11 Reasons Why 4-H is Better Than Scouts

After having some experience in both now, I’m starting to think that 4-H is a much superior program to Girl Scouts/Cub Scouts.  I’ve said it before, there are some flaws and not-too-great points about scouting.  Scouting has become a lot of make-us-money profiteering on children, where more of the funds appear to end up in CEO and staff member pockets instead of letting poor kids get to camp – and they try to do good, but I think the size of the organizations and their territories get in their own way.  Here’s some of the reasons why I lean towards 4-H these days:

1. 4-H is for everyone.  I don’t have to dance around a boy organization and a girl organization having meetings or events at the same time.  Or, almost as bad, having to dedicate two different days of the week to running back and forth to meetings.  When you have kids of different genders, it gets a little tough to participate in activities that are only for boys or only for girls.

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2. 4-H has a small time commitment, unless you want more.  At least here, we have County Council meetings on a monthly meetings basis, not weekly.  That makes 4-H an easy fit into our schedule.  Now, you don’t have to join County Council, and you cant still participate in any other 4-H programs.  There is no minimum or maximum participation requirements as far as joining clubs or teams.  If you join multiple clubs/teams or do different projects, that will, of course, take more time, but it’s easy to test the waters without committing several hours a week and a few hundred bucks in fees, dues, and uniforms.  To the contrary, you cannot attend most Boy Scout events if you do not join a troop.

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3. 4-H does not involve badge earning.  Instead of giving kids patches as incentives to do things, 4-H encourages children to do what they enjoy, because everything finds its way into 4-H.  In fact, my daughter just presented a project tonight on what real animals were matches to Pokemon – she loved thinking about it, creating it, talking about it (in a room of 15 kids all 5-10 years older than her, as she’s the only Cloverbud in our 4-H).  And, my son did a District Project Achievement presentation, where he wrote a 5-6 minute speech titled:  Why Minecraft is Better Than Disney Infinity 2.0.  He loved writing it and setting up the screen shots for his visual aids – and, out of roughly 40 kids from about 40 counties, he won first place in the General Recreation category (one of the bigger ones).

   Unfortunately, badge and award requirements in scouting can do the opposite and squash a child’s creativity and enjoyment in the program because you have to do very set things, them move on to the next badge.  For instance, we are not a camp-happy family.  Nature is dirty, bugs make me scream, and I pay too much for a climate controlled house to go hang out in the woods for fun.  However, if my son doesn’t camp, he gets chopped off at the knees for multiple achievements, ranks, and badges.  If my son goes into Boy Scouts and wants to achieve the first rank of Tenderfoot, for example, he is required to do at least one camp out, and that requirement will only increase as the ranks advance.

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4. 4-H does not spend much time fundraising.  One of my biggest gripes with Girl Scouts is that they shove Fall Product down your throat in September, and that is what the world centers around until November-ish.  Then cookies start in January and they aren’t finished until April/May.  In Girl Scouts, our whole year revolves around selling, and the return to the troop really sucks (ie, around $0.40 on a $4 box of cookies, or $1-2 on a $30 magazine subscription).  Boy Scouts has their annual fundraisers too, but they aren’t anywhere near as pushy with it – although, there is usually the annual Friends of Scouting campaign that becomes very high pressure, as they want you to publicly donate, usually during a major troop event.4-H will do casual fundraisers when they need to get something accomplished, but it does not come with all the high-pressure end-of-the-world hype that scouting makes you feel.

   In Girl Scouts, you even earn badges for selling, and if you object and don’t want to participate in selling, they often act as if you’re less of a scout or not properly contributing to your troop.  4-H picks more practical fundraisers (t-shirt sales, pumpkin patches, wreath sales, etc) that offer a club/team a much higher return for the money they collect.  As far as I’ve seen, there is no national 4-H fundraising campaigns.  Well, scratch that, there is the paper clovers you can seasonally buy at Tractor Supply Co., but that isn’t the kids going door-to-door or harassing all their relatives to buy something from them.  And, because staff in 4-H is paid through state colleges, grants, city funding, or other such means, that means they don’t make kids sell cookies to pay their higher ranking employees’ six-figure salaries (all while telling the public “your purchase helps girls!” – well, a few pennies on each dollar, maybe…).

