Once upon a time
Any resemblance to actual persons or states, living, dead, or on the way to hell, is purely coincidental.
Once upon a time there was a sheriff's son… let's call him Jimmy Lee.
JImmy Lee lived in an old plantation built by slaves on Indian land, on a lovely lane lined with trees covered in Spanish moss. Jimmy had been given every advantage in a world constructed expressly for people of his complexion. But still he was unsatisfied. There were few rules for a boy like Jimmy Lee. He graduated from killing cats as a tyke, to tipping over Black families' outhouses as a teen, to beating Black folks up as an adult, even blinding a young man in a particularly violent incident, eventually joining the Klan — all while Daddy Lee groomed him to be the next sheriff.
Daddy Lee had no qualms about stealing from county taxpayers to finance extravagant toys for himself and young Jimmy. The pampered son naturally had a collection of hand guns and semiautomatics, quite the bachelor pad, and Daddy's old Chevy 454 SS pickup. He was brash and hard-assed. He was the envy of even liberal townfolk.
But now, with all the money Daddy had managed to siphon from the county, good ole Jimmy now also had an Apocalypse 6x6 Dodge Hellcat with 707 horses and a reworked chassis. The goddamn thing looked like a frigging armed personnel carrier and scared the shit out of all the neighbors — which of course was the whole point.
A youthful career of unpunished theft, assault, and arson eventually led Jimmy to home invasions and fraudulent home foreclosures, made possible only through the quasi-legal machinations of Daddy Lee, judicial cronies, and several banks. Within short order Jimmy and his friends had taken ownership of almost half the homes on the other side of the tracks that marked the town’s racial boundary.
One day Jimmy simply broke into a Black doctor's home, Glock in hand, his masked friends carrying bats, knives and AR-15's. This time the home owner put up quite a fight but still ended up in the emergency room at his own underfunded Black clinic. The doctor's friends and neighbors protested, of course, and launched a fruitless legal effort to reclaim the beloved physician's home from the invaders. They even mounted a boycott of businesses that supported Jimmy Lee and his corrupt father, but legislators labelled them racists and terrorists, enacting dozens of laws to criminalize victims and shield the perpetrators.
The entire system was stacked against them. Even the small town papers always seemed to side with Jimmy Lee or Daddy Lee. Nevertheless, the case became so well-known outside the county and engendered such outrage that a deal was reached — Jimmy Lee would stay in the invaded home, but the doctor and his family got to stay in the basement while everyone but the actual owner decided what was fair. Town liberals heralded this new “two family” arrangement as the best and only viable resolution to such cases — which were quickly multiplying.
But the arrangement rankled Jimmy Lee, who believed he was entitled to the entire house. It rankled his pride. It rankled his sense of white superiority and entitlement that this… this clearly inferior doctor was treated with kid gloves and was allowed to stay in Jimmy Lee’s house, albeit in the basement.
As the anger welled up in Jimmy Lee’s veins, he’d periodically stomp down the old wood basement stairs to give the doctor a thrashing to remember. Or he'd kill one of the doctor's cats, destroy some furniture, or traumatize his children. In his heart of hearts what Jimmy Lee really wanted was to murder them all in the most grotesque manner imaginable. But the time wasn’t quite right.
One day it was the doctor's turn — long overdue, if you ask me — to erupt in rage. He left his basement and found some of Jimmy's buddies in their stolen homes and killed them in their beds. Having made his point the doctor went home to his little house — the only home he knew — and waited.
Unfortunately for the doctor, whatever little public sympathy there was for his situation rapidly went up in smoke. Every county deputy, every sheriff and deputy and police officer from every surrounding county — even the state police — were called to the good doctor's house to deal with him. And of course Jimmy's Klan buddies showed up too, armed to the teeth.
By the end of the day, the doctor's house was splinter and ash. The doctor was no more. His children were no more. Every one of his neighbors was no more. All of their houses lay in ruin. The level of destruction was unimaginable. It was like a hundred seasonal hurricanes had blown through the little Southern town.
Jimmy and his Klan buddies — even the forces of “law and order” who had joined in — were so convinced that no one would ever hold them accountable that they filmed the entire orgy of murder and destruction and posted it on social media. And it turned out that they were right — no one ever did hold any of them accountable.
And so, unpunished and undeterred, Jimmy Lee climbed back into his Apocalypse 6x6 modified Dodge Hellcat 707 and turned his gun sights on everyone who had tried to stop him.
The end. Nighty night.