Blog 3193 -07.29.2024

My Two Cents Worth

They say that the greatest difficulty in learning a new language is not learning vocabulary or even conjugation, but learning a myriad of new and strange sounding idioms.

The dictionary defines idiom:

The first definition usually being the more common use of the expression, let us go with it – an expression using words that have a certain meaning to mean something else. How difficult English must be take on for we have so many strange idioms that often vary in meaning depending upon which section of the country you are in. “My two cents” is such an idiom that really just means “in my small opinion.”

I was born and grew up on the southern edge of the Appalachia, an area known for backward thinking people called hillbillies. I never considered myself a hillbilly personally for I was born in Chattanooga, the fourth largest city in Tennessee, mostly contained in a large valley dissected by the Tennessee River and surrounded on all sides by mountains and ridges. I was a valley boy, not a hillbilly nor even a ridge-runner.

I suppose most people would have considered my family “poor white trash” not hillbillies. My grandpa on my mother’s side of the family was a bootlegger as a young man supporting his family of eight children and a wife. He fathered his first four children with his first wife who died and the second four with his second wife. My dad’s dad died several years before I was born, and from all accounts he was as a young man a share cropper and heavy drinker who fathered six children and whose only wife died soon after the sixth child. He put his older boys to work selling newspapers to support the family and the girls at cooking and keeping house while he mostly just drank. My dad drank heavily as a young man, but rarely after he married my mother. She would not have stood for it.

There is an interesting book that came out in 2016 in the middle of the Presidential election season that year by a woman Louisiana college professor named:

I saw an interview recently with the author discussing the book and learned a great deal about my own heritage.

It was the British who coined the phrase white trash or rubbish and their purpose for setting up colonies in the New World and Australia was to “put out the trash” to rid themselves of the poor, unlearned, unwashed, and unwanted who were a great drain on the British economy.

I especially like a child saying that goes “God don’t make junk or trash.” The concept of hell comes from a word that Jesus used in the New Testament for a place outside the city of Jerusalem where they burned the trash. This idea that some people have of hell being a place where all the unworthy are cast to burn forever is a hideous and unloving notion and I cannot conceive of a loving God ever sanctioning such a notion. Only the ego of man could have ever have considered such a place or judged even for a moment even the least of these our own brothers and sisters worthy of such a fate.

Well, that is “My two cents” on the subject of Poor White Trash or anyone that you or I may think we are better than. I believe the words of the U.S. Constitution, “All men (women and children) are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White