “the section of the country with, by far, the highest percentages of black people.”
As a natural-born Yankee, my initial impressions of Georgia came from redneck-scare movies such as Two Thousand Maniacs! (set in the fictional town of Pleasant Valley, Georgia) and Deliverance (filmed in the North Georgia mountains). Even 1992’s My Cousin Vinny reinforces the idea that if one were to innocently drive down into the Peach State, you’re likely to face much more danger from rural whites than from urban blacks.
But my whole time here, I’ve known two white people in Atlanta who were murdered by blacks. A third was attacked and received permanent brain damage after his black assailant smashed a chair over his head. And the week after Barack Obama was elected America’s first gay black president, a black male teen robbed my son’s mother at gunpoint in a supermarket parking lot in broad daylight.
Typically, this sort of fearless predation doesn’t come from the meek and oppressed. It’s the sort of territorialism displayed by primates who are saying, “We own this place.”
While readying my house for sale, I told a chubby white air-conditioner repairman that one of the reasons we were leaving Georgia was that it rained too much.
“Oh, I can never get enough rain,” he smiled.
“How about black people? Can you ever get enough of them?” I asked.
“Well, that’s another deal,” he laughed.
Maybe this is one of the many reasons that Georgia has never felt like home to me. Atlanta is the black Mecca, and since I’m neither black nor a Muslim, it’s hard for me to relate.
But if you can never get enough rain and black people, come to Georgia.
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59 comments
Stick around Jim. Maybe you’ll get a handsome payout similar to the poor souls in East Palestine, Ohio.
What is “ublaquity”?
Blackness everywhere.
I must be over-educated. I got ublaquity right away. Classic Goad wordsmithing.
Perhaps Petronius’ mother tongue is not English.
Indeed it isn’t. Where does “ubla” come from?
It’s a play on the word “ubiquity.”
A good coinage, I’ll add.
It’s a play on “ubiquity.”
Godspeed and good journey, Jim. All the best with your next life chapter.
The REAL Georgia, in the Caucasus, will greet you happily.
The American Georgia was named after British monarch King George, more or less fittingly, as under the British system the King is the ultimate owner of the soil.
It was not named in imitation of the Caucasian state, whose name comes from another source.
So, Georgia USA is fully justified and entitled to that moniker.
That was a joke. The Georgians do not call themselves so, and their country’s name is Sakartvelo and not “Georgia”. Of course, both Georgias were ultimately called so after St. George. And “British” King (German, of course, all “British” kings were and are foreigners) Georg Kurfürst von Hannover was also named after those holy murderer of rare animals.
Jim, hang around a bit longer.
I was in Georgia one time in my life. It was for a conference in 2010. I knew what MARTA (Atlanta’s subway/metro) stood for thanks to a friend who once lived there. But I had no idea it was a literal meaning. I was the only non-black on the train from the airport to downtown. I saw signs for “Free At Last” bail bonds, wig shops and gold teeth places. If it was fiction I would think that the author was trying too hard to make a point.
As I was waiting outside Peachtree Station for the hotel shuttle, I was again the only non-black in sight (this was on a Sunday early afternoon). I could sense an enormous black man (like 6’5, 300lbs) walking toward me and trying to engage me. When he finally spoke, I was relieved to hear a white-sounding voice and a friendly, “excuse me sir, you seem like a tourist who might be lost. Can I point you in the right direction?” I thanked him and assured him I was just waiting for my ride. He smiled and advised that the area can be pretty rough at times.
The late Martin Rojas once relayed a story to me of probably saving a black woman’s life in Atlanta. He was in a post office and observed a black man beating his black wife or girlfriend. Noticing none of the other blacks was going to stop it, he called 9-1-1. He thinks it may well have saved her life as the beating showed no sign of stopping.
