I quickly discovered that chemical engineering was practically synonymous with petroleum engineering and that the jobs were centered in the oil refining industry in and around Louisiana. Louisiana! I didn't want to go there! It was all dimwitted rednecks living in swamp filth. Why, they could barely read or write and didn't they all marry their cousins or something?
This photo of New Orleans is courtesy of TripAdvisor
That shack, found with a quick Google image search, is almost a perfect recreation of what I imagined the South to be.
Similarly, I came out of college hating the NRA and all of its members. No one with an IQ over 70 owned a gun. Guns killed people. They were accident prone and could leap up and go off of their own accord, almost always shooting toddlers, even if there were no toddlers in the house. No, a toddler would mysteriously appear out of nowhere and then the gun would shoot it. That's the way it worked and I knew, because I had been to college and done my learning with much studiosity.
When I got my first job after college, at a place where I still work today, my officemates weren't just NRA members, they made their own cartridges and at least one had built his own musket. They thought I was hilarious! It didn't take me long to change my mind. The initial shock of meeting intelligent, educated, highly accomplished men who owned guns blew my bigotry away like a high wind whipping away the fog.
These men mentored me patiently. My school was strong in theory, but weak in practice. These guys taught me how to solder, how to read schematics, how to build circuits and more. The best of the lot had grown up in the Depression on what he called a "dry dirt farm in Kansas" which I took to mean a farm without irrigation. The dude was always jovial and kind and he loved his guns.
Getting over my anti-Southern bigotry was a much slower process. I was born in Boston, my father was from Wisconsin and my mother from Illinois. I was a Yankee, through and through. Moving all over the country as I grew up, I tried to root for the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox to connect with my very shallow roots, but it never took.
Looking back, it's hard to find a tipping point that led me to my passionate love for the South. As best as I can recall, it was probably the time I had a day-long layover in Atlanta due to storms fouling up Delta Airlines' schedules. There had been so many flight cancellations that the best Delta could do was get me back to San Diego the next evening.
I got a hotel and a car and decided to explore Georgia for the day. On a whim, I picked out a tiny town called, of all things, Grantville. Grantville had a population of about 3,000 and I found a little, roadside BBQ joint for lunch. I had a great time. I came to realize that Southern hospitality was a real thing. The place wasn't busy, so I chatted with the staff while I ate some of the best BBQ I had ever tasted.
Over the years, work took me all over the country, but every time I visited the South, I had the same experience. It took a while, but working and socializing with everything from engineers and scientists to shipyard workers to the staff and customers at Waffle Houses across the South finally dispelled my narrow-minded intolerance. Reality dissolved prejudice.
Nowadays, I love the South more than any other part of the country. The more I explore the culture, the cuisine, the people and the countryside, the deeper my affection grows. Outside of biscuits and gravy for breakfast, which is almost always underwhelming, I can't think of anything about the region that has been a disappointment.
And that's how a bigoted, sneering, college-boy Yankee lost his ignorant hatred of hobbies he'd never tried, a place he'd never visited and people he'd never met.
I had close to the opposite trajectory. I lived in a rural area around Fowlerville, then when it got too built-up to suit my father we moved up to the even-more-rural area around Kinde, where we had a dairy farm. Nobody in either place made a big deal about guns at the time, everybody just had them. They were tools. We used ours for slaughtering steers for meat, and my brother occasionally shot rats. We didn't get into hunting much, because by father's experiences in Korea pretty much put him off of the idea of hunting, but everyone else did.
ReplyDeleteWhat I was bigoted against was cities. When I went off to college, I picked Michigan Tech partly because they were way off in the wilderness, and not in the middle of a big city like U of M is. I still don't like cities much, driving in heavy traffic annoys me and crowds give me the willies. I picked Metallurgy as my major, and specialized in minerals processing/extractive metallurgy, partly because this would involve working with companies that are far away from cities.
It has taken me a while to fully understand that a lot of people actually like living in cities, and that cities do have things to offer that simply aren't available in the rural areas. And also that the concerns in the city really are wildly different than they are in the country. Having guns in the country is just good sense, but having guns in the city is a recipe for shootouts with the cops.
Being racially prejudiced in the country is irrelevant, because you are likely to hardly ever see the people you are prejudiced against (and if you are a farmer, you may only see people at all outside of your immediate family a couple of times a week). Being racially prejudiced in the city, though, means dealing with the people you hate on a daily, or even hourly, basis.
In the country, it is easy to be dismissive of the government because it can seem like the only time you ever have to deal with them is when you have to pay taxes, or get permits, or other activities where you would rather have not had to see them. Living in a rural area, it is easy to think that if the government just packed up and went home, you might not notice for a long time. But in the city, the whole massive edifice is supported by government infrastructure, and it is easier to see where, if the government went away, the whole edifice would collapse.
I think the big thing is realizing that where you live really does have a big effect on what is, and is not, a good idea, and that city folk telling country folk how to live, is just as useless as doing the opposite.
About the only group I've been biased against is town kids-- although my family managed to get basic humility through my head early enough that even when I was thinking folks were silly, I figured they had reasons.
ReplyDeleteNow, thanks to the Navy and marrying one, I know what some of those reasons are....some of them are still silly (calling in a professional for EVERYTHING) but some make sense (various driving habits that are flat obnoxious in a rural setting).
Being from the west coast, the whole Yank/southerner thing is just strange.