   So, if a kid in 4-H is asking you to buy something, all proceeds are going directly to the club/team who earned the money, not to an overseeing council or national office.

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5. 4-H is very affordable.  4-H tends to be an organization sponsored by colleges, or other similar venues, meaning it’s really affordable without a lot of overhead to make up for.  My monthly Cub Scout dues for one child is $10, and I believe another $15 a year for his required registration – which isn’t awful by any means.  But, then you need the $30 shirt, the $40 pants, a $13 belt, a $15 hat, a $10 troop shirt (for when you can “dress down”), a minimum $12 scout book (you need a new one every year as a Cub Scout, and you’ll likely need additional books as your Boy Scout progresses.  The boys write in these books, so buying used or letting younger siblings reuse books is not always a great option.  Then you also add in whatever other odds, ends, and fees come up along the way with scout activities.Realistically, the volunteers in scouts are just recovering their expenses at $10 a month, they are NOT the bad guys in this crazy pricing.  Actually, I feel bad for them, because they have little to no recourse is a kid doesn’t pay dues, and they have to buy themselves uniforms, books, and supplies out-of-pocket too.  However, on a national level, these little kids equal big business in terms of purchase requirements.

   To the contrary, my monthly 4-H dues for two children is $0 a year for County Council.  There is no uniform or required materials in most clubs, so that’s also $0 a year.  Signing up with 4-H in general was $0.  Now, if you join additional clubs or teams in 4-H, you may have fees involved, but they tend to be minimal.  For example, the archery team costs $100 a year to join, but that includes weekly practices at a professional shooting range, competition fees, and a team shirt (equipment is your responsibility to purchase as well).  I believe the Robotics Club was also $100 for the school year, but consider that our volunteer instructor is an actual engineer and that the kids use $800 Lego Robotic kits paired with $300+ laptops – it’s not an outrageous fee overall.  Horse Club charges $20 a year to join, but if you participate in shows, obviously, you will end up paying entry fees as well.

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6. 4-H offers camps that are actually affordable.  It made my eye twitch when Girl Scouts mailed me their camp flier, and the DAY CAMPS were running $500 for a five day program!  Who has that kind of money?!  Oh, but for each 10,000 boxes of cookies you sell, the Council will knock $10 off of your camp fees!  Are you kidding me?Comparably, 4-H camp was 5 days/4nights at $230 – AND, if you wrote an essay about why you wanted to go to camp, they’d offer that writer up to a $150 grant to go!  All that time at camp and a merciful price and I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO SELL A THING TO “EARN” IT?!?!  Don’t let scouts lie to you – 4-H owns their own camp grounds just like the scouts do, so they are not subletting locations to get a cheaper rate!

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7. 4-H pushes their members to make portfolios.  Portfolios are basically life resumes that tell who a child is.  It lists all the activities they do or titles they’ve earned, and it includes a good number of photos.  I can’t stress enough why this is a good thing.  It’s telling kids to celebrate their accomplishments, no matter what they are, while also teaching them the kinds of things that they want to pick out for job resumes later in life.  Plus, the kids will have college application supplements ready to go when they’re asked about their activities and achievements.

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8. 4-H has Project Achievement, and projects are as open as the imagination.  There are some basic guidelines, mostly in regards to a time minimum/maximum, but, aside from that, the sky is the limit on what you can present about.  My son was very happy to do a project on Minecraft.

   The DPA is not just a silly little piece of busywork to earn a patch, my son’s DPA went to a regional competition where he had to stand in front of a room full of kids and judges and “wow” them with his presentation.  Here is my son’s project.  He has never spoken publicly before and has always hated the idea, but he managed to get up there, and slowly loosen up and he went on.

   
   Not too shabby for a 4th grader doing this 100% from scratch with no help (okay, I did glue the pictures to the board so they’d be straight, but the rest was him).
   Being able to speak publicly about anything is so important.  We have too many kids who can speak to a camera for YouTube videos, but they’re shaking in fear if they have to recite a poem in class.  Being able to thoughtfully write out a presentation with visual aids is such a good habit to get into for high school, college, and future jobs; not to mention, the DPA offers a lot of practice with public speaking, and I’m very pleased that my son’s able to get his feet wet in presentations by doing any subject he desires.  Then he gets to have passion in the project and he cares about what he’s doing.  That way, when teachers later assign busywork speeches that may feel stupid or unrelatable, my son already has a strong foundation to deconstruct what needs to be done and how to do it.

