I didn’t realize how proud I was of where I’m from until I moved away.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I suppose my pride started on the internet. I’m from North Carolina – more specifically, from a chain of islands off the coast of North Carolina. If you’ve been here awhile, you know this. If not, well, now you know. At any rate – I never often found other people from North Carolina on the internet. It just didn’t happen. In recent years I’ve heard of quite a few more people who live there, but still not nearly as many as I’ve met who live…say, up north. I guess because most people were too busy out working the farm or surfing or being hippies to use the internet. I don’t know.
A few months ago, Hurricane Irene hit. I lost contact with my family for 24 hours completely because a crucial strip of road that carried the electricity and phone lines to my parents island – which is only accessible by ferry – got washed out. No…this wasn’t a normal road wash out. A new inlet was cut through the sand. It took roads, electric poles, and parts of homes with it. For 24 hours, I was paralyzed with fear that I would never talk to my parents again.
When the lines came back up and the photos came in, it was terrible. Friends of mine were cleaning out their entire lives from their homes that had been flooded. Places I had played as a child were completely destroyed. My family was fine, of course, but one thing struck me – while all this was happening, the news was focused on New York. New Jersey. When they did get back to North Carolina, they skimmed over it and didn’t mention them at all. I begged, pleaded, sobbed at the television to show me something familiar. To show me home. To show people what had happened.
But they didn’t.
Now, it’s all eyes on us.
I still don’t consider myself a Wisconsin resident. I don’t know if I ever will. I’ve lived here for nearly two years and still carry my North Carolina ID, and it’s going to break my heart to turn it in when we move in a few weeks to get a Wisconsin license. I’ll probably be here for years more telling people “no, I’m from North Carolina.” They have my heart. My family is there. It’s Where I’m From.
Yesterday this amendment passed that…to be honest, I’m not surprised that it did so much as disappointed. It was being publicized as the “gay marriage amendment” – basically, that it would officially once-and-for-all state that marriage is between a man and a woman. Except it did worse.
It also took away the rights of long-term couples who aren’t married. Any kind of civil union or domestic partnership. It’s going to make life dangerous and uncomfortable for a lot of women in abusive relationships with men who are not their husband. It’s a very scary bill.
And it sucks, yes. But here’s what sucks more – the hate that followed.
It’s been very hard for me to be online since last night. The hatred, the animosity that’s been flowing in. People constantly talking about how bad North Carolina is as a whole, and how bad everyone there must be. Making jokes about how redneck and backwards our state is. And worse – threatening to boycott the state by not coming to vacation there.
Let me tell you a few things.
First and foremost – I have traveled the entire state of North Carolina. I know many people can’t say that about where they live, but I have. I’ve been up and down the whole coast, to the built-up city beaches of Emerald Isle to the homes built in the sand accessible only by 4-wheel drive in Carova. I’ve been so far west, through the mountains and the Nanthahalla Pass, that you could throw a stone and it’d land in Tennessee. I’ve been to the rolling hills of the Piedmont, to the wealthy cities (and less fortunate suburbs) of the Triangle, to Greensboro, to Charlotte, to Greenville, to Boone, to Ahoskie, to Kinston – I have seen North Carolina.
And, yes – we can be a little old school.
What saddens me is that when people stop to say how backwards our state is and how redneck or boondocks they don’t look at the larger problem. I have met a lot of people who genuinely believe that everything they see on the news is True. That means that if the news tells them that this amendment is going to protect families and if it isn’t passed that everyone is going to hell, yes, a lot of people are going to believe that. But that isn’t their fault. That doesn’t make them bigots. That makes them ill informed, and we need to work to inform these people better.
I will say it here and now: I did not realize that the news could lie to you until I moved to Wisconsin.
I didn’t. I just didn’t. I didn’t know why people hated Fox News so much, I didn’t know why the news was bad. Then I moved up here. I took part in a protest. And I watched them tear us apart on the news and straight up lie.
Meanwhile, people back home didn’t understand why I was at the protest - because they genuinely believed everything they saw on TV.
