{COMMENTARY}
By now just about every English-literate person inside and outside Mississippi has heard of state representative Karl Oliver’s Facebook pronouncement that Louisiana leaders removing Confederate monuments from public places should be “lynched.”
It’s hard to imagine a statement more idiotic yet simultaneously more revealing of the base, race-addled mentality underlying so much of what’s wrong with our state. It’s the same ideologically insensitive mentality responsible for refusing to expand Medicaid to thousands of Mississippi citizens desperate for health care when the opportunity was there, and for repeatedly slashing public health, mental health, and education budgets without apology to those who will suffer the worst consequences.
Social workers, this is what we are up against. In the current political context, hoping and praying for gradual evolutionary change for the better is delusional. Petitioning, “lobbying” elected officials in the traditional manner is a dead end. Forget the Washington nightmare for the moment. Time to break out the hip boots and ready ourselves to “drain the swamp” in Jackson.
The Southern Miss School of Social Work 