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9. 4-H doesn’t kick you to the curb if you want to participate in your own way.  My daughter left scouts because the drama levels got too high, and the constant push/stress to sell became too aggravating.  In 4-H, if you don’t come to 3 meetings in a row, you aren’t looked down upon or punished via a lack of badges/promotions (unless, of course, you’re on a team that needs you to show up to practice).  If you don’t want to do a DPA in 4-H, you aren’t required to do one.  If you don’t want to be in horse club, you can still attend the other 4-H clubs/activities.  If you just want to sign up for camps and not worry about clubs or teams, you can do that too!  4-H is an inclusive program, not an exclusive one.

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10. The kids in 4-H are more supportive and less over-bearing, high-maintenance nightmares.  My kid tends to be a bully magnet.  He’s in the state gifted program, and he fits the stereotype of a more docile, timid person.  Unfortunately, we are in an overly-competitive alpha dog area, where, even if you cannot be the best at something, you will bully the others around you so that you look superior.  We’re not from here, so that is not how we behave at all, and it’s very hard to survive in school and scouts when everyone is itching to mow you down and find their self-confidence by chipping away at yours.  Even at Cub Scouts the other kids will loudly bark in my son’s face every time he speaks.  Frankly, a lot of the kids around here are overly-entitled jerks.

    However, in 4-H, even the competitive aspects end up being fairly cooperative.  If you enter the DPA, all the other kids in your county will likely be working in a different category, so you aren’t directly competing.  That means it’s okay to help and be nice to others, because they aren’t your competition.  If you’re on the Poultry Judging team, you all work together to submit your answers, and every team there can have the right answer.  Even if you do County Council and do a smaller project each month, everyone has been up there before and everyone cheers you on.

    I’m not sure if this is because 4-H has a large homeschool population, so the children aren’t institutionalized and taught to be so flipping aggressive, or if it’s because the diversity of the 4-H program lets everyone who works hard be a winner.  But, I’d love to share one of my daughter’s little projects where she wrote her own 4-H song for County Council.  She is 7, went right up the and flipped the podium sideways so that you could see her, and went at it.  Every person in that room was at least 10 years old, with most of them being in high school.  The sound isn’t the greatest, but take note of no one booing her (like they did at the school talent show) and how there’s ever a “Go Kairi!” by one of the high school boys at the end, whereas no one is kind to her in Girl Scouts and she was often called “stupid” and “poor,” by the entitled, competitive rich girls who liked to play Mean Girls.
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11. 4-H is life.  I know some scouts bleed green and white and all, but 4-H is so diverse that it’s already in everything that you do.  And if it’s not something you already do – for instance, say you have a black thumb in gardening – then someone else in 4-H will be an expert and they will help you learn a new valuable skill.  Unlike badge earning, where you check off items on a list, then you’re finished and move onto something else, 4-H teaches you until you’re able to do it on your own and teach others.  If you want to focus on gardening for ten years – you can!  You won’t do it for two meetings and then move on, never talking about it again.Plus, without the ridged requirements and rules for what you must learn and how you’re allowed to learn it, 4-H is an open door so that interests can truly blossom.  Whereas scouts tends to be more of a sampler-platter program that teaches kids more or less to try something and move on to the next badge rather than develop any real interest, 4-H is about skill and confidence building.  And, to do those things just because you enjoy it.  The journey is the reward in many programs. 🙂

Now, having said all of this, my son is still a scout, and he hopes to continue in that for at least a while longer.  While we’ve reached our fill with Girl Scout troops, we quite like a lot of the experience in Cub Scouts still.  And, one of the best things about 4-H’s low time commitment is that it offers kids the opportunity to keep pursuing other interests while still being very involved with 4-H.  Other activities and interests actually compliment 4-H, and vice-versa, because outside interests give you more that you can do and talk about in 4-H.  It’s basically the Katamari of activities – 4-H accepts anything, and it only gets bigger because of it.

So, if you have a 4-H program in your area, I would highly recommend giving it a look.  You may think it’s all about horses and crops and tractors, but there is so much more to it than you can see as an outsider.  4-H is probably the best activity decision we’ve made for our kids by a large margin.

Why Are Girls Clothes SOOOOO Tight?!

