I'm so excited to have my friend and fellow writer, Craig Carter, here today. He writes, among other things, a weekly editorial for the Argus Observer.
EXPRESSING FREEDOM by Craig Carter
Here’s something interesting.
According to the US Census and the
Centers for Disease Control, the five fattest states in the country are also
the five poorest--Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia.
How can people be
fat and poor? Well, it’s partially because overly processed, fatty food is
plentiful and cheap. Which means poor people don’t starve to death in America.
They die from obesity and nutrition related ailments. Plus, Southerners
traditionally eat a lot of fatty, fried food.
It’s also
interesting that these five states are the center of the college football
universe. Yes sir, each of these states can boast at least one huge college
football stadium and multimillion dollar facilities and yet, the states the
stadiums are in are poor and fat. Speaks volumes about priorities, doesn’t it?
However, I’m a
politics geek, so what I noticed is without exception, voters in our nation’s
fattest and poorest states vote overwhelmingly for Republicans. (What do you
call a Democrat in Mississippi? The quietest person in town.) This is
especially interesting because Mitt Romney was pretty much talking about these
states when he made his now infamous comment about the “47%.” And yet voters in
those states wouldn’t vote for a Democrat if you held a gun to their heads.
Now, my parents, who
were FDR Democrats, always told me Republicans were the party of the rich and privileged.
And if you listen to liberal pundits, you’ll hear the same argument. But Southerners
voting predominately Republican kinda blows that theory out of the water
doesn’t it? Well, as it is with most things political, it’s really not that
simple.
You see, the reason Southerners
vote predominately for Republicans is because a Democratic president, Lyndon
Johnson, foisted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of
1965 on the South. Before that, the South was every bit as partisan for the
Democrats as it is for Republicans now, because Southerners didn’t like a
certain Republican, Abraham Lincoln, who also kinda forced federal policy on
the region. (Which is to say both Johnson and Lincoln dragged the South kicking
and screaming into the real world, and Southerners held (and hold,) a ponderous
political grudge.)
But here’s where the
plot thickens. Had it not been for Republicans, LBJ wouldn’t have been able to
pass the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act, because those 2 pieces of
legislation caused southern Democrats to switch parties in droves, leaving LBJ
to court and win the votes of Northern Republican senators and Congressmammals.
(Many of whom later switched parties.)
There are many
lessons to be learned from such political history, but I’m neither smart nor
astute enough to reach a single, unifying conclusion here. I just find the way
free citizens choose to express their freedom incredibly interesting. You can
draw whatever conclusions you wish.