I enjoyed living there in mid-90s. I hate to be one of those guys, but it really was a different place three decades ago. Yes, there were plenty of black folks, but there was not ublaquity. Sure, one obviously avoided South Atlanta, but most of the black people I ran into wore button-downs and loafers and looked like they were Sigma Chi at UGA. Of course, even then the writing was on the wall. Nonetheless, it was still a nice moment in time. Sorry you missed it.
Another separate change to Deep South infrastructure is, since impacted grazing land came to flyover, most U.S. livestock is currently getting raised in FL, GA, AL. Good dividends with side effects e g. E coli- laden runoff.
I just can’t believe a black female doctor would be incompetent…
May I inquire which state you’re moving to?
Glad you’re getting out before the last wheezing breath of the ATL and surrounding. It doesn’t bode well for those of us within driving distance in the short term, but this can’t last forever. And in the end skill and brains will triumph. God speed you to your next destination.
I wish you the best, Jim, wherever you go. You must have extended my life by years with all the laughs you’ve given me. Whether that’s a good thing remains to be seen…
If the blacks weren’t reason enough to leave, the mosquitos presumably would be; from your weather description they must be some serious business.
The South is not a great place; at best, only real Southerners fit in. I know there’s been yuppie migration to places like Durham, NC – but NC is not true Deep South (as I think SC might be; I have family in NC, and have liked their very upscale areas when visiting).
In the American future, the best path for individual survival is to move to places that are heavily white, and at least somewhat conservative already. I suspect the Northern New England states, esp. NH and ME, will get more conservative over time, as has happened to Idaho and Montana. The South is mostly GOP for now, but I’d never move to an area with a large black population. I wonder why non-native Goad did.
Good luck with everything, Goad. If only we already had our Ethnostate, right?
They will follow whites everywhere, literally to the ends of the earth eg Anchorage, Alaska.
Just going back 20 years or so, who the Hell would have thought that damn frozen places such as Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton etc in Canada would be so thoroughly wog-stuffed?
I mean, who the Hell would voluntarily *choose* to live in a snow bound minus 40 place?
That, is, of course, until whitey put in central heating – and doles out lavish welfare bennies. Without that, they’d be fucked as the Donner Party expedition.
The thing about the deep south, traditionally at least, has been that our black population wasn’t as militant or “uppity” as up north. (And you are very correct, NC has been crammed with northerners for well over 40 years, and calling MD the “south” is completely laughable.) Southerners, regardless of color, are/were just more polite. That has been steadily changing for the past 12 years or so. Atlanta is ground zero for it. Last time I went to Charleston I vowed to never return. It is ruined.
This has been my observation as well. Several years back I took a trip to Florida and was pulled over in both South Carolina and Georgia, and they were the two friendliest ZOGbots I’d ever encountered. The Georgia one started with “I’m sorry we have to meet like this,” and the SC one joked that I’d flown past him on the left and didn’t even see him.
In addition to people being friendlier, things are just a lot more relaxed. Up here in the northeast everything is very fast-paced and people are ornery and impatient. I’m guilty of it myself, especially in the car.
“Georgia On My Mind” will henceforth be a euphemism for Brain Tumor.
Did you like Stone Mt. Park much? Either walking up and down the mountain, or staying on level ground while walking around it?
That would be a “yes.” And the matching of my jean cuffs with the painted white line was purely accidental.
You’re saying this was accidental? Honestly, if so, that is wild. One in a million stuff.
What sort of fucking doctor would make an obvious crass error like that?
What is the fucking point of all those ‘tricky tricky’ little analysis and data questions on the MCAT exam?
And that’s years before you ever get in front of a living human body.
At least it was just plain old incompetence. I once made the mistake of self-diagnosing (correctly, as it turned out) a minor complaint when I went to see a half-caste GP in London. He seemed immediately determined to prove it was something else, and wanted to refer me to a specialist (although his manner was sneering rather than concerned). Luckily I found a remedy online.
Some schools have started to waive the MCAT. Take one wild guess why.
There will be negative side effects because of that in the future.