That is the real problem here. North Carolina is full of a lot of really great, really genuinely nice people. Many of them – maybe not the full 60% of voters who voted in favor of amendment one, but I’m going to guess a huge chunk – are just ill informed. I’m willing to bet that a ton of common law married couples or civil unions with straight folks voted to take away their own rights on top of gay marriage rights, without even realizing what they did.
We need to EDUCATE, not hate.
Lastly – to those of you that wish to boycott, STOP. Please. Yes, the North Carolina government relies heavily on tourism tax dollars. But you know who else does?
My parents, who work for vacation rental homes. If you don’t come on vacation, they are out of work. They cannot pay their bills. They cannot feed my cat, which would make me really sad.
My friends Ruth and Bob who own a restaurant on the tiny island of Ocracoke. The restaurant is only open from March to October. If you don’t come, they cannot survive for the winter.
If the rental homes do not get business, the restaurants will suffer. If the restaurants suffer, the local fishermen suffer. Eventually they’ll all have to pack up and move up somewhere else – bringing the pacifists, the hippies, the bigots, the liberals, the republicans, the democrats - EVERYBODY with them.
You aren’t going to be telling the government that they suck. The governmetn didn’t do this. A bunch of ill-informed people did this. A bunch of people who can be educated, who can be brought to see the light, who can be talked to and encouraged.
But you won’t be hurting the government. You’ll be hurting my parents. My friends. My cat. People who did nothing wrong – and many, many people who were even against Amendment One. In the days leading up to the vote on Facebook, I saw nothing but “VOTE AGAINST” messages from my friends. Good people are out there – they just didn’t win this time.
Think before you speak. This is my home. A lot of people made a really bad decision – I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Say what you want about the bad decisions, the politicians, the people who are genuinely bigots – but please don’t hate on my home state. North Carolina will always have my heart, and if I know North Carolinians the way I do – I can tell you that they aren’t going to take this laying down. We aren’t going to settle without a fight.
Uhg. I’m torn. On the one hand, I agree with you that this kind of backlash is like using a sledgehammer when what is needed is a scalpel. Yet, at the same time, part of me feels like there need to be clear and swift consequences for such an institutionalized act of hate/ignorance. Your argument makes sense -the idea that when the backlash takes a broad approach and paints the whole state with a single brush the story of individual people gets lost. Real people get hurt. But, that’s kinda what the backlash is about in the first place. I stick with my original word. Uhg. Ugly all around.
@Jarod – I definitely think that we need to do something about the ignorance, but the thing that hurts most to me is that…well, when people don’t know better, they don’t know better. So we need to SHOW them better. We need to show them happy gay marriages (and straight common-law marriages/civil unions, for that matter, since those got nuked along with it) and show them the facts and inform them better. We need to help.
It definitely is ugly all around, and that’s probably the best way to put that. I just wish people cared more about hurting others – from BOTH sides of the fence.
There are dangers with broad-brush backlash, some of which are just counterproductive. The highly vitiriolic responses some folks have had are adversarial and divisive. When you begin a conversation by telling me I am an ignorant bigot and you hate me, you are just turning me further against you. I won’t hear anything you say after that. It makes everything worse.
Secondly, we tend to have this monolithic view of populations. We tend to accuse organizations or regions of acting of their own accord. North Carolina did this. The Government did that. Microsoft made this happen. Whatever. But institutions do not make decisions. Individuals do. And the reasons behind any individual decision can be quite complex and varied. Is some of it hate-motivated? Sure. Is some of it ignorance? Sure. Are there a thousand other reasons? Are some of them entirely rational but based on bad assumptions? Are some of them even rational and valid? Maybe. North Carolina is not a collective hive-mind. And when you assume that any population is a collective, and react accordingly, you are choosing to neglect all of the people who acted for different reasons than the one you are ascribing the entire population.
The irony here is that expressing collective vitirol against the entire population of North Carolina, the use of slurs like bigot and redneck, is doing exactly what we are decrying. You are judging a population of over 9 million people based on the actions of just over half of them and using that to reinforce steretypes. It is especially ironice when the battle cry involves living for love instead of hatred.
