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Miss Georgia, Queen of Dixieland, I am the son of your free-thinking, progressive sister, Maryland, Queen of the Chesapeake.
I left her to be graced by your Southern hospitality, charmed by your genteel manners, enamored by your rustic beauty, schooled in your rich history and welcomed into your warm embrace.
After four laps around the sun with you, I must ask you, “Miss Georgia, why do you treat your chillens so mean?”
But your son, Ray Charles made a song for you, I know. He did this despite how you treated his people in Albany back in 1961.
100 years before this, when a petition arose among your rebel sisters to divorce the rule of a President who threatened the legacy of human servitude, you were the fifth to raise your hand against him and sat second-in-command of this revolt. Are you still mad cuz Ol’ Sherman with his War of Northern Aggression burned a gash across your face from your hills of Atlanta to your shores of Savannah because of it? Talk about unconditional love for you, your children Ray, Brook and Gladys have, for you have not deemed yourself worthy.
But that was so long ago. Was it? What’s this I hear about you wanting to secede from the rule of a twice-elected Black President you tried everything in your powers to defeat? You turned down the volume on your black children’s voices and muted the screams of your poor children unable to ID themselves to you as if you didn't know them on Election Day. Anything you would do to have your way, Miss Georgia, and still your children sing your praises.
Your chillens are beautiful, white, black, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo and violet. They’re colored and colorful. I see their true colors shining through like a rainbow. I don’t know why you cherish them not, this radiant and vibrant bouquet of humanity and spirit. Their brilliance has been steadily glowing and growing for 42 years, and how many times have you tried to rain on their parade? Yet, without your Georgia thunderstorms, there would be no rainbow for your lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered children. In 1996 you slapped them with a state statute and a federal act to devalue their love and nullify their identity. For many of them, their love and identity were the only things that made life worth living and put the sweet in your bitter tea of bigotry you serve to them from the Gold Dome on an annual basis. Yet, they went on anyway, stiff-necked as they are to create families of their own to have something to love which would love them back and you attack even that in 2004 with a harsher slap of an amendment. You cruel, bitter ditch at the bottom of Appalachia, bless your devout, Protestant-Christian heart. We all know you mean well.
Now in 2013 as our nation moves with hellfire speed toward justice and equality for those you deem sinful, I find you thumping your bible in a fit of Southern Belle Meltdown, steadfastly promising to enforce your little mean-spirited laws against your own people. Are you afraid that it no longer holds water should we come for it? Miss Georgia, don’t you have greater evils to oppose…if we must call love evil? Your Queen City is mired in poverty in homelessness. Human trafficking and slavery still holds strong within your borders. Your chillens are scraping the bottom of the stock pot for jobs. Your sweet families have lost their homesteads at alarming rates over the last 5 years. You won’t ensure affordable healthcare. In fact, I find you fighting it tooth and press-on nail. Your traditional marriages you hold so dear now has the 8th highest divorce rate in the nation. So much for protecting traditional marriages by making trouble for LGBT families. Your Yankee sister, Massachusetts' divorce rates have dropped to the bottom in the union since she decided to be fair in 2004. I'm not superstitious, but...I'mjusayin'.
I know it’s a peculiar question to ask, but why do you treat your chillens so mean? Tell me, what does it do for you? What has it done for you? I don’t know why they just don’t up and leave you to live free where they can now, and let you rot in your state of hate. I guess, they love you too much to give up hope for a freer, kinder and more compassionate Miss Georgia.
At the ripe old age of 281, aren't you tired of being so mean? If not, it doesn't even matter now because we’re putting your ways into retirement and soon the grave. Then we will make our Southern Paradise right were we stay were everyone can live peachy-keen. I have seen the future and it is fast-approaching. We will live free and equal for all those who couldn’t be.
-Branden G. Mattox