Without a shadow of a doubt, that black female medic only qualified because a more talented white male applicant was denied a position at medical school in order to privilege this affirmative action hire. Had he qualified instead, he would not have fucked up egregiously like that. What that frustrated doctor in the making is doing now, and in what field, is anyone’s guess.
The point is, there is a price, a very heavy price, to be paid for because of ‘affirmative action’.
Humidity would also fit into the last sentence. I lived in the Atlanta suburb of Smyrna from 1977-81. In 2016 on a visit to see family, I stopped to get gas at a convenience store I often frequented as a kid. I barely recognized it. Half of the store sold rows of hash pipes, the windows were heavily tinted, and a black kid was cashiering behind bulletproof glass.
I lived in Georgia in the 1980s and the White people I met were among the best Whites I’ve known. Right up there with Rhodesians and inner-city NYers. Now, looks like Lincoln finally won. Real shame.
Great article, Jim. I loved Atlanta when I lived there in the 90s. The weather was the same, as well as the quantity of blacks, but the city had a much friendlier feel back then. I return to Atlanta now 2-3 times a year for various reasons and the friendliness is gone. The blacks also seem angrier than they were years ago. Traffic is also terrible — friends compare it to LA. And parts of the city are now so over-developed they are unrecognizable. It makes me sad, as I have fond memories from the 90s. But Atlanta is just dead for me now.
“How about black people? Can you ever get enough of them?” Hilarious! The home of Wayne Williams doesn’t sound like a pleasant place to me, Jim. Although it may inspire your writing.
Excellent essay, Jim. I wish you & your wife the best in whichever state you end up hanging your hats. Truth be told, I decided on moving near the Eastern panhandle of WV, due to high White population AND mild weather (no hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, to speak of) + 4 beautiful *distinct* seasons.
You’re absolutely right. I live fairly close to you in NE Ohio. Low cost of living, affordable housing, no floods, fires, earthquakes, droughts or hurricanes — altho tornadoes are a threat. We’ve had solid sun for the past month and a half, with a brief overcast interruption due to Helene. Yet it seems everyone around here wants to move south. Once a trend becomes the norm folks follow it like lemmings.
I understand also from friends that heat is also a problem in what they call “Hotlanta.”
Those 4 distinct seasons do include cold weather – maybe not as bad as Grise Fjord but cold enough. Yet I see not a few whites, including white nationalists, running away to warm areas.
We did not evolve in tropical or semitropical areas, so it looks to me as if white people are degenerating mightily if they can’t tolerate a bit of snow and subzero temperatures for 3 months, even though though these cold areas have centrally heated, well insulated homes, cars with heaters, warm clothing and whatnot.
I’ve lived in New York (Downstate, upstate) for my entire 36 years of life (minus 19 months in California after college). I’ve taken many trips to southern states — ranging from the Carolina’s, to Kentucky, to Florida, and yes, Alabama and Georgia. While I am a political Conservative, and quite frankly, increasing tired of cold and snowy winters, I must admit, I could never see myself living in the South — certainly no lower than Maryland or northern Virginia.
No offense to my southern White brothers and sisters, but I generally find the “southern hospitality” to be pretty fake. Sure, they’ll be polite to you in public, but they don’t typically know how to otherwise be a friend. Here in the north, having a friend means you make a conscious effort to call once in a while, and have your friends over at your home on at least a semi-regular basis. Southerners don’t usually understand this concept very well
Economics and education in the South are also lackluster. Even salaried jobs for those with degrees tend to be significantly lower wages and even lower upward mobility. The wisdom of the past was always “Well, at least housing is cheaper down here” but even that has changed — due to massive influxes of northerners who can work remotely, and foreign Africans, Asians and Latinos flooding the southern areas. Virtually no city or suburb in the south is predominantly White anymore, and look what happens when dancer strikes in the rural parts of the south today. It ain’t pretty
Past to present, I’ve just always been of the general opinion that the South really is the worst part of the USA in many ways. Sure, the bartender in Greenville, South Carolina will have a conversation with me, and the local sitting next to me might even pay for my beer, but you can just tell that most Southerners feel stuck and hopeless, and there really isn’t anything to offer anyone. Nothing much more than college football brings them any semblance of joy, and maybe southern rock back in the 1970s and earlier.
