Roy Exum
I’ve always been real guarded about the girls I date. I’m what they call “unlucky in love,” having divorced twice, but I’ll match my string against any other man alive and the reason for my good fortune is I keep my mouth shut. It’s nobody’s business and, if the gossips get to talking about who I was seen with in Nashville or Atlanta, I could give a fat happy. It just means they are giving some other daring Lothario a rest.
Right now the same pitifuls are trying to run the Governor of Virginia off on the most idiotic charge in the history of man - he might have had his picture take in a blackface gag 40 or so years ago. Our witch-hunt skills have just dropped to a new low. It’s like everybody who has made a stupid, embarrassing mistake in the last half decade should rush to Atlanta and frolic in rush-hour traffic. This is preposterous and the mere accusation is the biggest affront in history to Americans both black and white.
This morning CBS News will air the first “exclusive interview” with the embattled Ralph Northam, who has indicated in the carefully-leaked buildup he ain’t going anywhere, but, if we’re lucky, we can hope for some great sequels: Why does it take a podium – of all places -- for Joe Biden to whisper tender nothings in the ear of another man’s wife, or, what’s the real reason Melania is sticking around Donald when he’s about as sexy as a hippopotamus, and, is it a racial thing that when some of all the liberal loonies vow to leave the country during every election, every dadgum one of them picks Canada and no one ever picks Mexico.
Oh, but I digress. Governor Northam can be labeled many ways - a Democrat with conservative financial views, a pediatric neurologist whose affection for babies is widely known, a man who passed the biggest litmus test when the people of Virginia elected him, or the proven fact his state needs healing in the worst way if some wacko poppycock can create national havoc with a 40-year-old yearbook picture.
There was once a time when I took up with a Delta flight attendant and we had great fun with each other. She had a masters degree from UVa but, far better, real tanned legs that were so long they started way up under her arms. She had a snappy vintage Porsche Speedster, an infectious laugh and was from Virginia’s Eastern Shore, just like Governor Northam.
So when Governor Northam is accused of racism I know it is untrue. I have seen where he grew up and how he grew up. On the Eastern Shore there are no strangers. Everybody is treated the same and that’s because everybody is the same.
That summer I fell in love with the Eastern Shore and we explored a lot. Chincoteague is up near the top of the Virginia island, almost into Maryland, and Onancock, where Governor Northam grew up on a water-side farm, is about 30 miles south. Now, you go up there and look at it and tramp around, you’ll find the island proper is too small for racism.
Ralph had an older brother and the Northam boys worked a 75-acre farm, with livestock and crops, and when Ralph wasn’t working his family’s place he worked on other farms as a boy. As he got older he was a deckhand on charter fishing boats, helped stock the island grocery, and even worked the Tangier Island ferry at times. Check history – racists hate, instead of enjoying life like a suntanned teenager on an ocean island
The biggest thing you need to know is the Northam boys went to Onancock school, a predominantly black school where Governor Northam was a member of the basketball and football teams before he got a scholarship to VMI. At small schools, where the entire sophomore class may be 63 kids, you don’t have race problems. You have classmates and teammates.
So help me this is true. You put on an attitude before you go to a school where the classes are so small you can’t pick nine-a-side and by the end of recess that attitude will have somewhat magically turned into a big knot on the side of your jaw. It never takes more than two cans of ratta-tat-tat for both white and black children to know they are in the same boat and sports – the greatest of society’s equalizers – could give a rip the color of either player in a double-play rundown.
I’ve seen a million “score books,” the official record of each game, and, while I’ve seen a bunch of times when an infielder wanted to go to “fist city” over an error, not the first “book” has room for a player’s color or, “the size of fight in the dog.”
Governor Northam is not a racist by height, depth, or any other measure. Sadly, we see a rush on other state officials citing rapes from years ago, and I for one have had enough of these unfounded claims when – my heavens -- it is most convenient to flip serious charge that should have been made many years ago at the moment instead of when it is best times for total strangers and their ever-hidden agendas.
This is wrong. Totally. Bogus. The criticism is mean, vicious and – hello! – questionable. We have long been the land of the innocent until proven guilty. If there is no evidence and no eye-witness account of the crime, it cannot be valid. This is wrong, totally bogus, because now America’s laws are no longer our true north, but instead just a tool to foster evil for society's nobodies.
Turn these people away. Look at what they have already done – a grainy yearbook picture over a good man’s entire life of work – and you side with the photo?
Do not fall for the evil side’s depravity.
royexum@aol.com