Southern Musings: March 12, 2018

One of the most revered religious voices in the history of our planet advised us not to judge others. We do, though. We can’t help it.

Nowadays, we not only rush to judge others, we elect people to public office if they are better and meaner at it than we. Odd, isn’t it?

Not really, it seems to depend on point of view. I recall a conversation I had with a dear close friend once who lived in a city where I served for years as its urban planning consultant. There was a prominent citizen there who was the meanest bastard I’ve dealt with in my entire professional career. A weak heart, combined I'm sure with his malicious personality, allowed me to outlast him.

As with many small towns, he was a banker, real estate broker, insurance company owner, and local kingpin. He was as rich as he was mean.

And oh, was he mean. He made the character of Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life look like Mr. Rogers of TV fame.

He once used his position of chair of the city's sewer board to kill a huge development deal for his city because a rival broker had the listing on the land where the development was to go.

He called a mortgage on a man with a wife and two kids because the man spoke, at a planning commission meeting, against a horribly devastating project in the man’s neighborhood, but from which our Mr. Mean stood to gain.

He sold homes “on contract”to poor (meaning “African-American”) families who couldn’t get mortgaged loans.  This meant they made monthly payments but gained no equity unless they paid the loan in full. He was known for kicking families out on the street for missing a single payment after years of faithful compliance. People would point out properties to me that he had “sold” to dozens of families over the years. He was a jewel among men. Every five years or so the Chamber of Commerce named him "Citizen of the Year." Everyone called him "Mr."

I’m proud to say that he hated me and the feeling was "muchal.”

He would refer to me during planning commission meetings as “that dumb young man who comes down to our fine city to tell us how to run things.”

His “fine city” has the same, within a dozen people or so, population now as it did in the 1970 census. Men like him are largely to blame.

Once, I mentioned him to my friend and she said something interesting. “I don’t know much about his business life,” she said. “I just know him as the nice next-door neighbor to my mother who mows her yard for her sometimes, and brings her fresh tomatoes from his garden each summer.”

That, my friends, is small town urban life in the South in a nutshell.