Messing up at that level usually results in relocation of the offending party, and not necessarily as a guest of the witness protection program. While those cases are not the norm, within my lifetime, I have watched several develop and play out among my arena of friends and family. None of them are ever pretty, and are about as messy as a fiery divorce. Actually, some of them involved fiery divorces. At any rate, Southern passions run deep and wide, and once ignited, have a tendency to blow themselves into a fire storm.
For Southerners, this is a sufficient reminder that's not even necessary. For the rest of you, and especially those that don't take me seriously, you'll find my two previous paragraphs are, perhaps the most understated warning of your lifetime. One thing Southerners have an abundance of is passion. Whatever arena our lives play out on, our lives are fueled with passion. You must get the full embrace of the word passion to quiet understand that. And you must understand just how encompassing, extensive, and numerous, a Southerner's passions may be.
For example, I happen to have a picky part of me that holds a high regard for truth, trustworthiness, and loyalty. These are sometimes lip service items for damnyankee carpetbaggers, midwestern empire builders, and westcoast trend setters, but seldom taken seriously by any of them, nor do they expect anyone to truly uphold or try to live by those principles. I do, as do many people I know. We are not naive idealists, who need to wake up to the real world. We simply have a disgust for the deceitful, who would feign these principles as a characteristic, while not truly embracing them. That kind of deceit when presented to me, will permit me to bite my tongue with a clean conscious, while a boulder drops on the offending, deceitful, clueless, head.
A Southerner, no matter how upright, feels little obligation to salvage the life of a scoundrel, although we will lament the loss of any redeeming qualities the scoundrel may have possessed or demonstrated as even a minute byproduct of their life. By doing so, we are permitted to memorialize the departed's life and death as "tragic", instead of just purely a "total waste of his mother's milk". This always seems so much more civil and gracious, and just the more mannerly approach. Especially so, if the departed scoundrel is survived by a mother. After all, she is only responsible for providing half of the disagreeable gene pool.
It seems I have rambled today from moral turpitude to motherhood. So, I'll stop here, as Mother's Day is approaching and my whole purpose in posting today was to point out just how lowlife and worthless I deem a certain scoundrel to whom truth, loyalty, and trustworthiness are sucker principles. Motherhood, I will leave as a subject for another day when I am addressing matters of respect.
Today, I've written what I have due to a scoundrel. Of course being Southern, politeness, precludes my actually naming him here, or embarrassing his mother with a description of his antics. Suffice to say though, there are plenty of boulders up there on the mountainside, that just as a result of natures own gravity will be sailing downward. I haven't the slightest inclination to shout out warnings, neither do my kith nor kin.
You see, here in the South, you don't have to scream or rave to be passionate. Even silence can be a passionate thing of consequence. Somehow, life and passion are always more than meets the eye or ear, nose or actually any of the five senses. At least its that way here; beneath the Carolina moon.