Lastly, contrary to popular stereotypes, most White Southerners are not “racist” anymore. I’ve met more racially conscious Whites in Connecticut, California, Illinois, and New Jersey than I even have in the Southern states. They’ve been browbeaten so badly since the 1950s about their hate and bigotry, that you’d think you were in a Maxine Waters campaign office in many ways. I never thought I’d see the day that a White guy in Huntsville, Alabama is bragging to me about all of his black friends and his Vietnamese youth pastor at church — while his daughter is dating an Indian guy. I wish I was kidding.
Good luck, Jim.
“This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds”
Good article, Mr. Goad. I, too, had a lengthy stint in GA (nine years) in the wonderful city of Macon (affectionately referred to as Ma-CON-ga by many of the local non-melanin denizens, for obvious reasons) which is an 80-mile drive south of Atlanta on I-75. I think Maconga had more Pvt schools per capita than any city in the state. Even though the county (Bibb) was about 55/45 white when I was there in the aughts, the public school system was 80% black. Only the poorest of the whites sent their kids to public schools. I had to drive up to Atlanta about twice a month to see clients which was enough to instill in me the intense desire to never live in that hell hole – and that was 20 years and 2 million people ago. I’m surprised you survived for 17+ years. Safe travels to hopefully better climes… and demographics.
Atlanta was a nice place. A branch of my family put down stakes there following the Late Unpleasantness, and I had many good times going down to visit them in the 1970s and 80s. To my knowledge, they’ve all moved, except for a cousin in Buckhead. A few years ago, I asked him how he was liking his new rapper and pro-ball player neighbors, and he hasn’t spoken to me since. Even though I live within walking distance of I-85, I will drive through another state to avoid going anywhere near Atlanta. Good luck, Mr. Goad, wherever you land.
I have only been to the “Deep South” once (AL, MS, LA) and was staggered by just how many blacks were stumbling around. Not just in cities but in small towns, whereas small towns in the Midwest are usually havens absent of any significant presence of blacks.
Oh, I got it now. “uBLACKity”.
You’re almost there. Pronunciation guide.
Never been to Atlanta, but a high school friend of mine lives in nearby Marietta and is happy. When Buckhorn, a part of Atlanta, wanted to secede and form its own town (away from blacks) she was all for it. Like a lot of us boomers, she doesn’t discuss race. Readers might also like to read James Howard Kunstler’s The City in Mind, a study cities, and among London, Berlin, Boston and Las Vegas he discusses Atlanta, “Does Edge City have a Future?” He shows Atlanta abandoned, full of suburbs and absurd highways and a city that really never had a center and purpose. Very thoughtful. My impression of Atlanta and Nashville (where I visit sometimes) is that their highway system is confusing and makes no sense.
As for southerners, I never lived in the south, but I have to admit I’ve never met a bad southerner. They were always good, kind people. I lived in Boston for seven years, and while I loved it, a lot of easterners are, as one man said to me, “hollow.”
If Jim is, like the boll weevil in the song, “looking for a home,” why not try St. Louis? I live here, it’s kind of a dump and the city proper is a dive, but there are good neighborhoods especially in the surrounding counties. Once you get out of the city and go twenty miles south, you’re touching the frontier of Dixie.
St. Louis essentially is a northern city dumped on the border of the south.
There are a lot of blacks here, but you can escape them up to a point. Blacks infest every city. That’s just a fact of life. I was in Chicago two weeks ago, and I was a bit stunned by mile after mile of Hispanic neighborhoods. God, I thought, who even believes we have any chance of retaking the cities? But St. Louis isn’t so bad. The climate isn’t freezing, snowfall is light, and he could make his peace with it.
