7-20-2024 2:52pm

Op-Ed: If You Ain't Got Something Good to Say...

S RENEE GREENE Editor

For Credit to: Ed Crawford, Local Photojournalist

First Lady Dr. Jill Biden Visits Columbus, Georgia

We, the Polite People of the United States of America, would have had better sense than to show up at a Melania Trump gathering in Columbus, Georgia, with rude signs while making our little “we do amazing” town look like podunk crud on a hick stick, but that isn’t what the alleged ‘southern graces’ did when First Lady Dr. Jill Biden made her way to Columbus just a moment (couple of weeks) ago.

According to the word on the street, they may as well have given her the self-righteous and classy middle finger salute — probably did, Class versus Trash-style.

Yes, I’m on the Late Freight with writing this, but I had to think carefully and wisely about my approach and angle.

I wasn’t invited to First Lady Dr. Biden’s local dignitary soiree at the Bibb Mill Event Center— even as a journalist — so, I didn’t go. But it’s interesting to see her visit through other people’s eyes.

If it had been Melania Trump, I wouldn’t have showed up either, even with an invitation—I’m simply not a fan as I am of other first ladies past and present; but I’m also not dizzy enough to go make an @$$ of myself by appearing somewhere I don’t belong if I’ve got nothing good to say.

That was the sentiment of Mrs. Glenda “Gigi” Crawford and her husband, Ed, who decided at the last minute -when they heard Dr. Biden’s plane had landed- to at least go take a look at the scene from outside the fence.

Admittedly, Ms Gigi is (in her words) “a bona fide iron clad Democrat and proud of it.”

I am a bona fide iron clad Independent who has voted for the right Republicans in the past…before these slovenly Georgia legislators forced us into a Party box and made us choose one party or the other.

I’ve been tempted to vote a Republican ticket and write in Democratic candidates, which I have every right to do, but … well … you know.

Moment of Truth: I became more left-leaning after Ronald Reagan’s presidency. I voted for him in the first term, as a “godly Christian woman” was supposed to do, then discovered in four short years that he was racially trifling and ol’ boy basic, definitely without the attitude of a real Christian, which was a ‘shroom trip considering where he came from.

However, I spent enough time in northern and southern California to understand that most of the state isn’t as “liberal” as people think it is.

Hollywood and immediate/intermediate L.A. (Orange and LA counties) tend to be entities unto themselves; but, it’s a big loud noisy entity that is all over the news and the movies and television shows, so it’s hard to ignore them most days. Mostly liberal San Bernandino County and Marin County, where lies San Francisco and Berkeley and Oakland (Contra Costa “CoCo” County), where I lived, is a separate entity also from Northern Cali. Not so much liberalism in Antioch and Clayton, both about 45–50 minutes from Oakland by car and by BART.

Bay Area notwithstanding, I experienced “culture shock” once again when I returned to the old gray mare deep south 25 years later (I did live in Atlanta most of that time, but it is not rural like the rest of the state tends to be) and I saw what appeared to me to be ‘horses and buggies’ in the form of over-priced vehicles and the many antebellum-styled homes with modernish updates.

Nearly 10 years in, it comes as no shock to me when Dr. Biden came to town by “Invitation Only” and some folks who looked like pure de FOX News drivel (I call it FOX Comedy News Central) showed up to rally around her air transport outside the fence and to hold up rude obnoxious picket signs and make horse-face ugly comments about her and her visit both in person and online.

You can see it for yourself, if you dare. Most of it was highly-profiled on the Ledger-Enquirer’s Instagram account featuring veteran journalist Mike Haskey. But “Woo, we’ve come a long long way from Walter Cronkite, baby.”

I can’t word-drag Haskey too much — there is always more than one side to a famous person visiting this town, so maybe he thought it his job to present the “opposition” in rare form.

Columbus’ “we do amazing” motto was subsequently overshadowed by the presence of folks who didn’t understand what Grandma’s southern drawl meant by “If you don’t have something nice to say…don’t say nothing at all.”

As such, the least Haskey could have done as a professional journo is to refer to First Lady Dr. Biden by her proper official title and not simply as ‘Jill Biden’. That alone sounded like he took her visit personally, as well as “not a fan.” We down home folk get tight-assed about our titles.

Said Mrs. Gigi (paraphrased) “It was a spontaneous decision that we had not planned for. So I went with my husband to see what we could see because I am proud of First Lady Dr. Jill Biden. She made history as the first First Lady to maintain her professional career as a college professor while her husband is in The Oval, and she still displays the feisty attributes of courage, class, charisma, charm and grace,” as a First Lady should when she really cares about her own country, [not-Slovenia].

