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Update: Ann Bartow, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, has a post outlining DV laws as they currently stand in South Carolina. Tragically, not a lot has changed.

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One of the reasons I rarely try my hand at political blogging, other than the fact that I suck at it, is because it takes me such a long time to form an opinion that is something more than just a reactionary AAAAUUUUGH!

I envy people like Digby and Miss Amandapants not just because they're clever, but because they're so clever so quickly.

Me, the wheels turn in my head sometimes for years before I figure something out. And I just get so pissed about problems I feel are obviously huge and a miscarriage of justice, and I run around all crazynuts trying to figure out why this horrible thing has been overlooked, and I'm flabbergasted that the reason things are the way they are is because people think it's okay.

Take the law in my homestate that rules wifebeating a misdemeanor. In
the South Carolina state legislature tabled a bill that would change the law from a misdemeanor to a felony on the same day they put through the law making cockfighting a felony.

A chicken's life is more valuable than a woman's, it seems, and I will never live there again, never ever.

Which I'm sure is just fine with the men that made wifebeating jokes while they tabled that bill, the same men who called protesting women "stupid" for being angry that cruelty to some dumb bird gets a harsher penalty than breaking your wife's neck in front of your kids.

Two or three months ago a woman I went to high school with, and her sister, who went to high school with my sister, were shot to death by their own father. His wife, tired of being beaten by him for forty years, left him, and her daughters came back to South Carolina to protect her and support her on her court date. After following her all over the courthouse, threatening her, he followed her and their daughters as they drove to his mother's house. He knocked on the door, and his younger daughter answered, and he shot her to death. Then he chased his older daughter into the back yard and shot her in the back.

She thought he'd kill her if she left; she'd been saying it for years. She finally left when she didn't care anymore, but if she'd known he'd punish her by killing her children, she would have stayed in the marriage until she died.

I'd like to ask the men to whom domestic violence is as serious as littering whether they think my classmate and her sister would still be dead if beating your wife in the state of South Carolina was a real crime.

His mother was my Kindergarten teacher. My strongest memory of her was the day our school had a Doll Pageant and a second grader won a blue ribbon for "Ugliest Doll" by entering a doll with the same name as our teacher. The indignation of the kindergartners almost started a riot.

Now every time I think about her I think about her being forced, at the age of 93, to watch her son murder her grandchildren.

These are the things I think about when I'm in Illinois.

Then, after years of being away, I go home, and my sister and I rent a small blue Chevrolet and drive down the back roads from Columbia to Aiken on Rural Route 302.

We were in the middle of nowhere, between Wagner and Kitchings Mill, when we passed a tiny little grocery store. What was it doing there, all by itself in a place where almost nobody lives? How do the owners pay their property taxes? How do they pay for their inventory? How do they pay for their...worms?



My sister and I saw the sign that said "Boiled Peanuts and Cold Drinks" and she slammed on the brakes and did a skidding 180º and whipped into the parking lot. We went running in for the boiled peanuts, which, if you're from the South, you know almost every small town African-American owned grocery store sells boiled peanuts they make themselves, and how incredibly addictive they are.

You can buy them in a can down there, and they're decent, but the taste of the ones in the can is nothing like the ones you can buy in stores like this one.





Which of course, they did not have, because it is winter, and the season for boiled peanuts is summer. Even though I was bitterly disappointed, I bought a strawberry soda anyway, because strawberry sodas and Cheerwine are also the kind of drinks you can find in these little grocery stores that for mysterious reasons Starbucks doesn't have.

While I was loudly whining to the older woman behind the register that I wouldn't be here in the summer, that I needed the peanuts now, her husband, who had been in the back, heard voices and came out front. Grinning broadly, he listened as my sister said we'd turned around in the road for the boiled peanuts, and he asked us where we were from.

"We live in Chicago now," my sister said, "but we're from Aiken. We're going home to take care of our mother, who is ill."

He was thrilled to find out we lived in Chicago, and that, sick mother aside, we'd come all the way from Chicago to shop in his store.

"We sell barbeque, too," he bragged. "We've been selling it for seven years, and we don't advertise. That should tell you how good it is."

We murmured appropriate noises conveying how impressed we were, and suddenly he said, hold on, wait a minute, and ran back into the back of the store.

A few moments later, he came out with two large white bags.

"Here," he said. "It's my barbeque. It's enough for your family, so you don't have to worry about cooking tonight."

I think about the tragedy of my Kindergarten teacher's family, and I think about this wonderful couple, who shared what little they had with two total strangers, and, later, of the four teenage boys on the plane ride back who insisted on sharing their doughnuts with us on their first plane ride, and their first time out of South Carolina before going over to Iraq ("Oooh, look at the McDonald's from up here!" one of them said excitedly.) I think sometimes it's impossible to have so much love for a place, and so much anger, too. I'll always love Chicago; it's my hometown now. But it will never be my home.