South Carolina is known as the "Palmetto State" because we made the forts in Charleston during the Revolutionary War out of palmetto tree trunks. The tree's wood is so fibrous and soft, the British cannon fire was absorbed by the thick walls and did no damage to the Southern soldiers.
A lot of people think of Southerners, especially those of us from South Carolina, as dumb hicks. It just isn't so. Did you know Charles Townes, quantum physicist, Nobel prize winner and one of the developers of the first laser, is from my town? That's right, Greenville, SC.
I feel a revolution coming on. I want to rearrange how the rest of the country thinks about the South. I want to show people that we're not dumb, or backwards - at least not any more so than any other place in the country. To add my small part of effort to this huge goal, I will continue to write to the best of my ability and live my life as honestly and positively as I can.
What do you want to change? And how will you start making that change, today?
3 comments:
I want to change the way people look at science fiction - it's not all tech, folks!
And SC's Palmetto bug is the largest flying cockroach I have ever seen in my life...
I'm on board with Alex as far as treating science fiction with a little more respect. Sometimes I feel that the genre is like the literary relative no one wants to invite to dinner for fear of being embarrassed. What a shame.
It's all in the accent. If we heard more of Charles Towne's interveiws in that charming drawl, maybe we'd see Southerners in a different light. So far, it mostly makes people think of revivalist preachers.
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