Whit Waide is a political science and public administration
instructor at Mississippi State. He can be contacted at [email protected].I write in response to the page-one story from Friday’s Reflector regarding Mississippi’s unfortunate ranking by Congressional Quarterly magazine. CQ has determined that Mississippi is the least livable state in the nation. In so doing, CQ’s wizards of quantification have found yet another way not only to beat a dead horse but also kick him while he’s down. I hope that The Reflector might strive to use its pages, especially in the wake of Hurricane Foglesong, to highlight a few of our positives.
We in this world are rather fond of measurement and quantification. We like to prove things, to know the absolute truth about this or that. And there is, of course, great merit to that. But perhaps sometimes we need a gentle reminder that there are some things that cannot be measured. There are things that only seem. Mississippi is not a perfect place to live. It cannot be denied that we look bad on paper. Neither can we deny our horrible racist past. At one time there was pure ,sustained evil in Mississippi. But I like to think that we have loosed some of our albatrosses, and it’s time we took some credit for it.
There is no way to quantify the friendliness of our people. There is no way to account for the fact that perhaps more so than any other state, we Mississippians have real and true bonds to one another, almost like a family, simply by virtue of having been raised here. There is no statistical data on the myriad stories that everybody seems to have about going on a trip to some far-off locale, and of all the people in the world, who should they see but a fellow from Bogue Chitto? And all he wanted to talk about was how bad he wanted to go home.
I realize that not everyone feels a part of the Mississippi community and that some are left behind, forgotten or simply not included. This is not unique to Mississippi, and of course there is always room for improvement in any aspect of life, and we must forever remember and strive to improve. But I think it offensive that the rest of the country sees us as we were and as the numbers paint us. The rest of the country will allow for no other perspective of us, despite faulting us for having had poor perspective in the past.
It seems a default response to the latest study painting us as poor and doomed is always to rush to point to what some politician has done to lure industry and create more jobs so as to contribute to the bottom line so that we might rise up from the bottom of all the good lists. Without discounting the considerable economic development achievements of Gov. Barbour, I believe that all the car factories in the world are not going to cause our stock to rise. Move the Silicon Valley to the Mississippi Delta and we might climb a couple of ticks up the rankings. Maybe.
Mississippi needs more jobs, but what Mississippi really needs is to believe in itself. To realize that what exists here is worth fighting for, that all of our immeasurable [traits] amount to something good and true, that we may be last on a lot of lists but we cannot forever continue to let others paint our skies gray and demoralize us all. We need a true infrastructural overhaul in Mississippi if we want off the bottom of all the good lists. Not highways, school systems, factories or strip malls, but a creative infrastructure that will begin to stop the bleeding. We need an infrastructure for life, where there is greater comprehension of the phantoms that forge us. We are at the same time products of our stagnant environment and also accountable for the stagnation.
We provide so little culture and sophistication for these children that we spend so much to poorly educate. Yet we gave America most of its music, art and literature. And through our considerable faults held a mirror to the larger country so that it might see its own ailments. We need an infrastructure that transcends money. We need pure and simple creative support, an intangible, unquantifiable path to firm our ties that bind. We are a state of many creative people, people with an amazing capacity not only to preserve, but also to thrive despite. Mississippi must stop throwing so many of her children away in prisons and inadequate schools. Those things are fixable, not with more money, but by paying more attention. The money is there. The stewardship is not.
We need an infrastructure where we are slow to build bigger churches and quick to build more museums; to put more paintbrushes and violins in the hands of our children, to teach them song, propriety and foreign tongues; to make them read Aristotle, Carl Jung and Toni Morrison; to realize that in order to appreciate all the old myths properly, first we must learn them.
There is an obvious chicken-and-egg argument with my observations – that in order to grow these things we need more economic resources to attract more economic resources. I think that is the more difficult and unlikely path. Our riches as a state will never be of a monetary sort, but that does not mean we have to be poor forever. Money is but one option. Our abilities and potential are our best currency.
Our state symbol should not be a magnolia or a mockingbird. It should be an old sharecropper stringing twine to the side of a barn to make music since he had no money to buy a guitar. Or the old hillbilly farmer who made whiskey in a still of his own manufacture, with the parts he could gather, so that when the yearly drought or flood inevitably robbed sustenance, he could still feed his family.
In the press conference that followed our victory over Alabama this year, the remarks made were indicative of our program having finally turned a corner and that the future was bright. Coach Croom uttered one particular sentiment that I cannot recall verbatim but will attempt to reproduce here in spirit. He said that the Bulldog football team could do more for the state of Mississippi in three hours than most people could do in 30 years.
Here is a man who understands the power of the symbolic, the inherent value of the power of the spirit, of those intangibles on which no number, no word can be placed. Coach Croom and our Bulldog football team are not going to build for us a better quantifiable tomorrow. They can, however, make us believe that it can be done, by igniting us to strive, by galvanizing our resolve, by creating hope and honor and pride when the numbers would not otherwise allow it.
We are not last. We are not poor. This is not the least livable place on earth. Our virtues are plenty and are ones only we can define.