As I have mentioned before, I grew up in Georgia and lived there until 1995 when I was uprooted and transplanted—kicking and screaming in protest every mile of the way—from my beloved rolling red-clay hills to the murky, mosquito-infested swamps of Southwest Louisiana. Moreover, not a day passes in which I don’t miss my home state; and like Lewis Grizzard, that late icon of Southern Humor, once wrote, “If I ever get back to Georgia, I’m gonna nail my feet to the ground.” Still, I realize Georgia isn’t perfect. For one, its people are quite eccentric, to put it mildly. Not that eccentricity is necessarily a bad thing, although it does leave the state open to ridicule on occasion, for example, as it is currently being laughed at, and not behind its back, for its stanch on seat-belt usage in pickup trucks. Apparently, according to an article in Tuesday’s The Advocate, a battle is waged every year in the Georgia Legislature over whether or not to require adults in pickup trucks to use their seatbelts; and, so far, the pickup owners have won. 

You have to understand that pickup trucks are a big thing in Georgia, even more so than they are here in Louisiana; but I guess that’s as it should be since Georgia is home to a great many Good Old Boys; and everyone knows just how much Good Old Boys love their pickup trucks. They love them so much, in fact, that they do not want to be restrained, perhaps because the seatbelts interfere with their mobility when they want to toss beer cans out the window at other pickup trucks. Who knows? I certainly don’t. The point, however, is that Georgia pickup truck owners do not want to be forced to wear seatbelts.

As a result, or so I imagine, Georgia is the only state that exempts adults who are riding in pickup trucks from buckling up when they go caroming around the Interstates, highways, byways, and dirt roads that make up the state’s transportation network. Yet, if you are in a car, that’s a different story entirely. In that case, if you don’t buckle up, you will receive a ticket, that is, if the police can catch you. Again, however, if you are riding in a pickup truck, you are completely free to go unrestrained, which, naturally, leaves you open to the possibility of being sent zooming through the windshield if your pickup truck collides with another vehicle, a stationary object, or one of the many deer that roam about those byways and dirt roads that meander through the woods and fields of rural Georgia. Of course, as Greg Bluestein says in his article, “The way some Georgians see it, if they’re going to get thrown through the windshield of a pickup, that’s nobody’s business but their own” (The Advocate, 2008, p. 6A).

And that’s another thing I miss about Georgia—the pig-headed individualism of its citizenry. Believe me, Texans, who are notorious for boasting about their independence and uniqueness, as well as the massive size of their state, do not have a thing on the Good Old Boys in Georgia. They epitomize pig-headed individualism. If you don’t believe me, just go visit any country/western bar in any small town in Georgia on a Saturday night; and after you order your longneck Miller or Budweiser, which you will naturally drink from the bottle, just sit there and listen to the conversation around you, although you may have to strain a bit to hear it over the Hank Williams Jr. tunes playing on the jukebox. And what you will hear is a entire roomful of Good Old Boys all talking about five things, although not necessarily in this order:

1.      How they can out-drink any man in the room;

2.      How their wife/girlfriend can out-drink any woman in the room;

3.      How they own the best coon dog in the entire Southern United States;

4.      How the deer they shot last season was the largest on record and they could prove except the deer bounced off the truck while they were driving home on a rutted dirt road;

5.      How they own the “baddest truck” on four (sometimes six) wheels;

6.      And how no one, especially a bunch of politicians, “who ain’t got nothing better to do with their time than sit around making up stupid laws,” is going to take away their right to go zooming through the windshield of their pickup truck. Besides, “everybody knows only sissies wear seatbelts in pickup trucks.”

Ah, Georgia, not a day passes that I don’t miss it.