Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now.
Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete
the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. — from The Talmud

If someone were to ask me about living in the Deep South, I would liken it to being in the surf on the Gulf Coast. You can’t fundamentally change it, so you have to come to it knowing what it is. The forces that create the crashing waves are enormous and beautiful and intense and violent and envigorating and indifferent, and you only see it a little of it from where you stand. Sometimes you lean into what’s coming, sometimes you dive under, sometimes you choke on what overtakes you. And when you tire, you will have to be the one to step away because it can outlast you and keep going.

On the positive side, the culture of the Deep South has given the world some wonderful things, among them our music and our food. Jazz and blues are at the core of most American music, and both came from the Deep South of the late 1800s and early 1900s— New Orleans, Mississippi, all the way up to the Carolinas. From those styles have emerged country and soul, gospel and rock: Hank from Alabama, Elvis from Mississippi, James Brown from Georgia. The list could go on and on. And the food that emerged from this confluence of cultures – African, French, Native American, Spanish – gave us country cooking and a couple of different kinds of barbecue, Louisiana’s gumbo and Mississippi’s tamales, Low Country boil and she crab soup.

However, the culture of the Deep South has also proven to be at the hardened core of the worst impulses in the American Experiment. In the early days, after moving shamelessly into inhabited lands, European-descended settlers and frontiersmen purported indigenous people to be violent savages, then used that twisted narrative to employ violence in . . . self-defense. Later, the region’s use of enslaved people made it infamous as the worst place for an African-descended person to end up. Though Virginia’s Robert E. Lee is the Confederacy’s most recognizable figure, the leaders in Deep Southern states, like William Lowndes Yancey and Jefferson Davis, were among the fiercest proponents. After Reconstruction ended, a recalcitrant culture “redeemed” itself by fashioning a new brand of injustice, creating what became known as Jim Crow. In the 1930s, the region’s backwardness led President Franklin Roosevelt to call it “the nation’s number one economic problem.” By the middle of the twentieth century, it was the Deep South – Alabama and Mississippi, in particular – that offered the strongest and most violent opposition to the Civil Rights movement. After those political and legal defeats, Deep Southern states formed a wall that disallowed the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Later in the 1980s and ’90s, it was leaders in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama who led prolonged fights to keep the rebel flag atop the state capitols. Today, more than two decades into the twenty-first century, everyone sees that our region will stay on trend.

Herein lies the rub. As a long-time writer and teacher, I’d like to believe that, if people are shown the facts and understand a situation better, more people would make different and better choices. But no matter how many times the people of the Deep South are shown what we have done, even to ourselves, there is not nearly enough movement toward something better.

Yet, I still see hope. I quoted a passage from The Talmud at the opening of this little missive, and I believe the ideas expressed there offer our best good hope for anything beyond what we see and have seen. First, Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Opportunities for systemic change may get squashed over and over, but the weight shouldn’t lead us to quitting on each other. Second, Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. Not tomorrow, not eventually— now. Each minute, each chance, each opportunity. It’ll make a difference to the people who are there at the time. And last, You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. As I reach late middle age, I don’t approach anything with the long view that I had as a young man. Whatever legacy I’m going to leave is mostly in place. But as long as I’m still here . . . there’s plenty to be done— Always is.