The Economic Shortfall in Mississippi

Even though I live in the poorest part of America, I received one of the best possible educations on economics, taught by brilliant, very Christian-thinking people.   Mississippi has some truly brilliant people working on our considerable economic problems.  They're people with varied perspectives and qualifications, but they're all very genuine and all ultimately working for the same goal.  I'm proud to say most are from here.

We're still failing, though.  On every economic metric, we're failing.  The problem we're facing is the human condition is so complex and so nuanced that no economic system or combination of economic systems is capable of meeting all our needs.  Despite our bountiful economic resources, our history and our internal conflicts create such a complicated economic landscape that we're simply not able to provide for our people.

In Mississippi, there is a considerable shortfall between our reach and our grasp.  You won't hear me say this very often, and I don't mean everybody, but there are some very conscientious and Christian people in our Legislature working as hard as they can to elevate us out of the spot we're in and have been for as long as I can remember, but there's only so much they can do.

This considerable gap between what we need and what we have is what keeps me up at night.  The only way we can make sure all the people of Mississippi are clothed and fed and close this gap between what our economy supplies and what our people can provide is with the ancient concept of simple Christian charity.  

When you use words like "charity," for many people, it conjures up images of little old ladies at bakesales or rich people who don't care at black tie events, but it's so much more complicated than that.  Charity is what keeps Mississippi alive.  Nearly everyone on my Facebook list is involved in some form of charity.  Some are involved in EVERY form of charity.  We have such an enormous capacity for human capacity that there are a good dozen or more who are intimately involved in charity for dogs and cats.

My father taught me some very simple lessons.  People will hate me if I'm not humble.  I come from poor farmer stock in Mississippi and poor farmer stock in Scotland and Ireland before that.  I must never try to elevate myself beyond a deep concern for the poorest people in Mississippi.  That's where charity comes in.  As a people, Mississippi may never really be prosperous, but we can be kind.  We can be sufficient so that not even the least of us suffers.  That's where charity comes in.

Yelp Reviews

 For about a hundred years, I've written restaurant reviews in my journal.  I just never showed anybody.  My goal is to eventually post a really good review for all my favorite restaurants.  If I haven't gotten to your restaurant yet, I will!

My Yelp Page

Lunch Downtown

Getting ready for the big move, I went downtown to meet the movers.  Since I was nearby, I went to the Mayflower for lunch.  Since 1975, I've done this maybe seven hundred times.

I've known Jerry for something like forty years.  In that time, there have been maybe eleven encounters when he didn't find something to complain about.  His cousin was like that.  His dad was too.  Greeks are pretty straight shooters.

Jerry's complaint yesterday was that it was a beautiful summer day, a quarter till noon, the IBC was getting ramped up, and his restaurant was nearly empty.  Judge Waller came in.  His dad ate there every day since before he served as governor, so I guess he's just keeping up the tradition.  A couple of three tops came in, and an out-of-town couple who didn't know to order anything with the salad dressing but somehow weren't connected with the ballet.

It wasn't Jerry's fault.  My gumbo and seafood salad was as good as it was the three hundred other times I've had it.  It wasn't the fault of the IBC.  I met with a cluster of dancers having lunch at Millsaps, and they were having a great experience.  Truth be told, parts of Jackson are dying.  Jerry's restaurant is in one of them.

When Jerry was thinking about buying the restaurant from his dad and his cousins, we talked about it a good bit.  He had a great strategy and good financing.  It was a good deal.  Downtown then didn't have any retail traffic to speak of, but it had a lot of people, and his tables were always full.  Some fifteen years into it, Parlor Market moved in and brought Mayflower as much business as they had their own.  It was a good time.  That's when I moved downtown.

Jackson's biggest problem is jobs.  There aren't enough.  All the crime and dropping property values, and rotting infrastructure go back to jobs.  If we had the same employment levels we had in 1980, the Mayflower would be packed.

