I have spent much of my adult life in the South, and presently live in Atlanta, Georgia.

I have mixed feelings about it - I love the proximity to both the mountains (45 minutes north) and the warm Gulf waters (5 hours south).  I love the warm, sunny climate with hot summers and mild winters.

I don't like the redneck emphasis on football and beer.  Georgia has been ranked as having the worst school systems in the nation, even below Mississippi, West Virginia and Alabama. Racism is alive and kicking, with a twist - since blacks control the Atlanta government, whites are treated as a minority and often discriminated against.   The city still is polarized between good old boy whites who control business and entitlement program-oriented blacks who control city government.

For example, the local mass transit system, MARTA does nothing to alleviate traffic congestion in the north of the city, it only goes from the predominately black and poor areas to the shopping malls and airport.  The system was made not to relieve traffic, but to buy votes for the black mayor by using taxpayer money to provide an means for poor citizens without cars to get to their jobs.

Things are changing - slowly, almost imperceptibly, as the flood of people moving to Atlanta from outside of the Deep South transforms the population.   Atlanta today has much greater ethnic diversity than ever before.  When I lived there in the late 1980's, all I saw was Whites and Blacks.  Now, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indians, South Americans, Mexicans, and even Canadians are here in substantial numbers.

Locals have even stopped referring to people from New York as "Yankees" or "eye-talians".

Now, let's look at some of the great things about Georgia!