What to Say and How to Say It

I've been working on the presentation about Mississippi that I will need to take with me to Brazil for the past day or so.  It has, in the way of such things, turned into a monster project.  Whenever I start making a PowerPoint for something, it tends to get massive, anyway, but when I know I'm going into a group that has no background knowledge, I want to make sure I give lots of images, multimedia when I can.  This makes the presentation hard to build, massive to store, huge for a machine to handle.

The hardest part hasn't been the technical assembly.  PowerPoint, the medium I chose because it works best in an environment that has limited tech access, and I are old friends.  The hard part has been trying to figure out what to say.  If my job is to give an overview of my state, what do I put in?  What do I leave out?  This is complicated if you're from Mississippi.

There are so many ways to approach my state.  You can take the Glorious Past route with strains of "Dixie" playing in the background.  You can take the Tourism route with casinos and Pilgrimage homes shining in the afternoon sun.  You can take the Race Hate route and display all the ugliness and inequality that have been a part of life here in the past.  You can take the Redneck route and show the poverty and ignorance that abound. You can look at the Arts, show the massive contribution Mississippi has made to literature and music.  You can even go with the Southern Sports life route, focus only on all the aspects of football and hunting if that's what floats your boat.  This is not even an exhaustive list.  Mississippi has all these things and more for people to pull out of her depending on what it is they personally want from her.

So what about me?  As I am planning to try to tell others about my state, what should I leave in?  What should I leave out?  What is the best way to explain what this state is?  I am not going to bash it.  Certainly I think there are things it does poorly, but I think that can be said of anywhere, everywhere.  I think we are a mixture of good things and bad things, just like every other place.  At the same time, I don't think it is right to gloss over the bad things in our past, pretend like everything has always been some kind of sterilized Technicolor dream here.  When people have fought and bled and died, you don't dishonor that sacrifice because it doesn't make for good PR.  We have a huge horrible thing in our past.  America has a huge horrible thing in her past.  We are still moving on from it.  That doesn't mean that we have the right to sweep it under the rug because it makes us or others uncomfortable to look at it.

And yet.  All so many people know of Mississippi is a stereotype of poverty, racism, and...well...bare feet and overalls.  They seem to think we're all Snopeses somehow.  Those of us who were born here and live here are sort of used to that misunderstanding.  We know there is a lot more to us than that, that things here have changed tremendously, that we are frequently generalized and misrepresented, that we have great good as well as struggles we are trying to overcome.  What I want to make sure that I do, though, is find a way to show  us accurately.  When it is as complex as this situation is, though, how can I be sure to do that with honesty and sensitivity?

All I can do is try.  It makes me nervous to say, "Here is my state.  This is the truth of it."  Instead, what I would like to say is "Here is my state.  This is the way I see it."  This would be more comfortable and more true.  Who among us can really know the heart of a place, the whole of it?  Even though I have lived here my  entire life, I find new parts of Mississippi all the time, every time I meet somebody new or go somewhere I haven't been before in the state.  It would be arrogant to think I knew it through and through just because I happened to be born here.  Maybe if I approach this presentation with that mindset, I will be more comfortable.  Of all the things I'll be doing, this is the one that is difficult.