Confronting a Life-Long Hatred of Mississippi

When it came to where I was born, no one gave me a choice. The incorporeal essence that would soon become Brad Stennerson was never given a globe and asked where, specifically, he wanted to appear. There was no listing of pros and cons. There was no populating of Excell spreadsheets with snippets of research like crime statistics, education metrics and real estate prices. When it was my time, I simply got what I got. What I got, unfortunately, was Biloxi, Mississippi. When I emerged into the world — chubby, bald and probably shouting — I didn’t understand my home state’s reputation. As my swaddled form was transported to an apartment in the adjacent town of Gulfport — thin pines crowding Highway 90 like rows of malnourished cousins — I didn’t know how most of the country saw Mississippi. Backward. Shoeless. Uneducated. Incestual. Fat. Racist. Infant me could not know that for most of the United States, the state into which I had just been born was little more than a source of schadenfreude. For them, its economic stagnation and crumbling infrastructure embodied a well-deserved karma — the poisonous fruits of an evil Confederacy. Poor and failing by every conceivable metric, Mississippi’s plight earned no compassion. The suffering of this deepest state of the deep south was justice for the social sins of its past — and perhaps, its present. What it got, according to many, was less than it deserved. <a href="https://medium.com/invisible-illness/confronting-a-life-long-hatred-of-mississippi-a414feb2ac8b">Click Here</a>