Omg, I love Foxon Park! In the South, Mexican Coke is about the best we can do. When I took the family up there for a visit a few years ago, we stocked up on Foxon Park sodas from Stop n Shop on the first day so we could try a new flavor every night..

We're leaving this summer, although sadly can't leave the region for a while longer. It is definitely no longer safe here for people who are too different from the imposed and enforced "Christian" norm.

Well, in addition to u/GatekeeperTDS's pithy list, I'll add my perspective as someone who grew up in Connecticut, went to college in Texas, and now lives in Florida. Although let me say that I recognize the grass is always greener, etc., and also pretty strongly believe that every state/region has positives and negatives.

• There's the way the states are run, especially the recent turn toward culture-war issues above all else, including the economic well-being of their residents. And this isn't new. Texas still hasn't expanded Medicaid despite having a huge number of people who can't afford health insurance. As a parent with two queer kids, this is a problem that has just gotten worse and worse across the region, even in states not run by likelt 2024 presidential candidates. Meanwhile, the governments are so beholden to their market-fundamentalist ideology that they make life more expensive for all but the super-rich by jacking up sales and property taxes to balance the budget rather than introduce progressive income and corporate taxes. Meanwhile, infrastructure falls apart, as evidenced by Florida's failing home insurance market and Texas's inability to keep residents from freezing to death during cold weather.
• And then there's the people. Lots of great humans live in Texas and Florida, and of course part of what makes the leadership so reactionary is their fear of losing power as the populace diversifies and liberalizes. But those who support these politicians are genuinely scary – pickup and gun culture, giant Trump flags (and worse – we lived down the street from someone flying hardcore militia flags), and during COVID, an uncritical embrace of every selfish, individualistic instinct over any effort to care for their community, which fed directly into longtime efforts to undermine public education by underpaying and demonizing teachers, professors, and critical thinking in general, never mind public health and science more generally.

In short, there's something wrong here, and as someone who studies history and religion for a living, I can say that something is a regionwide refusal to reckon with the atrocities it committed for centuries against Black people. Almost all of the ideological obsessions of the region – idolatries, if you're Christian – can be traced back to the patterns of thought that justified slavery and segregation: the irrational suspicion of government; the pervasive, fear-based embrace of guns; the distrust of public education; the obsession with perceived sexual deviance; the nostalgia for a rural "true America" that never existed; the rejection of so-called "elites," which is code for scientists, public health authorities, and university professors; and and of course the stultifying Christian fundamentalism. All of it was incredibly useful when defending slavery from the "atheistic," industrialized North, and then in resisting and eventually outlasting the effort to force them to treat Black people equally during Reconstruction. Even if none of the people currently alive would accept the overt arguments against racial equality that initially spawned these ideologies, they continue to embrace them because doing so is easier than accepting the ugly reality of their cherished traditions.

All regions of the country have to deal with their demons; Connecticut in particular was the site of numerous massacres of Indigenous people, especially the brutal Pequot War. But that particular sin/crime/stain is more or less universal to the entire country. The modern day South is what happens when a region's people collectively decide not to confront their "peculiar institution" for centuries and centuries; for anyone no longer willing to go along with the collective amnesia, and the ideological and political fictions that uphold it, it's an oppressive atmosphere. For those who are anything but cisgender, hetereosexual, white, male, and upper middle class or richer, it is literally oppressive.

I'm glad we agree.

You get what you pay for from Walmart dot com. And this was still the best one I could find!