West ‘By God’ Virginia
This evening I remembered a conversation I had with my wife a month or so ago. At the time I thought, ” I need to remember to put something about this on the man blog. So here it is. You may recall a while back our illustrious vice president making a comment about his lineage during a press conference. The comment went something like, “I have Cheney’s on both sides of my family and I’m not even from West Virginia.” When I heard this I was furious and I mean mad. It was the type of thing that the more I thought about it the more angry I became. When I shared this with my wife she asked, “Why are you so worked up about this?” I replied, “We are both from West Virginia. How can you not be upset?” I went on to explain that the real reason I was mad was that being from West Virginia we have grown up hearing the negative WV jokes, having to deal with the stunned looks from people when they find out we are educated and from WV, and explaining to people in Oregon and other parts of the country that WV is an actual state and not merely western Virginia. For some reason people in the rest of the country seem to think we are all back hills, incestuous, banjo playing, moon shine making, no shoes wearing, one-toothed bumpkins. I have come to accept that everyone from West ‘By God’ Virginia gets painted with the same brush. People are allowed to be misinformed and make assumptions about other people groups.
What I do have a problem with is when the person who would be president if anything ever happened to Bush, who wouldn’t even be in office without WV by the way, chooses to perpetuate the hillbilly stereotype on a national stage. It is impossible for any state to rid itself of unfair labels when those charged with caring for and running the entire country, not just those states with oil, choose to further ignorance. This is not an anti-Bush/Cheney political rant, we can get into pure politics at another point. This is a, “Those with power of influence over others have a responsibility to make sure the things they are saying are not bigoted, misinformed, ignorant, racist, or perpetuating stereotypes” rant, I know it doesn’t just role off the tongue. If someone claims to love and serve this country, as Dick Cheney does, they should love and serve the country as a whole. If they don’t want to do that they should at least stop short of actively damaging the reputation of the parts they couldn’t care less about.
