Southern Fatalism

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While sweeping the floor this morning I had some thoughts on Southern fatalism after reading the first couple chapters of Pat Conroy’s new book last night:

Lee invoked God’s will the night before the third day of Gettysburg and the ill-fated Pickett’s charge but took blame for the bad outcome himself: “It’s all my fault.”

92 yo lady in West Virginia:
“If you’re destined to hang you’ll never drown, so let the big cat jump.”

“Just when you think it’s ok, that’s when it will happen.” – TV show in the 50’s about a terrorist warning a bomb had been placed on an airplane. After a frantic search for the bomb, the hero finally figured out the meaning of the terrorist’s quote: the bomb was attached to the landing wheels.

James 4:13-15
“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’ Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’” [Lord willing and the creek don’t rise]

Pat Conroy (South of Broad)

“…my mother’s world seemed disconsolate and tragic before she really knew how tragic life could be. Once she learned that no life could avoid the consequences of tragedy, she softened into an ascetic’s acknowledgment of the illusory nature of life. She became a true believer in the rude awakening.”

“Nothing happens by accident. I learned this the hard way…”

“..fate comes at you cat-footed, unavoidable, and bloodthirsty. The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells…Death lives in each one of us and begins its countdown on our birthdays and makes its rough entrance at the last hour and the perfect time.”

“It would take a great portion of my time as an adult before I realized that tragedy was hurled freely into everyone’s life as though it were a cheap newspaper advertising porno shops an strip shows thrown into an overgrown yard.”

And this is just the first two chapters!

There is this positive sentence:

“But I had come back to Him, and that is part of my story.”

The book may have some hope after all, and, like Claypool, he may find some comfort in the gift of life.

Psalm 1

Happy the one who doesn’t sit around with the cynics….
He’s like the tree planted by the rivers of water….
Everything he does will prosper (because God is with him.)

Really? Unfortunately, our southern sense of fatalism seems to trump the optimistic side of life and leaves that for the tele-evangelists to promulgate.
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