DEAR SEAN:
I just read a few things you wrote, and I have to say that I refuse to see life through the rose-tinted glasses you obviously wear. I can’t agree with the bull (bleep).
Have you seen what’s on television? This country is in the worst trouble we’ve been in and you’re talking about happy-go-lucky (double bleep)…
The last thing we need is another ignorant redneck on Facebook telling everyone how great things are... So go back to your cornfield and just shut the (unprintable word) up.
Regards,
CALLING IT LIKE I SEE IT IN BIRMINGHAM
DEAR BIRMINGHAM:
Firstly: Nice to meet you. Remind me to invite you to my annual coon roast and rat-killing party. I'd like you to meet my uncle—who holds the national award for most tobacco-spit stains on a truck interior.
Secondly: I can bear being called a redneck—I come from a long line of men with farmer tans and bad handwriting.
But ignorant.
I would rather be quartered with a cheese grater and strung up in front of the A&P.
Look, maybe you’re right about the world. Maybe this is
the biggest trouble we’ve ever known.
Maybe when my great-great grandaddy marched in the Battle of Cumberland Church—during a time of 620,000 civil soldier-deaths on American soil—it was only child’s play.
Maybe the Great Depression itself—a period when those fancy Birmingham subdivisions were once pinewood poverty shacks full of starving kids—was peanuts compared to this.
Maybe the Second World War—60 million deaths worldwide—was a walk in the park compared to your Facebook feed.
Maybe.
But does that mean I should ignore those like Kiera Larsen? She died shoving a toddler out of the path of an oncoming SUV. She ran in front of the vehicle, screaming. The toddler lived.
Kiera was 10 years old.
Or: Lourdes Sanchez, the black newborn whose drug-addict parents left her in a dumpster. She got adopted by a Mexican-American…