I have been having a lot of frustrating with the clothing industry lately and how little girls are being prompted from the earliest ages to be little, petite, bags of bones.  I’ve often wondered why I, as an adult female, can wear a Medium size shirt in the mens department, but, if I want a women’s size, I need an XL.  I’m a geek, truly, and I often find myself pursuing in Hot Topic for shirts I like, and, again, I can wear a Medium in mens, but I need a 2XL or 3XL to wear the “womens” size there.  I know Hot Topic primarily caters to teens and college kids, but, why are junior-esc sizes and grown men sizes the same for dudes, but the gals are supposed to be significantly smaller at the same age.  And why is this disheartening trend already starting to happen in my kids’ clothing?!

I noticed my daughter running today, she just turned 7 mere days ago, and already her size 7 jeans are so tight that she can barely get them on.  She has to suck in her gut just to button them.  And I know she’s not big for her age, because the size 8 jeans drag the floor with what seems like three extra feet of fabric to spare.

I don’t encourage childhood obesity by any means, but I am curious as to why my 10 year old son will get a size 12-14 shirt and that garment is huge, baggy, and goes almost to his knees.  To the contrary, my 7 year old daughter will wear a shirt size 8-10, and it barely covers her stomach, even though she is not even slightly overweight or tall for her age.

Let me show you some clothing examples.  Pictures below is my daughter’s new Frozen shirt, which we could only find in a size 14-16.  This shirt is designed to fit a high school girl who can drive!  Underneath that is my son’s Despicable Me shirt, which is a size 10-12 in boys – so a boy in 4th/5th grade.  Despite being TWO SIZES bigger, the Frozen shirt is still considerably smaller compared to the boys shirt.

It’s not just the shirts either.  As I mentioned before, pants are a huge issue.  My son’s still wearing size 8 pants at age 10.  They are big and loose and full of room to grow.  My daughter’s pants are skin tight, restrictive, and painful to wear.  It’s a struggle to get them over her hips and after school she usually has them unbuttoned because she “can’t breathe.”  In fact, she can’t even sit down without her buttcrack showing because they’re cut in such a moronic way – and it seems that all of her jeans and khakis are designed to do this!

Now let me compare Halloween costumes that are the same size, yet the wearers are 3 years apart:

Halloween costumes always seem to run a little small, but my son’s 8-10 Pokemon outfit is just a little short in the leg department.  But, for Supergirl, and in an 8-10 size as well, I had to pin it shut because the back was too small to stay closed on its own.  I also had to CUT the armbands from the top to the halfway point just to be able to fit them on her arms!

I mean, this girl does track, gymnastics, cheerleading, dance, soccer, and Tae Kwon Do.  She has a little, tiny six pack, and it makes me so upset that she feels fat because her pants are meant to be cut off after each use.  I feel like it’s being suggested that her size is a problem, and she needs to stay trim to find fitting clothes, yet, she’s so fit I can’t wrap my brain around it!  Does this look at all like a heavy kid that would have a reason to not fit into age appropriate clothing to you?

Even this cute, little, sparkly dress is a size 8-10, and she’s about to outgrow it!

I am really aggravated with our standards of appearance and the blatant sexism we slap our young girls upside the head with.  Pants and shirts shouldn’t be painful or restrictive.  We don’t need to train our daughters to dress like hoochies, yet, we aren’t giving them a lot of alternatives.  Why do I have to find sweatpants if I want my daughter to be warm AND be able to participate in gym class?  How do we make this stop and let our little girls know that there is nothing wrong with them and everything wrong with the clothing designers?  I, for one, would like the young ladies of America to know that you can be pretty, have nice clothes, and still have some meat on your bones regardless.

Pitfalls of Southern Living that Northerners Don’t Understand

I was raised in the North and, for many years, I believed that everyone in the US was roughly the same.  Sure some people had accents and did things a little differently, but, at our core, we were all alike.  Oh, how wrong I was!

