Jimmy Tucker • Gulfport, Mississippi USA
for my namesake kiwi friend at JimTuckerMedia.WordPress.com
August 4, 2025
I’ve been sharing my opinions via print, television, web and radio for half a century, but I’ve never framed for a foreign audience.
My first strong imaginings of New Zealand came in the 1970’s when I worked as unskilled labor in the oil fields off the coast of Louisiana. I met two young men from down under who were hitching and working their way around the USA, in order to see this place at eye level.
Can’t remember their names, but we shared enthusiasm for the futures we expected to find. My kiwi friends told me that their claim to fame was from being the first to feature Southern fried chicken in a New Zealand restaurant. Hope they had happy lives and a marvelous adventure!
Since those days I’ve lived, worked and voted in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas and New Mexico. Everywhere I’ve roamed I’ve encountered good people, because I expect to. The prejudices and ugly remnants of The Confederacy and “Jim Crow” didn’t disappear, though until 2016 I thought they were dying embers.
I’d love to put on blinders and hitchhike to conspiracy land, where the election was a lie and half of the nation is not duped or evil. Too old to start kidding myself; all those highfaluting promises are still promises, about equality and the radical meanings of freedom.
The revolution is still on in the colonies. King Don will have a reckoning. I might be bound for the pillory or worse, but don’t count out “the land of the free.”
All that said, I think I’d rather send ya’ll travelogues than political screeds. I’ll post something more lighthearted soon.
Best to you all!
-jet