Mississippi is a very misunderstood place. People who are not from Mississippi, have never lived in Mississippi and have no ties to Mississippi still see us as cousin-marrying hicks who live like people once did back in the Tom Sawyer days.
I was flipping through the channels on my TV one day when I came across the “Martha Stewart Show.”
I am not a Martha fan and have absolutely no interest in her show, but she happened to be making something that looked interesting to me, so I stopped and watched for a few minutes.
As I began to watch it, a woman from Madison, Miss., called onto the show to talk with Stewart about what she was making.
When the caller mentioned she was from Mississippi, Stewart looked down at her hot glue gun with a concerned expression spread across her face. She then had the gall to ask, “Do you even have electricity in Mississippi?” to which the baffled caller answered, “Why, yes, we do.”
These people do not look away from the past and recognize the great people and things that have come from Mississippi.
Unfortunately, we do have our share of crazy people, and they are the ones who make the headlines and come to the attention of our “superiors.”
On the positive side, Mississippi has given the world Oprah Winfrey, William Faulkner, Elvis Presley and Jim Henson, all of whom changed their branches of entertainment forever.
However, Mississippi is known for many negative reasons, and the list of contributing people just keeps growing. The latest person added to the list is Thomas Steven Sanders, the “dead” man who recently murdered a girl from Las Vegas.
You probably have not heard of Sanders before now, but that is not surprising because he has supposedly been dead for 16 years. How can a man murder anyone if he’s not alive to commit the crime? That’s easy: he was never dead.
Sanders was declared legally dead 16 years ago even though he had not died.
Since then, he has been roaming around the country, and he has lived in five different states. He has even been arrested multiple times without anyone knowing his true identity.
This leads me to wonder how effective our legal system is. If the system is clumsy enough not to pick up on who this man really is, it seems like there are probably many innocent people wasting their time sitting in jail for mistakes made by the judicial system.
That, however, is a different topic for a different time.
Sanders met the young lady whom he murdered and her mother a few months ago while he was living in Nevada. The two women went missing shortly after.
The daughter’s skeleton was found in Louisiana on Oct. 8, but the mother is still missing. Authorities believe she is most likely dead as well.
From Mississippi men who fake their deaths and go on killing sprees to non-Mississippians who just choose our home as the place to commit their crimes, we just cannot seem to lose the “crazy” label.
Jared Mitchell Harris was recently arrested for the murder of 7-year-old Somer Thompson. He is from Florida, but he decided to help Mississippi get back into the news by being arrested in Meridian.
A more well-known case is probably that of Stephen Joseph Christopher who uploaded many videos of himself threatening President Obama on YouTube.
This man is from Wisconsin, but he was arrested in my hometown, Brookhaven.
These are not the people Mississippi should be known for. This state is not full of “zombie killers” and psychotic lunatics.
Mississippi is a beautiful state with tons of history, even though some of that history is negative.
It is time to forget the bad times of the past and focus on the notion of moving forward.
We are not river-bathing, cousin-marrying, barefooted, straw hat-wearing people anymore. We are civilized and rather sophisticated human beings.
Jay Ballard is a freshman majoring in chemistry. He can be contacted at [email protected].