Hillbilly Review Board #3

Hillbillies, get over yourselves.
There is a very small tiny insignificant movement afoot in WV blog circles to overcome the stereotypes that these folks claim are oh so oppressive to their lives as West Virginians. Mostly, these folks are white urbane pseudo sophisticates who want WV to be some socially hip mixture of urbane and rural culture. . . bluegrass and REM, pulled pork with demi-glace, corporate board rooms and ramp festivals. . . you get the idea.

So these semi-educated semi-professional weenies think WVians are misaligned. Well welcome to the fucking club bozos. Almost every state in the union has a stereotype that it has to overcome. Let’s look at a couple of them, shall we?

New Jersey – The toxic waste dump state.
New York – loud obnoxious fast talking pricks
Florida – Floriduh
Texas – ignorant cowboy morons (ok, that one’s not a stereotype).
California – the stoner state.
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, etc. – they might not be hillbillies, but they suffer the same stereotypes.

Who the fuck cares what some people from some other state think about your state. It’s just silly shit. Sit down and tell a black person how prejudiced you think people are against the people in your state. Be prepared to be ridiculed and generally made to look like a fool. . . but hey, you’re probably used to it by now. There are people in this country today who battle prejudice everyday of their lives. They have to teach their children how to maneuver in a world that is going to try and keep them down and oppress their goals at every turn in the road no matter where they go or what they do. So what the fuck? Gimme a break with your whiney little baby shit. As long as you’re in your own state, what some other bozo in the next state thinks doesn’t matter a whole hell of a lot, now does it? When you go out-of-state are you going to wear a fucking sign on your ass that says “I’m a dumb hillbilly?” No, you’re going to be treated like any other white person. “Prejudice.” If you had any fucking clue about what prejudice is like for people who REALLY have to fight it on a day-to-day basis, you’d shut your fucking pie holes.

So just get over all this ‘poor me I’m being scorned’ bullshit. If you feel you’re being viewed as an ignorant hillbilly, make sure you’re not acting like an ignorant hillbilly. Get on with your life and be the cool hip urbane person you want to be and live the life you want to live. Someone else’s attitude about your state or geographic locale is NOT your problem. Want to know what your problem is? Here’s a hint: Take a look in the closest mirror.

Personally, I’m glad people from other states don’t want to come here and I think WV should pretty much stay the way it is. I like our sparse stable population. I like our low crime rate and I like our low cost of living. I could never live the life I live and have lived anywhere else. I have built and lived in a house that people in other parts of the country would have thought was a mansion costing over $1 million, but here, it was a fraction of that cost. I live on a beautiful big farm that in any other part of the country I never could have afforded, but here, the cost of farm land is relatively cheap and when I decided I had to get back to my roots, I could afford it. I don’t lock my doors. Ever. I leave the keys in my car. I don’t worry about leaving my teenaged daughter home alone overnight. I can go out onto my front porch in my underwear or no underwear if I want to anytime of day or night. My taxes are almost zero compared to people who live in groovy places.
Life is better in West Virginia BECAUSE other people don’t really want to come here. BECAUSE they think it’s some backwater (which it is, so what?).
So folks, why don’t you change your own attitude. Why don’t you work to make West Virginia a better place instead of worrying what everyone else thinks of West Virginia. It really is a juvenile pursuit to try and change the way other people think about you by trying to talk them out of it. You aint gonna talk them out of thinking you’re an asshole. You’ve got to quit acting like an asshole. You aint gonna talk them out of thinking you’re a juvenile little dip shit. You’ve got to quit acting like a juvenile little dip shit.

Oh, and I think I insulted most hillbillies in my opening line. The folks who give a shit about what everybody else thinks probably aint much of hillbillies. See, the hillbillies I know just don’t give a flying shit what you or anyone else thinks about them. So my fellow hillbillies, I apologize for lumping you in with these yuppish bores who think it is their duty to change West Virginia’s image for their own sake.