I think this post hits it right on the head. It is easy, in the fury, to lose sight of the human beings on the other side. It is easy to treat them as a collective of stereotypes and respond to the entire collective with rage and anger. But it does no one any good. Not you. Not them. No one.
It never occurred to me to cancel my Outer Banks vacation. I can agree that the backlash is rather harsh. It’s an unfortunate dog-piling that happens these days. A lot of it is all talk, no action, but in the heat of the moment, it’s hard not to ignore.
I see the points you make. They’re valid.
I guess that my response to your plea for education and patience is that it’s *2012*. Having a LGBT friend or relative isn’t exotic anymore; it just is, for large swaths of the American population. And so when you say “we need to EDUCATE, not hate”, my response is that we’ve had well on two decades of mainstream exposure to gay relationships in the media — at some point, when do we start holding people responsible for being ill-informed, as you put it? How much more “education” do they need?
Because none of this happened in a vacuum, you know? The same people that watch FOX News also watch “Glee” on FOX. They probably watch Ellen Degeneres’ show. They probably watched “Will & Grace” when it was on the air. I could go on and on, but you get the idea — their lives are regularly exposed to LGBT folks on TV, and given that approximately 10% of the population is gay, they probably know a gay person at work or church.
And they *still* voted to curtail their rights.
So yes, education is necessary. And so is confrontation. I think this is what’s behind the calls for boycotts of North Carolina. People want to make it *very clear* that what happened yesterday was WRONG. And I think this is what’s missing from your very thoughtful essay.
How do we make it clear to the voters of North Carolina that they voted the wrong way?
I do ask that with some trepidation. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, which was every bit as culturally Southern as any place in Western North Carolina; and I know that Carolinians don’t cotton well to people from outside telling them how to live their lives (which is why a boycott will fail).
One big thing with North Carolina – I say this as someone who comes from living in a place where people don’t often drive cars and we have no major chains or grocery stores and you can’t even get a gallon of milk after 9 PM in the Summer – there are many areas that are every bit as rural and every bit as “boondocks” as the stereotypes make them out to be. I touched on this briefly on Twitter (though I’m not sure who saw it, to be honest!) – I’ll give you a great example: I used to know an extended family who lived in one of the poor foothills areas of North Carolina. They had television, but only used it to watch things like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. They got all of their news from the local newspaper and from people at church on Sunday mornings. If they used the internet, it was to play games. Many of them never graduated from High School.
This was in 2010.
There are plenty of people like this. The family I mentioned – all of them were extremely politically charged. Extremely. They were die-hard voters and faithful Americans. But if they went to church on Sunday morning and they were told by word of mouth “This is going to keep gays from making our marriages as straight Christians invalid!” – or something else completely heinous, just using that as an example – they would believe it. It’s how they got their news.
We need to work to speak with these people, with friends and families, to show them facts. To tell our newspapers and local news media that it’s wrong to broadcast opinions that don’t share all of the facts. To tell the government that they need to be making sure these people actually are truly well informed. Maybe write letters to the editors of papers to tell them what the bill does and see if they can publish it.
It’s never going to be a perfect world, and maybe there is no one solution – but I see this as part of the problem. It’s just one tiny step, but even in 2012 there are people who still don’t get their news from the internet, still don’t watch shows like Glee or even Ellen, and still don’t know. It’s a sad truth and one that maybe, just maybe, we can all work together to move towards fixing.
After all, it’s 2012 – and that tiny island I’m from still doesn’t have a McDonalds or a place to buy bread if you want toast at 2 AM. That’s saying something.
As someone from North Carolina (Morganton, know it?), I just want to say thank you for writing this. I couldn’t agree with you more. I voted against Amendment 1, and told everyone that I could that the language was so vague that it would do MUCH more than ban gay marriage. No one believed me. I guess everyone will see soon enough. Even if it is a little redneck and boondocks, it’s home. I’ve been a lot of places, and always happy to be back in North Carolina.