Our Liberties We Despise and Our Rights We Will Mangle; Or, On The Road Part 1

Stolen from Reddit

Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain is written on the state flag of Iowa in white script on a blue banner held aloft by a proud eagle. As is everything else we learned as a kid growing up in the state of Iowa, it was a fucking lie. We were told that Iowa was the first state in the nation to desegregate its schools; we weren't told that the state never bothered to enforce this edict from its supreme court. Iowa legalized gay marriage before many other states, and then recalled those same judges and left the state with justices who decided that you could be fired if your boss found you too attractive. Iowa added sexual orientation and gender identity to its civil rights code in 2007; this week in 2025 they became the first state to remove a protected class by removing gender identity from the Iowa civil rights statutes. The usual transphobic excuses were issued by the legislature and the governor; I will not bother quoting either party here. Evil is evil, no matter what words they use to justify it. Not that they ever have the courage to stand on business either. They do great evil in the name of their cruel god and they cry wolf when the oppressed dare to name their oppressors. These freaks see themselves as the heroes of reality and cannot conceive of themselves as villains. This is what is so frustrating about this crop of morons and ketamine-addled weirdos that have wrenched control of the state and The State: they are such broken and awful people to have ruling over you. A man with a broken dick is ripping out the copper in the walls of the American empire! You could not write this shit! Elon rant aside, Iowa's fall into the shitpile of genocidal politics is the final act in a debasement that started not long after I started to gain political awareness. Perhaps this what Iowa always has been, and the mask has finally been ripped off.

Baton Rouge waterfront, from the wikipedia page

Part Two: The Road

Thirteen hours in the car from Chapel Hill to Baton Rouge isn't great for sanity, health, or photo opportunities, but it is great for seeing billboards of all shapes and sizes. The Jesus billboards are everywhere across the South, but nowhere are they as psychotic as South Carolina's. Shout out to "The blood of Jesus binds demons." I'll remember you forever, psycho sign in red ink on a yellow background. Another neat collection of billboards that aren't region specific are the lawyer billboards. You can find one in every state, but I have noticed that in states without anything resembling a safety net, the damn things sprout up like mint leaves.

Crossing into South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Gulf Mississippi, and finally Louisiana is and is not enough to give you whiplash. Especially when the roads from one state improve immediately after crossing over into another. The scenery changes ever so slightly as the miles tick on by, and then you're in the touristy part of Mississippi, and there's seemingly water everywhere around you and you woke up surrounded by forest. The one constant in all of this state-crossing was the Atlanta traffic. Still miserable as shit even on a weekend. The road lifts off some of the weight on your shoulders for a moment as you cross from state to state, until you have to stop for gas or the bathroom and you are reminded that you are a minority that is so so so firmly in the cross-rights of the federal government. Yet. Even when the world shoves its ugly face into my car and leers at me, I still have the road. And for now, that's more than enough.