Today, after living in the South for a few years, people don’t believe the things I’ve seen and heard when I tell them about Southern living.  So, for all of us Northerns who jumped down a few states, here are some issues that our friends back home just don’t understand:

• Drivers are psychopathic sociopaths.  You could be passing a massive wreck that clearly features serious injuries or fatalities, and the people behind you still want to do 20 over the speed limit.  From what I’ve seen, cops in the South rarely pull people over for speeding or other minor traffic violations, so people drive like assholes.  Accidents are frequent, and usually the result of a speeder, or someone trying to whip around someone else who was going too slow.  Driving in the South is like constantly playing a game of chicken, and I’ve even had a police officer honk and flip me off because I slowed down too much (by his standards) to take a right turn.  And left turns into on coming traffic?  Just prepare to die now.  Southerners will have a two foot gap in between cars going 60 miles per hour, and they will get annoyed that they are waiting too long and take that left turn – missing a deadly wreck by the mere grace of the other driver’s brakes.  The really cute part is that, while the road is an “all about ME” experience, once you inevitably get to Walmart in the sea of drivers (who are angry at you for not going 75 in a 35), you look around and see that all of the road ragers are 600 pounds and move slower than a turtle on foot.  Really, you honked at me for five minutes because I wouldn’t stop my car on the train tracks during a red light – WHILE A TRAIN IS COMING – because you can’t stand that extra wait time to get to Wally World?  Pathetic…
• It doesn’t even take an inch of snow or ice to bring a major city to it’s knees.  Seriously, I was used to driving to college in blizzards, going ridiculous slow behind the plow so that I didn’t die.  That wasn’t a catastrophic event, that was any given day in February!  But, in the South, people see snow and they panic – then their common sense turns to mush.  You know why all those cars got stuck in Atlanta and kids were spending the night at schools, completely stranded?  Because SLOW DOWN only applied to hills.  I watched in shock as people tried to do 75 miles per hour on fresh snow, and if they didn’t end up sliding off the road, they would eventually come to an incline and try to do 0.5 miles per hour up it.  I guess the logic was:  “oh, watch out, it’s a hill!” but, in reality, all they did was get themselves stuck from a lack of momentum.  Combine that with a general lack or plow and salt trucks in the South and – TAAADAAA – an entire region is crippled and people are abandoning their cars on major highways.  It wouldn’t be so embarrassing if the same thing didn’t happen every few years…

  Here is the road in front of my house during the snow that shut the South down (ALL of those cars are parked and have given up driving in these “impossible” conditions):
  
  Please, tell me that I’m not the only one who can still see the pavement under this minor powdering of snow!

• Rain.  Seriously, the freaking rain is so intense that you think it may bring your house down.  It’s crazy, because, many, many, many times the rain hits hard and out of nowhere.  Also, forget about keeping anything outside, because it will be ruined in days via rust or mold (if it doesn’t blow away completely).  Don’t bother signing your kids up for outdoor sports either, because they’ll only get to play about 50% of their games due to the weather.  And the farther South you are, the worse the rain gets.  Whoever decided to build Disney World in the lightning capital of the world, well, I just don’t think they were thinking things through.  Plus, the rain is salty, oh so salty, so any knicks you got while shaving are sure to sting for days to come.
• People really don’t care about their work.  I see it all the time and everywhere I go, and it’s definitely an epidemic; workers have the attitude of “I get paid whether I do a good job or not,” so they actively decide to be terrible at their jobs.  I don’t just mean that the kids working at McDonald’s are horrendous, because most teenagers are terrible at life skills, but, in the South, adults who have been manufacturing, crafting, creating, or laboring for decades go at each job like quality is a myth.  Don’t believe me?  Come to the South and hire a lawn service, or pay a PROFESSIONALLY listed person to hang wallpaper for you.  It’s a crappy, sloppy job that falls apart in minutes (weeks if you’re lucky).  Even the locals know, if you want something done well, call up someone who moved here from the North, because they take their jobs seriously, and they do their work the right way.
• If you don’t have a deck and a pool, you have no social life.  No one will come to your gatherings if you don’t have these two vidal social spots.  If someone really wants to show off, they’ll have one of those fancy double-deck and/or a deck around their in-ground pool.

• Religion isn’t a part of your life in the South, it’s the only thing that matters.  Perhaps the worst part about being a non-Christian family in the South is that church isn’t optional, as it is the non-stop topic of conversation.  Even the teachers and activity volunteers carry on as if there is no possible way that anyone around them might be something other than a Christian.  For the most part, I don’t take offense, and I overlook it when the teachers are blatantly telling the kids to pray in class.  But when the school is calling, texting, emailing, and sending notes home about the mandatory Praise and Worship Service Club meetings, it starts to push your buttons (and, yes, this is a public school!).  Then, if your kids don’t attend the club meetings, they are immediately singled out and questioned relentlessly.

