GEORGIA ON MY MIND

The song was written in 1930.

By Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell.

There is a debate over whether the song is about the state or a woman. Hoagey, who wrote the music, said it was about the state.  Gorrell, who wrote the lyrics, claimed it was about a woman.

Hoagy's sister to be precise.

In 1979, Georgia made it that state's official  song.  

More specifically, it made Ray Charles's 1960 bluesy cover the official state song.  That version had rocketed to the top of the Billboard magazine's Hot 100 and became the song most associated with Charles's iconic career. So much so that, in 2003, Rolling Stone  named it --  Ray Charles's cover, not Hoagy Carmichael's original -- the 44th greatest song of all time. 

If you listen to the two, it's not hard to understand why.

The song is about a memory.

Of a place or a person?

Who knows.  

The difference is that Charles, a Georgia native and black child of the segregationist south, made it about a place. And in slowing it down and bluesing it up, in singing it through the prism of his own voice and experience, he also made the memory unforgettable . . .

And real.

Or the opposite of merely ideal.

Which is how, I imagine, it became in 1979 the song of a post-segregationist state.

Other arms reach out to me

Other eyes smile tenderly

Still in peaceful dreams I see

The road leads back to you

I said Georgia

Oh Georgia, no peace I find

Just an old sweet song

Keeps Georgia on my mind

Yesterday, another memory was made unforgettable in Georgia.

Unfortunately, the road it leads back to is well-traveled . . .

Overcrowded . . .

And has to be closed.

Now.

Four people were killed by a 14-year-old at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, a small city fifty miles northeast of Atlanta and about half that west of Athens. The four victims included two freshmen and two math teachers. Like their killer, the freshmen were 14-year-old boys. One of the teachers, 39-year-old Richard Aspinwall, was also the assistant football coach; the other was 53-year-old Christina Irimie.  Nine others were injured and hospitalized.  The firearm used by the killer was a semi-automatic AR-platform style rifle.

There is really no question on why we as a nation are regularly witness to mass shootings of young people and others.

It happens nowhere else with either the frequency or lethality at which it happens here.  

It's the guns, stupid.

On the issue of guns, however, we are in the place we were in on the issue of race in 1896.  

That was the year the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson constitutionalized segregation under the legal myth that a state could satisfy the Fourteenth Amendment's color-blind demand for equal protection by providing different races separate but ostensibly equal services.  

On guns, we now live in a world where the Supreme Court has constitutionalized an individual right to bear arms unmoored from the Second Amendment's original and stated need to provide for a well-ordered militia. 

The myth on race in 1896 was that separate could be equal.

It never is.

The myth on guns today is that individuals need weapons of war to protect themselves in times or places of peace.

They don't.

Apalachee High School at 9 am yesterday was as serene and calm as schools across the continent.  Nothing required anyone other than law enforcement to bring a firearm to that school.  Colt Gray, the 14- year-old now in custody and charged with murder, was not in any danger himself. And he did not need protection from anyone but himself. 

Today, Gray's aunt claimed he had been "begging for months" for mental health help and that may very well be true. A year ago, he and his father were  interviewed by a Jackson County Sheriff's officer following an FBI tip that Gray had allegedly threatened on-line to open fire in middle school. When the on-line address could not be linked to Gray, that investigation was closed.

The problem here is not mental illness or investigatory negligence. The notion that we can insure absolute safety by improving mental health services or through investigations is nonsense.  Someone will always fall through the cracks and no police department or bureau of investigation will be able to ferret out one hundred percent of those who may be planning a mass killing.

In 2024, as of September 4, there had been 385 mass shootings in the United States.

In Georgia, yesterdays was that state's sixteenth.

The only solution is getting the guns.

Ban  semi-automatic weapons

Ban assault weapons.

Ban multi-magazine clips.

Ban bump stocks.

Ban Saturday night specials.

If the Supreme Court will not alter its ludicrous construction of the Second Amendment . . .

Repeal it.

The deer hunters will not lose their sport.

And our kids will not lose their lives.