I often wonder what may have happened if Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy-Onassis, the classiest act of all time and First Lady to John F. Kennedy, would have stayed with her womanist employ as a magazine and photo-journalist and First Lady/wife and Mom of two. Maybe her articles written while her husband lived in the Oval would be framed and plastered all over the White House “Dish Room” (lol!)

Maybe we would still use her, God rest her soul, as the infinite example of All Things A Woman Does (‘bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan’, etc.) when it comes to life, love, family, home and taking care of an entire nation while she was at it. The only one we heard of who came close was the dearly beloved Eleanor Roosevelt.

We both, Mrs. Gigi and I, acknowledged that if we felt that way about a First Lady, we just wouldn’t have been there, at all.

Notably, when Trump’s husband was in town some months ago (making that infamous Waffle House stop on Veterans Parkway) the local NAACP, featuring Ms Tonza Sheree Thomas, stood in front of the Columbus Government Center tower and made one highly professional statement about her husband’s policies and stated that his presence, because of that, was not welcome in Columbus.

No alleged or real Democrats -that we heard about in the news- showed up to protest Trump’s presence and hold up wicked picket signs, especially since the last thing Columbus needs with all of the crime and gangs that make for daily headlines, is more negative press, Mr. Haskey.

We mostly make our disapproval known by being unsupportive and ignoring them. As in “Bye Felicia.”

I gleaned through some of the picketer’s (and hater’s) comments, and along with many others that were vile and obnoxious, was a reference to the First Lady as “evil.” I commented on the comment and asked what, exactly, they found so evil about her, but I didn’t receive an answer to the best of my knowledge. I’ll check it again one day.

There were also some vitriolic comments about her wasting jet fuel on what amounted to a 10-minute trip, but Trump the Former has spent far more golfing on his own nouveau plantations. I have a feeling, though, that she was here more than the ten minutes that they found to play political victim for the local news crews.

But all Mrs. Gigi had to say about it on Instagram was three words —

“JUST PURE IGNORANCE.”

You can go to the L-E’s Instagram account and see it for yourself.

Mrs. Crawford and her husband, who didn’t say much, but did give us photos of the plane from the I-185 off-ramp, were a witness to the vicious “Trump sign carriers” and flyer-givers who had every right to be there, yet showed none of the usual respect and southern social grace or charm, as (my title) Life Soror Sister Jackie Kennedy would have-even as a Bostonian and ‘woman of airs’ from New York City.

Mrs. Crawford said that a glimpse at the First Lady herself would have been nice, but in this current climate, they understood it was unlikely, so they just went there “out of curiosity” because they had never seen a First Lady’s plane before.

Of course, there were less (fewer?) Biden supporters there than the “about 15” of the opposition because they weren’t invited.

I am not journalistically perfect, but as a woman of grace and a woman of God’s mercy and honor who was raised properly at St. John AME Church, Fifth Avenue, Columbus, I have heard the same people who repeat Romans 13:1–7 and 1st Peter 2:13 feverishly and dare to utter the “name of Jesus” when they are up front and center, showed up and disrespected a current First Lady of the United States as badly as they did former First Lady Michelle Obama when it was her job.

…uh uh uh, my my my, Columbus. My grandma’s voice and finger wagging “How amazing was that?”

We’ve gotten more “Mayberry RFD”-esque callout coverage here about some Hollywood movie being filmed in Columbus than what should have been politically important to us as a larger town center in Georgia, but as the Bible says “Let the dead (I add, in spirit) bury their own.” (Luke 9:60)

I was grandfathered into writing my heart out by Ledger-Enquirer Pulitzer Prize-winning elites — Mary Margaret Byrne, Baxter Omohundro, Jack Swift, Jeff Davis, Priscilla Black Duncan, Josiah Sumbry, Louise Smith, Claire Brannen and my tough ‘inside voices’ Liza Benham and Kaffie Sledge, and, as I called them “The Two Pats” and “Miss Mary”, our beautiful and gracious clean-up lady.

Even in the Reaganista 1980s, we had a lot more definition about our work than to fall for classless angles and useless tacky points of view about what is important in life, especially if it will live on in the White House archives forever.

I am sorely reminded that Walter Cronkite and others of top-notch news delivery, such as our own beloved “Bax,” would not have been so easily deceived into displaying Columbus’ worst side by dishonoring President Biden’s legacy with Donald Trump’s crowd of local Unsophisticates.

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