In 1980, between Missco, McCarty-Holeman, McRaes, and Deposit Guarantee, you were looking at something like twenty-five hundred jobs.  Maybe more.  In 2023, those four companies hired zero people.  That's a number that's kept me awake at night for twenty years.  

Part of the problem is that we've had a massive accumulation of wealth in very few people since Jimmy Carter left office.  The last major anti-trust action was Judge Brown vs AT&T.  That ended in 1984.  Just speaking for our own company, there was really no way we could compete with companies coming into our market with fifteen and twenty times as much capital as we had.  Like McRaes and McCarty-Holeman, we formed a purchasing group with other companies our size.  I was deeply involved in creating it.  With that, we were able to have price parity with Office Depot and Staples for a while, but they had so much money for other areas of how that business reaches the market that we were really probably doomed to failure, no matter what.

The last time this happened, the situation was actually much worse, but we're getting there.  What saved us was Teddy Rosevelt, a Republican, who became the greatest trust-buster in history.  The moves he made and the legislation he passed made it possible for companies like the ones I mentioned to make a profit in Mississippi, which has been the poorest state in the union since the war, the Civil one, not the one in Europe.

A lot of people are going to disagree with the economics of my assessment, but I feel like the evidence is there.

A lot of times, when I mention doing things downtown, I get a handful of responses like, "Aren't you afraid of getting shot?"  Well, I've always been afraid of getting shot.  Hell, listening to TW Lewis and Ed King talk about what happened to them in the sixties, and I don't know that I've ever been safe.  

Jackson has a crime problem that's undeniable, but over-inflating it isn't helping anything.  The Mayflower is a hundred feet from the federal building, two hundred yards from the Governor's Mansion, and two hundred and fifty yards from not only Jackson Police Headquarters but now the Capitol Police Headquarters.  I've lived downtown for fifteen years, and I've never had a problem.

Parts of Jackson are very sick.  Parts of my body are very sick.  Neither of us is dead yet.  The Jackson Police, The Hinds County Sheriff's Department, the Capitol Police, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol have combined efforts to make sure that your experience at the International Ballet Competition is safe and enjoyable.  While you're downtown, eat at the Mayflower and Ironhorse and King Edward and Hal & Mals.  Don't give in to hate and fear.  Even though I'm moving, you'll probably see me around.

Two Tiny Opals

I ended up on academic probation in college once because I was enamored with this girl from the Delta, and all we did for six months was smoke weed, drink, and mess around (if you take my meaning.)  

She was stunningly beautiful and exceedingly rich, well-read and quick of wit, but despite all of this in her favor, she had this wounded bird quality about her that is very likely what drew me to her and what drove her passion for not being sober--that and being from the delta where most people are never sober.  Nearly everyone I knew from there had a history of finding different ways to experience the universe, hers included a lot of Budweiser.  

Her laugh attracted me first, then she spilled almost an entire red cup of beer over me on the back patio of CS's one summer.  That's how we became friends.  I'll be friends with anyone who spills beer on me, then spills the rest over it over their own head and laughing to prove they didn't mean any harm.  

She began her career at Millsaps kind of backward by attending the Summer session first and then coming back in the fall.  In the Fall, she failed out of rush.  I don't really know how that happened, except maybe her party-all-the-time attitude in summer school annoyed some of the other girls.  Maybe she spilled beer on them too.  She was something like a quadruple Tri Delta legacy, but we didn't have a chapter yet, and the four we did have, didn't want her.

I can't really say that I was in love.  There certainly would be deeper wells to explore in that aspect of my life in the future.  I was, however, without a doubt, entangled in a very powerful spell.  I would have done anything for her and sometimes did.  When we both were three-tenths of a point away from a goose egg one semester, I pleaded on her behalf and my own with Dean Whitt to let us come back the next semester on academic probation rather than having to sit out a semester. 