I hope against hope that Jim is moving back to LA, to do what he was born to do, coach mentally and developmentally disabled black and mestizo youth at Widney High in their music and theater programs. No devastating rains there, unless its raining fabulousness.
Maybe Jim can be a street diplomat and bring peace to the hostile factions in LA that are at each other’s throats, you dig?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaYOJk2iIv8
I remember Georgia from around forty years ago and found the Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta to be a particularly fascinating experience. Sporting a brand new Futurama look, it was like something out of Logan’s Run or Star Trek. Now the busiest airport in the world, Hartsfield (then named exclusively after a long-time White mayor) had moveable sidewalks and subterranean rail cars to shoot between the concourses.
Queuing into a tube to get to some other concourse gate with an unintelligible intercom speaker giving anodyne but useless information, evoked something like:
“Please watch your step when entering the disintegration chamber. Thank y’all for having a nice trip.”
I liked that the ubiquitous Southern Belles, sometimes with a slight twang to their voices, dressed for business or business-casual in revealing fashionable skirts or shorts. They didn’t look like they had just been to the swimmin’ holluh with Daisy Duke in cutoffs or were eye-candy looking to score some weed. Not to say that the “ubiquitous” ladies milling through Stapleton airport in Denver or dragging luggage in Salt Lake City were wearing prairie dresses, but the South had a different vibe entirely, and the South has its charms for sure.
In those days they actually sold Confederate flag souvenirs at the airport and Negroes weren’t triggered. Not in the airport, but in many small towns, for sure, there were quite a few heritage museums that I found interesting when I had the time to check them out. A Confederate ancestor, hey, I had one of those!
I never felt like a fish out of water in the South. I doubt if I could say that today with BLM signs in all the winduhs and stuff like that. For one thing, I am used to Summers that pull triple digits, but the humidity is usually fairly low in the West, and once the sun goes down in the high desert, you might want to break out the field jacket.
I nearly froze one year wearing a warm-weather costume for the Nightfall Halloween event at the Old Tucson movie ranch. According to the otherworldly guides, the coming of Dusk in a ghost town brings a fifty-degree temperature drop.
Not so with the sticky climate in Hotlanta or South Carolina. There the temperature might reach triple digits, but it is a different world of Disneyland and Deliverance when the humidity is also 90 percent.
I was there just after Hurricane Allen, which the locals were endlessly talking about, having only recently started naming storms ocasionally after males, but I don’t remember all that much Georgia rain except when a bivouac was scheduled. That wasn’t a coincidence, however.
Our WWII wooden barracks had giant fans in them for cooling. Later we got the 1960s “Hollywood” pattern made of utilitarian brick and concrete that had pretend air-conditioning with Berserker wall murals in the stairwells that looked like Molly Hatchet album covers. We never baked in Gomer Pyle-style quonset huts, however.
The only negatives ─ other than a lot of (then well-behaved) Blacks to begin with, and the weirdo Hare Krishnas that were in those days allowed to bother everybody inside the airport selling subscriptions to “get kids off drugs” or whatever ─ was that there was a lot of blatant race-mixing going on and nobody even seemed to notice. The Darkies and the White coal-burners (if you saw any) were a lot more discrete with the PDA where I came from.
Other than that, in those days I found the White people from the South to be incredible and superlatively decent. If a private soldier wore his uniform at the airport you felt like a celebrity. People would shake your hand like you were Forrest Gump with a flashy new medal. They were patriotic in a very good way. Maybe it has all changed, but I prefer to remember a lot of things the way that they were in my formative years.
I was stationed at Fort Gordon near Augusta at the fall line of the Savannah River, and sometimes we would take a bus trip to Atlanta to kill a long weekend. Back when Jane Fonda looked good on the Golden Pond and Henry Fonda got lost on the way to the mailbox, none of my friends were particularly interested in sportsball or Ted Turner’s CNN ─ so instead of seeing the Atlanta Braves or (((Daniel Schorr))) at their intrepid newsdesk, we went to Six flags Over Georgia, the amusement park. Not that many Blacks go to amusement parks, apparently, but the ones who were there were well-behaved.
