CARLTON FLETCHER: Sorry, America, it’s a Georgia thing … you wouldn’t understand

“You don’t know how it feels … to be me.”

— Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

People outside our state have probably asked this question a lot lately — and rightfully so — of anyone who has any connection to Georgia whatsoever:

What is the real Georgia?

Is it, they wander, the state that stunned the nation — especially the very red Southeastern part of it — by helping elect a Democratic president and two Democratic senators — who were running against incumbents, no less — and change the balance of power in the country? Or is it really a redneck at heart, run by good ole boys hell-bent on holding back inevitable change … at least until they’ve had the opportunity to run things their way and spend all the money they’ve accumulated?

The answer is … yes … to both questions.

Sure, Atlanta is probably the most modern — and liberal — city in the South, and other urban centers like Savannah, Columbus, Macon, Augusta and even Albany are filled with voters who helped turn the state blue — well, really, purple — in the 2020 election cycle. But, hard though it may be to believe, especially to the people who live in the capital city, Georgia is more than Atlanta, and it’s more than a place where the elites and urbanites are at war with the hardscrabble rural folks.

It would probably astound many people who actually live in the state — again, especially those who migrated to the capital city for the thousands and thousands of jobs that have made their way to Atlanta over the past several years — to know that even with high-tech companies setting up shop in the metro Atlanta region, Georgia’s No. 1 business remains agriculture.

It’s not even close.

So there is a huge sector of the state that is bound to the land, people who tend to be more conservative and served by ways of thinking that many now see as well past sell-by dates. It’s that dichotomy — the new, tech-savvy population made up of millennials and the like and the traditional agrarian, usually older, population that tends to hold onto traditional beliefs — that makes the answer to both of the questions that the rest of the nation is asking about us … yes. It’s really just a matter of who you ask.

Even with the vote for Democrat Biden over Republican Trump in the presidential election and Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock over Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively, and everyone declaring a new blue day in Georgia, the overwhelming majority of the state politicians who make the laws are Republican. And, since they have an overwhelming majority in both Houses of the state legislature and hold pretty much all the statewide offices, look for the state GOP to draw up redistricting boundaries that allow them to hold on to that majority.

(Side Note: I would expect, given the hoopla surrounding Georgia’s new election law — a law that probably would have gone pretty much unnoticed if a bunch of state Trump loyalists hadn’t vowed to change things so that, in the future, Georgia officials could “correct” errors made by panty-waisted cowards who refused to bow to the pressure put on them by Trump and change the results of an election that has been confirmed by just about every legal body up the food chain — an act that could have landed them in jail, but that’s no skin off Trump’s teeth — that the national Justice Department is going to watch the state’s redistricting efforts really closely this year. Gerrymandering might not be as easy as it’s been used in the past, by both Republicans and Democrats.)

So those of you who can’t quite figure Georgia out, don’t waste your energy trying. Georgia is a state of contradictions, a state in which we’re lauded as the guiding force behind a “new South” while at the same time being castigated as so backward in thought we might — if not checked — take our laws back toward the Jim Crow era.

Ahh … just an old sweet song that keeps Georgia on our minds. Sing it Ray.