[Mb-civic] A Song of Sorrow -- and Endurance - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

A Song of Sorrow -- and Endurance

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, October 2, 2005; Page B07

One thing that poor whites and blacks shared in the segregated South of 
my childhood was a talent for romanticizing misery in music and in word. 
Maybe we got good at it because we had so many chances to practice.

Back then, even the expressions of that common gift were delineated by 
race: Whites used country music to elevate cheatin' hearts and dead-end 
jobs to epic status on their records and radio stations. Blacks sang 
gospel and blues to make mythic the sorrows and injustices they would 
eventually overcome.

The outward styles merged as the South changed and as the vast misery 
gap between the region and the rest of the nation nar-

rowed. But the underlying talent for romanticizing hardship -- for 
coupling the inevitability of hard times with the determination to see 
them through -- should now become part of the Gulf Coast's reconstruction.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita should give rise to the kind of great music 
and art that is frequently born in disaster's wake. And don't be 
surprised if the folks who were actually shoved around by these 
destructive storms are quicker than outsiders to put the damage into 
perspective and replace anger with hope.

Life in these dire circumstances is the flip side of the old joke about 
kicking people when they are down: When else can you kick them? When 
else do humans get to show their best qualities except when they are 
faced with the worst that life has to offer?

Look, the poor people of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas already know 
how part of the story ends, even as Congress starts it by appropriating 
tens of billions of reconstruction dollars they will never see. 
Fast-talking city slickers of all races and the politically adept of all 
persuasions will find ways to corral those dollars and leave the poor 
once again with the crumbs. Why would this be different from everything 
they have known before?

Even a medium-good band such as Sawyer Brown can rhapsodize about the 
South as a land of "burnin' bridges on a rocky road," a land where 
people reassure themselves by "trying to build a fire in the rain." The 
imagery of struggling on was expressed long before Katrina and Rita 
visited and Brownie did a great job. I can't wait to hear the song about 
Brownie and the Great Flood.

I don't mean to suggest that whites and blacks have shared the region's 
misery equally. One of the major points about segregation was to make 
sure that whites knew there were people in deeper misery than they were 
so they would feel better about their lot. Those people were most often 
blacks, of course.

But it worked the other way, too. In South Carolina, when I was growing 
up, the state consistently ranked one rung from the bottom in per capita 
income, life expectancy, education and almost every other civic 
measurement. "Thank God for Mississippi" was therefore a popular saying.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/01/AR2005100100929.html
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