Confessions of an Elitist Snob

Part of the permanent divide my wife and I are constantly working to overcome is my extremely bad attitude concerning the little berg we find ourselves living in. 

For her it is a pleasant, but traffic congested, suburban community offering good schools and a middle class lifestyle. My wife sees the people here in a much more appreciative light since she runs with far more educated and accepting crowd, although most of them are transplants like us.  

For me this tiny piece of incorporated real estate is a lowbrow and inbred little village with its numerous subdivisions and supporting national retail chains taking on the characteristics of malignant cancerous tumor. Traffic for most of the daylight hours is literally an utter nightmare to the point it is easier to drive across the neighboring “big city” of Columbia during its morning and evening rush hours.

As far as the people are concerned, while in no way could I seriously claim to be an expert on any subject I have never met a similar collection of individuals for whom their minds are already made up on all possible subjects both great and small. Besides being xenophobic to newcomers, any differentiation or dissension on the accepted community mindset is akin to religious heresy or traitorous behavior. And that is the people for whom a semi-rational discussion is possible for at least a few minutes. For the sake of not going completely over the top myself, I will not describe those for whom secession, the justification of slavery, and the earth being just several thousand years old are subjects for small talk.

Of course, there are some good points to this area, Riverbanks Zoo for one, and despite the ever present conservative hive mind I have met some truly great and interesting people here. However, the number of these people are no where near sufficient for me to consider living out my golden years here but enough to prevent me from coming to believe I have fallen down some rabbit hole to a right-wing Wonderland.

My wife calls me a snob for having this attitude and points out my hometown, Georgetown, South Carolina is very much like the place we live now. Am I a snob? Quite possibly and yes, my beloved hometown was never a bastion of sophistication and higher learning. The one major difference being that my hometown has a far more welcoming attitude to both newcomers and visitors. 

If I have to list one example as to why I feel this way about where I live now it involves the conversation I overheard one night while making a run to the grocery store. As I searched the aisles for some obscure ingredient for one of my wife’s experimental gourmet dishes two high school boys were busy stocking shelves and complaining to each other about their nasty English teacher.

Both of those young boys were highly pissed because their teacher had dared to give them both failing grades on some assignment. Because of the failing grade they were being forced to work on a makeup project that was cutting into their hours at the grocery store.

“Why do we even need to know how to write?” I heard one boy ask the other while standing a few feet away looking for the item my wife wanted. More than slightly dumbfounded at the question I left that grocery store saying a small prayer that my own children would never fall to such a level. I wish that was an isolated incident but over the years I have heard and observed many examples of how the locals go excessively defensive at anything that threatens their simplistic mindset.

Well, there is some evidence that for whatever reason my son, Darth Spoilboy, will escape the idiotic and closed mindset of this area. We just received the results of his SAT exam and my boy scored 1360, enough to have college prospects at such places as Clemson here in South Carolina, the University of North Carolina, and my wife’s alma mater, the University of Virginia.

Needless to say, since in all honesty my wife is a brilliant woman I am pushing the boy towards Virginia, although no one dare tell her that.