Mississippi rising

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views February 16, 2004]

Radio talk show host Paul Harvey complains about the ongoing vilification of the South, decades after social reforms. He has this to say about the general public treatment of Mississippi:

The pack-media could not wait to remake the movie Mississippi Burning, into a TV version called, Murder In Mississippi. Thus yet another generation of Americans are indoctrinated with indelible snapshots which are half a century out of date. The very idea that anybody from New York, D.C., Chicago or L. A. could launch stones from those shabby glass houses toward anybody else is patently absurd. Lilliputians have a psychological need to make everybody else appear small, and Mississippi, too nice to fight back, is such an easy target. . . .

Much of our nation's most monumental medical progress has roots in Mississippi. The first heart transplant in 1964. The first lung transplant in 1963. The most widely used medical textbook in the world, The Textbook Of Medical Physiology, reprinted in ten languages, was authored by Dr. Arthur Guyton of the University of Mississippi.

The "Case Method" of practicing law, the basis of the United States legal system, was developed at the University of Mississippi.

Nationally, educators are chewing their fingernails up past the second knuckle anxious about the disgraceful rate of dropouts and illiterate graduates. In Mississippi, the state government and two philanthropic organizations have teamed up to put a computer-based literacy program in every elementary school in the state. Maybe Mississippi is right to downplay it's opportunities, advantages and refinement. The ill-mannered rest of us, converging, would surely mess it up.

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