  Oh, the joys of being forced out of the religious closet in the South!  I won’t even bother to outline how negatively it impacts each day of your life.  From experience, though, people in the South are more tolerant of LGBT couples than they are of non-believers.

• “Jesus Did It” is a viable answer for everything, even math problems.  On the few occasions that I’ve been involved in the classroom at my kids’ school, I am amazed how often Jesus comes up.  It’s actually aggravated me to the point where I try very hard NOT to get involved in the classroom any more.  I’ve witnessed more than a handful of teachers allow “Jesus did it” to be a valid, accepted answer to a number of questions, including, and I kid you not, “what’s six divided by three?”  Kids, you are all welcome to have your personal beliefs, but an educational standard needs to be set somewhere.
• BUGS!  I knew the South was well populated in the insect department, but I had no earthly idea of how bad it was.  We came to the South from the Southwest, where it’s so hot that you pretty much on deal with roaches.  Now, roaches are terribly disgusting, don’t get me wrong, and they make my skin crawl, but the bugs I’ve seen here in the Southern Rain Forest are the things of pure nightmares!  I’m pretty sure the arachnid that created Spider-Man has a nest in my trees, and I’ve seen spiders so big that they were transporting pine cones!  Not to mention the centipedes, kudzu bugs, bees, wasps, hornets, “chiggers,” carpenter ants, fire ants, termites, and the list never ends!  Every few weeks there is a new creature invading your house and running rampant.  Worst of all, most insects seem immune to pest control poisons, so there is no keeping them out!

  Think I’m making it up?  Meet my buddy the Banana Orb Spider (at least, we think that’s what these guys are).  He and his kinfolk set up shop in most of the trees and bushes around my house, and this is actually the smallest one I’ve ever seen.

  
  Some of his buddies are the size of softballs, but, they move pretty fast and scary like, so this was the only one I was willing to get close enough to for a photograph.

• Single parents be damned!  I don’t know how I would manage if I didn’t have a husband, in all honesty.  Not only are most jobs in the South tertiary (fast food, retails, and all other service industry), but if you have a personal life at all, you better be prepared to lose your job.  I gave up job hunting after about 2,000 applications over six months.  The few times I was offered a job, it was part-time, minimum wage OR commission based, and they wanted me there exclusively on evenings and weekends.  This is with multiple college degrees, mind you – I’ve been to grad school!

  So, how in the hell am I supposed to work that kind of schedule when I have children and no family nearby to pick up the slack for me?  The pay rate wasn’t even enough to cover what I’d spend on childcare, let alone compensate me enough to make my student loan payments on top of that.  To add a cherry on the sundae, the schools here have a week long break every freaking month they’re in session!  It’s now the middle of October, so we have a week of Fall Break right now.  Why?  Oh, because the kids irritate the teachers, so they need some time away.  Meanwhile, a household with working parents is supposed to do what with their crappy rate of pay exactly?  Fork over $200 per child per week for a special daycare or camp, request unpaid vacation time from work, or simply lose your job?  It is absolutely ludicrous!

• Food has no hint of being nutritious.  Hey, junk food is everywhere, and I’m well aware of that.  However, everyone uses butter and deep fryers around here like they own stock in Consolidated Lard (I made a Rugrats reference, yay!).  Terms like oven-baked and grilled are often met with a pound of butter – you know, for flavor – and all the unhealthy fixins that will send you to an early, diabetic grave.  So go on, get your deep fried pickles and grits, the lap band industry has to get new clients from somewhere!
• Discrimination is alive and well – and, not what you may think.  Having grown up in the North, I can’t say that racism doesn’t exist, but it’s definitely a different animal up there.  Sure, you don’t have to look for long in the Northern states to find people who separate themselves by class, color, religion, or other things, but, for the most part, it’s an optional segregation due to personal preference.  Plus, even if you aren’t best buddies, you’ll still have friends that are different from you, because, for the most part, Northerners are kind of yuppies who believe in equality and treating people the way you’d like to be treated.  We actually think it’s a good thing to learn about other cultures and expand our horizons, and a lot of Northerns will speak up if they see someone being put in an actual situation of racism or discrimination.

