Racist bastards.

For several wonderful years, I lived in a place called Gilmer County in the mountains of northeast Georgia. It was wonderful because I lived on 120 heavily forested acres that my parents had bought there. Our house was way down in a deep valley surrounded by old hardwood trees beside a spring-fed stream and our driveway was a mile long. Our nearest neighbor was two and a half miles distant. The nearest paved road three miles. The nearest public phone more than five miles away. This was the 70s, when there was only one option for phones: Ma Bell. They couldn’t figure a way to turn a profit by running that much line to our house, so they didn’t.

At any rate, I loved growing up there. I was so close to the hills and the trees and the wildlife I came to love. I even made a few friends there. But, largely, the people of Gilmer County were a horrid lot. It’s no wonder that James Dickey used Gilmer County as the template for the location of his monster-story, DELIVERANCE. And the people he wrote about in that novel…well, I lived among them, and he was not kidding, and he was definitely not writing in metaphor when he described those creeps.

But, because of the friends I did make in that place, and because of the beauty of the county, I still have some nice memories and some kind feelings for the place. So I found an online forum for the county seat of Gilmer County: Ellijayforum. I hooked up there with an eye toward finding out what had changed in the decades since I moved away, and what remained the same.

Sadly, what had remained the same is that a fair portion of the population remains (as then) hideously racist. Gilmer County was easily one of the most monstrously xenophobic places I’ve ever visited, and definitely the most xenophobic I’ve ever lived. A huge chunk of the native folk there are suspicious of every outsider, and distrustful of them to an almost pathological degree. And, of course, as the county then was 100% Anglo, the poisonous race hatred could almost be seen to be dripping from the rotted fangs of the inbred, mouth-breathing white boys.

At any rate, I started reading and posting at the Ellijayforums and quickly discovered that the place was crawling with the same racist assholes who had lived there when I was a kid. When I lived there, they would openly brag how they would (and did) murder anyone of color who tried to move into the county. Today, these same racist dogs have to put up with Hispanic citizens in their county, because the folk who run the apple orchards and other large businesses there want migrant laborers to settle down and fill the job vacancies. With the rich bringing in these new “coloreds”, the monster racists are left to gnash their green teeth and spew their venom. They soon were using the forum to scream about “the Mexicans” and the “brown-skins” and announce their “Minute Man” meetings.

Alas, the forum owner tried to clean up the board. Apparently they didn’t want the town to be known as a center of vile racism. But they couldn’t police the board fast enough, and so it was taken down, and now, this is what remains of it:

http://www.downtownellijay.com/forums/

Kind of a clever solution, but it’s sad to see them shut it down. So it goes. The bad guys can gather at the local Shoneys and Heil Hitler among themselves and commit buggery in the woods.



Let ‘em rot.