Saturday, November 1, 2008

Fucking Georgia Rednecks

So both Sarah and Nate (and to a lesser extent me) spent last night battling sore throats. Sarah woke me up at 7 this morning, and said she was going to Kroger to get some liquid Tylenol. I'm a good husband, so I went instead. When I left the house, it was still pretty dark out, but the sun was rising and there was a fair amount of light by the time I returned.

Yesterday I linked to all those images of black people standing in impossibly long lines for early voting. Those people were in Fulton, Dekalb, and Gwinnett counties where there is a large black population. When I was growing up, we lived in Gwinnett county; this was before the mid 1990s when there was a migration in which many of the black families left the city for some of the more suburban, white counties. Not to be integrated, a lot of the white families moved north to the less developed parts of Fulton, the more conservative Cobb (Newt Gingrich country), and the far less densely populated hill country of Cherokee, where I live today.

Last night, Sarah and I took Nate trick or treating through half of the neighborhood. It's an overly white neighborhood. There are a lot of McCain/Palin signs, especially near the entrance of the development. I learned last night that there is a Latino family that lives a couple of doors down from my parents. There's also an older Asian woman who was giving out candy a bit farther away, and a black family that lives a couple doors down from her.

A black family!

Anyway, the guy seems to get really in to Halloween. He had a bunch of lawn witches, a smoke machine, and he piped out spooky music to get the trick or treaters. Anyway, surprise, surprise, he seems like a perfectly nice fellow: a wonderful black ambassador to a bunch of McCain supporters who would rather live an hour out of town than to live in a neighborhood with more than one black person.

Apparently, his good nature is not good enough. As I drove home from Kroger this morning at dawn, I saw what I had not seen when I left. The dude's house had been rolled (or TP'd or toilet papered, depending on your regional dialect). Not only that, but his was the ONLY house in the entire development that had been rolled. I don't want to call anybody racist or anything, but when I got home, I saw that my parents's Obama lawn sign was also gone.

2 comments:

Marisa said...

I live in Savannah on a fairly affluent street where in the last few weeks a number of McCain/Palin signs went up. There are 3 Obama signs to the dozen or so Palin signs. If you go two blocks down to the younger, still nice, more diverse nieghborhood there are a zillion Obama signs. I'm hoping we can turn GA democratic next Tuesday even if the guy on Abercorn had his Obama sign stolen four times.
(saw your blog from Raph's facebook feed-cheers!)

Andrew said...

I tend to think it's unlikely. The shift to blue, I mean. Here in Cherokee, the numbers are definitely weighted to McCain. These are the white folk who left places like Gwinnett and the outskirts of Dekalb when the blacks from Atlanta started to make enough money to become homeowners in the suburbs. These are the people who built whole new developments in the middle of nowhere with the first sign of the coming integration of the suburbs. That being said, about 35% of total registered voters in Georgia have already voted.