It was very important to her that her father not know she had failed a semester.  Much like when she failed out of rush, my shirt was wet with her tears.  That, and the incredible softness of her fingers were probably the heart of our relationship.  While I could arrange that, there was, however, no way to hide the fact from my own father as he was intimately involved in bringing Dr. Harmon and Dean Whitt to Jackson in the first place.

"What happened, Buddy?"

I didn't lie.  There was a girl, and there was an awful lot of alcohol.  It was a moral failure on my part.  With my learning disability, he'd become accustomed to my academic failures, but this was something different.    We thought my days of academic struggles were passed.  A new obstacle arose.  

I approached my friend with the news that she could come back on probation without having to sit out a semester.  I told her things had to be different, that I couldn't spend all night every night drinking and laughing at the way cold cuts exploded when you threw them into a box fan.  I said we had futures to consider, and our parents expected more from us, and this was the right thing to do.  Her response was that we should see other people, and she had already begun.

For a long time, I had this tradition that whenever I broke things off with a girl, I'd buy them a necklace.  Nothing gaudy or even really noticeable, just a small drop, usually with an opal.  I went to Albrittons and picked out a piece that had two small opals in a sculpted gold setting that made it look like they were tiny pears hanging from a tree.  I showed it to my friend Lisa, over in Sanders Hall, explaining that even though she technically had broken things off with me, I still wanted her to have it as kind of a punctuation mark on our time together.

I wrapped it in creamy white paper and took it over to her apartment at the Groovy Grove.  In the interim, she had told me that, instead of coming back to Millsaps on academic probation, she was leaving Jackson and going to Mississippi State, and she was also spending all the time she previously spent with me with a boy I was in kindergarten with.  I gave her the box and said goodbye.  She asked if I wanted to come in, and I said I had to get to work.  My tie was already wilting in the July heat.

There were maybe five or six of these ritualistic necklaces given during my career.  All, very remarkable women.  I'm honestly curious if any of them still exist--the necklaces, not the women.  

They were hardly heirloom pieces.  Neither was I.  The future would bring worse experiences.  This girl really only wanted my time.  All of it--and my attention.  All of it.  I gave it willingly; you would have too if you'd seen her eyes.    This girl never asked me for a dime.  In fact, she usually paid for our trips to the liquor store.  In the future, there would be girls who really only wanted money from me.  Some, quite a lot.  They found themselves in very unstable situations and made a convincing argument that only I could help them, and I did.

In the Summer of 1985, there was none of that.  All this girl wanted was somebody who could keep up with her parties, which I admit was quite a challenge sometimes.  The first time I ever kissed her, her cheeks were still wet with tears.  I never knew what caused them, but there was some demon inside her that was driving all this passion for not being sober.  There was something inside her that caused a wound most people couldn't see, but was all I could see.  

In the end, whatever was eating her, I failed to defeat. That failure hurt a lot more than knowing I'd never hold her again and some other fella would.  I sent her out into the world with two tiny opals shaped like pears and my sincere wish was that whatever was hurting her would stop on its own because I could not stop it, even though I tried.  

My psychologist told me that I shouldn't seek relationships with girls who needed me.  I should focus on girls who enjoyed their time with me, not the ones who sent me on missions.    I told him that I understood what he was saying but that he hadn't seen her tears.  There was no way I could have refused her.  

I would see those tears gliding down many other tender cheeks over the years.  I never got very good at refusing them.   Eventually, I ended the tradition of giving away a tiny gold drop to end a romance.  It was meant to be a really noble gesture but ended up being sort of pointless, especially since none of them would ever be "the last time."  At least two recipients of my pointless gesture read my stuff.  If you're reading this: Hi.  I still remember you.  I remember it all.  

I guess, in the end, that was the point.  Whatever hurt them, I registered it.  I noticed them.  I remembered them.  Nobody should ever go through life without somebody noticing their wounds.  Maybe that's my superpower.   Sometimes, I take inventory of my past loves.  Most of these girls ended up becoming happy.  Some never did.  One didn't make it at all.  Maybe I wasn't supposed to fix them all.  Maybe I was just supposed to remember.