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Other Aspects of Travel
Jul. 8th, 2023 01:51 pmMost of you know that I lived in Europe for about 13 years -- two as a child, just over ten as an adult -- and I also lived in Boston for 14 years. My mother is Californian.
My father was a Virginian. I think of myself as one, too, for all that I've now lived as long in Boston and the District, which is culturally different from even northern Virginia, as I ever did in Virginia. Part of that is heritage. My earliest Virginia ancestors came to Jamestown in 1613, the same year that Jamestown held the first Thanksgiving. [For those of you who aren't U.S. citizens, that means we were there about 7 years before the Mayflower hit Plymouth Rock and the "first Thanksgiving" story that's told in schools happened.]
Virginia was the first colony to pass a resolution for independence. Virginia had the earliest representative legislature in the colonies with its House of Burgesses. We had Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson and Georges Washington and Mason and Madison and Monroe. All of whom were great men who contributed to great ideals for a new country. They were also all slave holders and, by one reckoning, the first slaves to enter the colonies arrived in Virginia the same year as my ancestors.
There is much to be proud of in being Virginian, but there is just as much, possibly more, to shame us from our choice to join the Confederacy to Jim Crow.
My uncle taught at Virginia Tech until he was 80. When a gunman started shooting people on the campus, we just assumed it was one of his students because Uncle taught the math for engineers course that 2/3s were expected to fail. Mention Professor Fabi's Dad in Boston or some parts of California and people will gush about how kind he was, what a great teacher. Mention Professor Fabi's Sister and, after only four years, people will say what a good and patient teacher she is. Mention Professor Fabi's Uncle and the most common phrase is "that bastard." (Even the students who managed to pass didn't much like him. On the other hand, I want my engineers to really understand math.)
I think of myself as a Southerner. I react, socially, as a Southerner. It's a type of automatic graciousness that can baffle Northerners and is often thought of as fake. It isn't, usually.
All of this is a preface to how much living in the South is hurting me at this moment in history. I am thankful that the state I currently live in, Georgia, refused to play ball with the former president's attempt to subvert the election. However, I am also furious at the many ways the very same governor and secretary of state have attempted to limit voting rights.
This is a state that holds Stone Mountain (scroll down to the phrase "memorial carving" to see what bothers me). It wasn't completed until the 1970s, after the voting rights act. There shouldn't be a memorial to the Confederacy.
On our trip I saw a Confederate Battle flag that had to have been 10' x 10' waving in the breeze, no U.S. flag anywhere nearby to sully it. I saw a billboard lying about the election accusing Biden of destroying the country that was huge, brand new, and double-sided. I heard my uncle, an educated man, complain that taking changing the names of U.S. military bases from names that honored Confederate generals was "erasing our heritage."
I don't recognize this south. I went to boarding school in 1976 and was shocked to find the first black girl had been admitted only four years earlier (and the first Jewish girl came in the same year I did), but we were progressing to a better future. I'm in a future that is undoing that progress, and I'm trying like hell to fight it.
My father was a Virginian. I think of myself as one, too, for all that I've now lived as long in Boston and the District, which is culturally different from even northern Virginia, as I ever did in Virginia. Part of that is heritage. My earliest Virginia ancestors came to Jamestown in 1613, the same year that Jamestown held the first Thanksgiving. [For those of you who aren't U.S. citizens, that means we were there about 7 years before the Mayflower hit Plymouth Rock and the "first Thanksgiving" story that's told in schools happened.]
Virginia was the first colony to pass a resolution for independence. Virginia had the earliest representative legislature in the colonies with its House of Burgesses. We had Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson and Georges Washington and Mason and Madison and Monroe. All of whom were great men who contributed to great ideals for a new country. They were also all slave holders and, by one reckoning, the first slaves to enter the colonies arrived in Virginia the same year as my ancestors.
There is much to be proud of in being Virginian, but there is just as much, possibly more, to shame us from our choice to join the Confederacy to Jim Crow.
My uncle taught at Virginia Tech until he was 80. When a gunman started shooting people on the campus, we just assumed it was one of his students because Uncle taught the math for engineers course that 2/3s were expected to fail. Mention Professor Fabi's Dad in Boston or some parts of California and people will gush about how kind he was, what a great teacher. Mention Professor Fabi's Sister and, after only four years, people will say what a good and patient teacher she is. Mention Professor Fabi's Uncle and the most common phrase is "that bastard." (Even the students who managed to pass didn't much like him. On the other hand, I want my engineers to really understand math.)
I think of myself as a Southerner. I react, socially, as a Southerner. It's a type of automatic graciousness that can baffle Northerners and is often thought of as fake. It isn't, usually.
All of this is a preface to how much living in the South is hurting me at this moment in history. I am thankful that the state I currently live in, Georgia, refused to play ball with the former president's attempt to subvert the election. However, I am also furious at the many ways the very same governor and secretary of state have attempted to limit voting rights.
This is a state that holds Stone Mountain (scroll down to the phrase "memorial carving" to see what bothers me). It wasn't completed until the 1970s, after the voting rights act. There shouldn't be a memorial to the Confederacy.
On our trip I saw a Confederate Battle flag that had to have been 10' x 10' waving in the breeze, no U.S. flag anywhere nearby to sully it. I saw a billboard lying about the election accusing Biden of destroying the country that was huge, brand new, and double-sided. I heard my uncle, an educated man, complain that taking changing the names of U.S. military bases from names that honored Confederate generals was "erasing our heritage."
I don't recognize this south. I went to boarding school in 1976 and was shocked to find the first black girl had been admitted only four years earlier (and the first Jewish girl came in the same year I did), but we were progressing to a better future. I'm in a future that is undoing that progress, and I'm trying like hell to fight it.
