The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

Grits & Gomorrah

If you'd walked around midtown Atlanta today, you would have gotten a glimpse at everything about modern life that Strom Thurmond would have hated.

On the southern end, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, some former Carter aides, ex-Governor Barnes and others gathered onstage to do last rites for local icon Maynard Jackson. To the north, drag queens and leather men clotted the streets as the annual Pride Parade and festival wended its way up Peachtree toward Piedmont Park. If Strom weren't dead, today's spectacle would probably have killed him.

With the close timing of the passing of Strom Thurmond, Maynard Jackson, and Lester Maddox this week, you almost get the sense that the trap door of Southern history has swung on its hinges, dumping the old offstage and leaving us to get to work on building the new. We'll see whether that bears itself over the long run, but it's worth a thought.

On my way to meet friends for brunch today, I drove past a sign outside a Baptist church that said the Sunday morning message would be about "taking America back." I feel like that's in order as much as anyone else on some days — I wouldn't mind taking America back from George Bush — but when you hear someone say "take America back," you have to wonder where they plan to take America back to, and who they want to bring with them.

My occasional pangs of nostalgia aside, I subscribe more to what Hugh McColl — the ex-Marine who built North Carolina National Bank into the modern day Bank of America — used to say: "when you stop growing, you start dying." Learn from the past, but take life — and the country — forward. I wouldn't mind an America where the Baptists and the leather boys could coexist — where George Bush wouldn't send my cousin to Iraq, where the police wouldn't send consenting adults to jail to spite their sexual orientation, and where, yes, we respected the views of those who would rather "take America back." I hope that somehow, that doesn't turn out to be asking too much.

Posted by Greg Greene at June 28, 2003 08:21 PM