This was not long after the Wayne Williams serial killings, which the national news media made a big deal about ─ not so much the local media. You would think it was the Klan killing all those Darkies. But no, it was one of their own and then the matter was quietly dropped. When Williams was caught, I remember one lady at the mall who in a soft twang said something like:
“Thank God it was a Neegra or we’d a’ never heard the last of it.”
In those days I was a Mormon boy from Idaho with a pocket full of tater tots, but I already knew from experience in the Civil Air Patrol from billets at Mountain Home Air Force Base or visiting NASA’s Mission Control at Houston, that Evangelical chaplains were not too keen on them ─ somehow deriving from sola scriptura that the LDS are not really Christians. That is why the Mormons no longer use that nickname. Jesus Christ, sometimes capitalized, is in the formal church name and always has been.
Well, Augusta, with its famous golf course, was right in the Bible Belt, but instead I found the locals to be welcoming and friendly ─ especially to servicemen ─ and certainly if there was not an LDS branch nearby to attend on a Sunday, and I still needed somewhere to go.
They say that there are no atheists in foxholes, but that is only because if you didn’t attend a church in those days, you didn’t get Sundays off hanging out with a paperback in the barracks. Instead you got to show your proficiency with a floor buffer or with the kitchen Sonderkommando.
And sitting in some of those Protestant church meetings in the South, I found that the Northern Whites usually sat stoicly in the pews while the Blacks rolled around in the aisles handling serpents and playing the whacky sax like Gov. Bill Clinton. Modern LDS services are anything if not staid, but some of that historically American Holy Awakening charisma is exactly what attracts women to Jesus ─ I’m guessing (ducking below the parapet). At least it worked in Joseph Smith’s day (no relation, btw).
In any case, it was always better to find a mostly-White church to attend, whatever the denomination.
I found that not so many Southrons were named Elvis, but the Georgia shopping malls did have interesting events from time to time. Once there was a Jewish (I’m guessing) chessmaster visiting who was all set up with a score of chess boards and you could sit down and play a game with him. He would go around the boards rapidly in a circle and beat you in like three or four moves. I can last longer against the Microsoft computer, LOL.
My remembrances of those days was that even in the airports and malls of the South, they were filled with some of the most awesome White people. This was a bit before Blacks got really good at ruining public spaces. We should not forget that “Peak Negro” can be had at less than 1 percent diversity.
I don’t think I could handle 17 years of infinity Negroes. Turner Broadcasting could not pay me enough. But I think that Mr. Goad and the missus are making a very good call to leave Atlanta. Good luck in the everyman’s journey to find the promised land.
🙂
I thought Portland was soggy, but Atlanta’s ceaselessly maddening rain is one of the many reasons I’ve yearned to vamoose.
Fun fact: Atlanta gets more rain that Seattle. There’s an especially wet microclimate there caused by the interaction of maritime air masses with the southern fringe of the Appalachians.
Appalachians? Interesting that the mountain range a half continent away would result in that.
Another fun fact. Sitka, Alaska, in the panhandle, gets 100″ of precipitation annually. I believe that was a target location for refugees around WW2.
I’m from Georgia originally, and while I don’t ever remember a time when I thought Atlanta was “nice,” there are rural sections in the northern part of the state that I actually found really pleasant. It’s nowhere near as black as the southern half of the state (which is also infested with gnats like I’ve never seen in my life) or ATL.
Mr. Goad, sorry if I missed this, but did you announce where your new digs will be? Just wondering if you’re headed to whiter pastures…
Any move is one of life’s great stresses and vexations. Here’s hoping the next MVA line moves a tiny bit more efficiently.
So where are you moving to next Jim?
Wyoming? Montana?
You’ll find them answer here: https://counter-currents.com/2024/10/a-state-of-enchantment/
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