  But, in the South, if you aren’t like us then you’re against us.  There is such an atmosphere of intolerance that it’s astounding.  Kids in pre-school are already predisposed not to communicate with kids who are outside or their race and/or religion.  Nowhere else in the nation have I ever heard a 2nd grader tell a kid that they can’t speak to each other, because they don’t want their brother to think they’re “trying to be white” by talking to a white kid.   In fact, causing harm to or bullying a white kid gets your “street cred.”  There seems to be a very set standard of what black and white are supposed to be and mean, and it’s a shame that so many Southerners pinhole themselves like that for no good reason.

  Plus, everywhere we go, everything we do, this issue of race comes up, and, all too often, it comes across like a ploy for someone to get their way.  If the customer service department at Kmart won’t refund you money when trying to return used underwear, that’s not racism!  Yet that’s what the returning customer starts screaming to make a scene until they get their money back.  If a waitress charged you for two drinks instead of one, that wasn’t an attack on you for being a minority, it was a mistake – they happen.  If you work at a cash register and keep giving people change for a $50 when they hand you a $10, you weren’t fired for being “black,” you were fired for being incompetent.  Even though most of it seems like a buzz word to get attention, race is the engine that moves the South along, and just being “whitey” makes you a target for ridicule and harassment.  Even while shopping in the Dollar General a woman started screaming over the phone, “and you wonder why we want to kill all you white people!”  Am I the only one that thinks this is not acceptable or normal behavior?  Nope, sorry, we never owned slaves, we don’t have good jobs, and we aren’t connected to the government – there’s no possible way that my family’s existence keeps your life down in any form!  Put the card back in the deck, quit calling me a white devil or “the man,” and move on.

• Being a feminist means you’re a “troublemaker.”  Do you remember watching those old black and white shows on Nick at Night?  You know, the ones where the wife was this pretty, little thing that stayed at home and worshiped her husband?  That’s still Southern mentality, and an independent woman is often treated like a dangerous woman.  And the expectations men have of their wives have made my jaw drop.  I’ve met men who will not go to work or leave the house at all unless their wife puts on their socks and ties their shoes for them!  And this was on more than one occasion!  That isn’t every man in the South, of course, but women here seem to be consistently treated like property and personal servants to their husbands.  The level of controlling behavior towards women in the South is an epidemic, plain and simple.
• The women can be everything that Family Guy warned us about.  I have long since gotten irritated with Family Guy for their repeated suggestion that all women just hate one another and go at each other like rabid dogs.  Yet, here I stand, having met just that kind of behavior every single time I try to volunteer or make a new friend.  If you are under a woman in charge, you often get a lot of abuse.  They call you names, they start making demands on you in very rude ways, and you’re just sitting there like, “hey, I’m a volunteer and I just got here!  Plus, I didn’t even volunteer for THIS project!”  Yet, if my husband would come and fill in for me one night, or a man is volunteering and doing a very bad job that needs correction or direction, those same women won’t say a word to the males.  I suppose, logically, if women are treated like slaves at home they will turn around and do the same thing to the people “under” them outside of the house, but I still don’t think that makes it alright.

  Similarly, if you get put in charge of something, you are constantly challenged and met with adversity at every turn.  I tried to lead a Girl Scout troop after being volun-told to do so, and the mothers, none of whom wanted to help or volunteer themselves, made my life an endless drama pit to where I was spending 60 hours a week dealing with needless mama-drama and having these women snapping their fingers and telling me what to do.  I was forced to volunteer in Cub Scouts and immediately the top ranking female in the pack treated me like her servant.  And, my stance is, if I’m not paid to be there, then I’m certainly not volunteering to be treated like shit.  Since moving to the South, I have met two women that haven’t attempted to rip my throat out at first glance.  It wears you out quickly, especially if you aren’t raised to be treated like an inferior creature, and I have stepped down from volunteering in many different activities just because the abuse I received from Southern women was not worth the hassle of helping with a Fall Festival or PTA meeting.

So, all Northerners living in the Southern states, I now make it your mission to warn others about moving!  They may not believe you, they may mock you and laugh at you for drinking the local Kool-Aid, but, all the same, we have a chance to save some people from severe culture shock!  Because, short of old people who miss the “good old days” of the 50s, I can’t imagine anyone with a Northern mindset getting along at all in the South.