Why certain Southerners are preoccupied with Old South iconography instead of future potentiality is a puzzlement. Our achievements have been legion when we have focused upon the present and future rather than a mythical yesteryear.
The refrain to the Temptations 1964 hit “The Way You Do The Things You Do” is apropos:
“Well, you could have been anything that you wanted to
“And I can tell, the way you do the things you do.”
I was reminded of why Southerners can be anything that they want to be, the way we do the things we do, while skiing the first Nattvasan 45 as a team member with “homeboy” Stuart Stevens, March 1, in Sweden, and completing the race in the top 40 percent.
Stuart and I are internationally-recognized cross-country skiers. I laugh that we can concoct the fiction that our fathers Phineas Stevens and Julian Wiener and their friends Guy Gillespie, Stuart Irby, Herbert Langford, Walter Neill, and Bob Nichols took their sons cross-country skiing, along the banks of the Pearl River, every morning before school, when we were boys, although the only “white stuff” which we knew was cotton and the only skiing was water skiing on the Ross Barnett Reservoir.
Stuart and I pursued independent paths to Nordic skiing yet, in the process, demonstrated that Southerners’ abiding passion for athletic competitions is not confined to being spectators at ballgames nor narrow narrative about Winter Sports, namely Alpine skiing at overpriced ski resorts. There is no reason that Mississippians cannot become world-class athletes in each and every Winter Olympic category.
Stuart skied the original 10 Worldloppet ski marathons in 1984, an accomplishment which was made into a documentary film “Marathon Winter”, aired regularly on European television, although it has never been broadcast by any channel in his home state. The first conversation that I had with Martin Gerecke, a former BMW Executive who is one of my closest, dearest friends in Worldloppet, and anywhere, was in the Helsinki Airport, when he asked whether I had “heard of the American who had skied all of the Worldloppet marathons in one year.” As Stuart reminded me, when we trained together last Thanksgiving, in British Columbia, our parents were neither the first generation of our families to be friends nor the first to pursue sports together.
I never set out to be the top Worldloppet Master in the United States, with more than twice the number of the next American, and one of the top 10 in the world — with 160 marathon completions. Each accomplishment led to the next, every opening enabling another. If I found neither fun, fulfillment, nor success, I would not have persisted, passionately.
The point is not personal: Southerners should recognize possibilities, believe in the ability to achieve accomplishment in the wider world, and see the best days as being ahead, not in a Plantocracy where success was predicated upon enslavement and only a few privileged slave owners prospered.
If I were to write an “I Have A Dream” speech, it would dream that Southerners’ splendid record in sports, politics, music, literature, and business expand in breadth and depth.
Confederate generals and politicians did not wish that former Rebels persist in pursuit of a failed past. Why the veneration of a Lost Cause eclipsed present and future opportunity is inconceivable.
Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis declared, in a speech delivered in March 1888, at Mississippi City, “The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations; before you lies the future — a future full of golden promise; a future of expanding national glory, before which all the world shall stand amazed. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring a consummation devoutly to be wished — a reunited country.“
Former Confederate General Robert E. Lee wrote a Confederate widow in Spring 1867, “Madam, do not train up your children in hostility to the government of the United States. Remember, we are all one country now. Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring them up to be Americans.”
Change occurs constantly in each decade and every generation. Whether one accepts “the new normal” and consolidates gains or squanders them is a conscious choice: Southerners can enjoy éclat if desired or delude themselves that time stands still.
