Georgia on My Mind

“Fairmount had streets named for deceased factory owners, a shuttered college and the town’s last practicing doctor. There used to be carpet mills, but now there was a plant that makes powdered chlorine, and another that made bricks. An IGA grocery anchored one end of town, an American Legion post the other, and in between were three gas stations, one diner, and an intersection where locals reliably shot out the one traffic light the county kept trying to install. ‘People here do not like change,’ said Connie Underwood, the clerk at the Citgo, explaining life in Fairmount one day. ‘Like if I moved the beef jerky, they’d get mad.'” In WaPo, Stephanie McCrummen shares the story of Cody Johnson and why he said no to hate. In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism. “He voted against all the politics of Trumpism that had been expected to work on somebody like him — white nationalism, grievance, bitterness, bullying and, perhaps most of all, fear of a changing world. ‘I have relatives who retreated rather than adapted,’ he said, thinking of the life he left behind. ‘I think of it as, I left the mountain to come into the world, to go out into the world. It’s something I’m kind of proud of.'”