Hitch up that moving van!

Hitch up that moving van!

What’s with all these libs moving out of the country because of Donald Trump?  Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi “fled” to England – or was it Ireland? A slew of other LBGTQs have been mewing about leaving. Someone named Laverne Cox said that she and her partner were looking at places in Europe and the Caribbean. One headline said “Panic in Hollywood’s LBGTQ Community: Some Weigh Emigration Ahead of 2^nd Trump Term.” Huh? Panic? Hollywood? One guy gay said “I’m physically afraid of being here now.” And he lives in California! The media are running stories like “Top 20 best countries to move for LBGTQ expats in 2025.”

One publication says that the number of LGBTQ couples looking to leave the country has soared 300 percent since Trump’s election – of course that’s not many if the base is 1. One person put it “We love this country, but we don’t love what it has become. “It saddens me to move. But it’s also a situation, politically and socially, that is unacceptable.” Gee, poor baby. That of course is BS and they know it. If Trump is so hostile to LGBTQs then why is Scott Bessent his Treasury secretary? Do all these aspiring expats think that Trump is going to be president for the rest of their lives – if it is indeed Trump the reason for fleeing? I think that they just crave being in the news and having their one second of fame.

Well let them go and good riddance. I have no sympathy for cowards. Black folk have endured at lot worse for a lot longer. I know what I went through at the University of Georgia with broken dorm windows, lighter fluid squirted under the door and firecrackers dropped down the slats in the door. And I stayed. My parents lived through much worse – what I call the Reign of Southern Terror where a black person could be shot by a white who would either not spend a day in jail or know that he would be acquired by a white judge and an all white jury. And they stayed. My grandparents experienced even worse and their parents were slaves. They all stayed . I remember asking my Dad why didn’t he move north out of Georgia. He said “This is my state. This is my home. I am not going anywhere.” So if black folk have the strength and fortitude to fight racism, discrimination, racial violence and hatred in a system that legally deemed them to be inferior and second class citizens, then I am supposed to feel sympathy for a bunch of whining whippy bunch of spineless crybabies? I would say grow a pair but that’s probably inappropriate.

We just spent four days at the farm in Gray. It is still a place where drivers will occasionally wave when you drive past. It is also a place where cars pull over and stop for a funeral procession. My father used to remark that funerals were the only time that white folk gave blacks any respect. I am glad to see that at least those pieces of the good old days remain. But most of them are best kept in the past.

During the war, many of Mom’s relatives left Gray and moved to Detroit to work in the factories. They sent back glowing reports of huge increases in income, new cars, fur coats and great schools. My cousins clamored for my grandfather to quit scratching the Georgia red clay and come to Detroit. Mom said that he left and was back within a month. He came back to Gray because he could not find a place to hunt rabbits. The cousins thought he was a bit “country” because he would not leave the segregated south (and Georgia like Mississippi was notorious for its violence toward black people who “stepped out of line.”). Instead, he lived out his days in Gray. My mother met my father. My grandfather lived to see me graduate from the University of Georgia and to his dying day could not completely fathom that white people allowed blacks to go to their schools.

So we stayed and in so doing we helped save the souls of fellow southerners. We have no respect for cowards who tuck tail and run.