Introducing 'Courier Colloquies'

Friends, I subscribe to the weekly Savannah Courier to keep up with the shenanigans and goings-on of my Hardin County brothers and sisters (and, I'll admit, the growing list of my peers who are getting hitched and having babies), and every week the paper is delivered to my doorstep (okay, stuffed in my tiny mailbox) brimming with a particular hilarity best exemplified by rural white America. And every week it is a struggle for me to accept that I am no better than my Hardin County peers — that I am just an asshole who lives two hours away but still takes the paper for the gossip and the funny. But mostly an asshole.

This is not something I hide or am coy about. If you are from Hardin County (or any small town, I suppose) and you managed to get away, you understand the love/hate relationship inherent to small-town living and small-town emancipation. It's a running literary theme, and I understand there's a FOX show about something similar that airs some time after The Simpsons. (I've seen it and am disturbed that the main character and his love interest look so much like real-life siblings.)

So it's with that superfluous introduction that I present to you the newest T&G feature: Courier Colloquies.

Today's Courier Colloquy comes from the Thursday, March 9, edition.

First, some backstory:

The local school board superintendent retired and a replacement was sought. The principal of the local high school (re: the only one in the county) wanted the job. It was a natural ascendency, if I may be permitted to use that word without really knowing what it means. But he had some competition in the principal of Pickwick Southside School, a K-8 school that serves as a natural choice for Pickwick/Counce-dwelling elementary schoolers, and an alternative to the only other middle school in the county.

So it was principal vs. principal, with a hotly divided school board set to choose its own boss. Long story short, the board tweaked its own rules to achieve a vote (because they could not reach the usually required two-thirds majority) and selected the underdog — the principal of the small Pickwick school.

But this post isn't really about any of that, although I'm excited to see the board choose the Pickwick principal over the high school principal, because, having been educated under the high school principal, I can vouch for his utter ineptitude. Though I guess that's an unreasonably mean thing to say.

Anyway, GAH, I'm rambling.

This post is about a quote from school board member Thomas Neill.

This quote will tell you everything you could possibly need to know about Hardin County:

It breaks my heart to send one of these boys home without this job," said board member Thomas Neill. "We've got to put somebody in here. Setting still, not doing nothing, is not doing good for nobody."