Epiphanies from Infrastructure
Enlightenment South of the Mason-Dixon Line
I have been spending quite a lot of time in the American south, mostly in Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina. As someone originally from the the Westside of Los Angeles, the West of the West of the West Coast, where, oftentimes I have said “where the European Enlightenment ended and died,” I have learned a lot from the South. I now live in the woods in upstate New York and my travels below the Mason-Dixon line have opened my eyes to my former and, I hope, fading bigotry.
This short essay all started with several very long drives from upstate NY to Alabama wherein we would have to drive through so many states and I found the roads in the South to be better kept than in the North. Again my observation on a few routes so not conclusive but Pennsylvania is a mess compared to Tennessee. New York pales in comparison to Alabama when it comes to infrastructure and upkeep. The environs of Birmingham, and I drove quite a lot, are gorgeous and well kept. Which is not what we assume from our lounge chairs on the beach in Malibu. The assumption about the South is that it is falling apart, that the politicians don’t care about the people and that they would have bad schools, bad roads, bad infrastructure. Well, the parks that I saw, the schools where my son played baseball, the community spirit that is quite apparent, shows a completely different story. Given that I left LA because of it’s continued collapse of infrastructure — roads, schools, and not to mention social fabric, the south is a revelation… and that it was tells me I was so deeply misinformed.
I know that what I saw was not the whole state of the South so I will depart from my initial infrastructure epiphany to a conversation that I had from a dad from Alabama. When he found out where I was from, originally from LA but now from NY, he said, “Welcome to Alabama, and yeah we wear shoes.” Which was a fair comment, there is a bigotry toward the South in general, and most people who write shows, or commercials or who have participated in the mediasphere were, (and this is changing rapidly) from LA or NY, and the narrative around these states is very skewed given the writers often haven’t spent any meaningful time in the South. As a result, entire states have been flattened into caricatures.
To those still steeped in the old narrative: go visit. You might find a culture that’s not only persisting, but in many ways thriving—often without ingesting what the coastal media offers. When cultural affronts persist too long, people stop engaging. And who could blame them? They will no longer participate and for good reason.
The posters in North Carolina I opened this observation with are emblematic of the spirit of this civic engagement I thought was absent in many parts of the country. I double checked my assumptions upon returning to NY and found that indeed the state of infrastructure in California and New York is indeed in a greater state of disrepair than in the South. So the data shows one story and the media shows another.
I know this is not the whole story, but the big takeaway at this point is that my former culture — coastal, elite, insulated — has a lot to learn. It’s time to leave the bubble and witness what’s really happening in the rest of the country. Our cultural disposition should shed itself of years of jingoistic illustrations of a Southern culture that has clearly moved on. For my part, I am sorry for my shortsightedness, for my lack of rigor, for being led by the nose by media that was misinformed.