Georgia Good Old Boys Love Their Trucks

As I have mentioned before, I grew up in Georgia, and I lived there until 1995 when I was uprooted and transplanted—kicking and screaming in protest every mile of the way—from my beloved rolling red-clay hills to the murky, mosquito-infested swamps of Southwest Louisiana. Moreover, not a day passes that I don’t miss my home state; and like Lewis Grizzard, the late-and-great purveyor of Southern wit and humor, once wrote, “If I ever get back to Georgia, I’m gonna nail my feet to the ground.”

Still, my love of the state aside, I realize Georgia isn’t perfect. For one, its people are quite eccentric, to put it mildly. Not that eccentricity is necessarily a bad thing, although it does leave the state open to ridicule on occasion, for example, as it was up until 2010 when Governor Sonny Perdue finally signed legislation requiring seat-belt usage in pickup trucks.

Up until that fateful day, Georgia was the only state that exempted adults who were either driving or riding in pickup trucks from buckling up when they went caroming around the Interstates, highways, byways, and dirt roads that make up the state’s transportation network. Yet, if you were in a car, that was a different story entirely. In that case, if you didn’t buckle up, you would receive a ticket—that is, if the police caught you. Again, though, if you were completely free to go unrestrained, which, naturally, left you exposed to the possibility of being sent flying through the windshield if your pickup truck collided with another vehicle, a stationary object, or one of the many deer crossing the byways and dirt roads that meander through rural Georgia. Of course, as Greg Bluestein says, “The way some Georgians see it, if they’re going to get thrown through the windshield of a pickup, that’s nobody’s business but their own” (2008, p. 6A).

You have to understand, however, that pickup trucks are a big thing in Georgia, even more so than they are here in Louisiana; but I guess that’s as it should be since Georgia is home to a great many Good Old Boys; and everyone knows just how much Good Old Boys love their pickup trucks. They love them so much, in fact, that they do not want to be restrained in their trucks, perhaps because the seatbelts interfere with their mobility when they want to toss beer cans out the window at other pickup trucks. Who knows? I certainly don’t. The point, however, is that Georgia pickup truck owners are not happy about being forced to wear seatbelts.

And that’s another thing I miss about Georgia—the pig-headed individualism of its citizenry. Believe me, Texans, who are notorious for boasting about their independence and uniqueness, as well as the massive size of their state, do not have a thing on the Good Old Boys in Georgia. The guys back in my home state epitomize pig-headed individualism. If you don’t believe me, just go visit any country/western bar in any small town in Georgia on a Saturday night; and after you order your longneck Miller or Budweiser, which you will naturally drink from the bottle, just sit there and listen to the conversation around you, although you may have to strain a bit to hear it over the Hank Williams Jr. tunes playing on the jukebox. And what you will hear is an entire roomful of Good Old Boys all talking about five things, although not necessarily in this order:

1.      How they can out-drink any man in the room;

2.      How their wife/girlfriend can out-drink any woman in the room;

3.      How they own the best coon dog in the entire Southern United States;

4.      How the deer they shot last season was the largest on record and they could prove except the deer bounced off the truck while they were driving home on a rutted dirt road;

5.      How they own the “baddest truck” on four (sometimes six) wheels;

6.      And how no one, especially a bunch of politicians, “who ain’t got nothing better to do with their time than sit around making up stupid laws,” is going to take away their right to go zooming through the windshield of their pickup truck. Besides, “everybody knows only sissies wear seatbelts in pickup trucks.”

 Ah, Georgia, not a day passes that I don’t miss it.   

Sources: 

Greg Bluestein, “Ga. Mulls seat-belt law for pickups;” Associated Press; The Advocate; January 29, 2008. p. A6

Pickup Trucks Image, retrieved from Google Images (2016) Citybiketrips.com