Pessimistic vs Pathetic

awbuzz

awbuzz

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Love the OP.

Some (most?) or the perception difference in the "old"" UGA and the UGA of the last 15 - 20 years or so is due to the higher HS grades / SAT scores that are now required to make it into UGA. This, in part, is due to the HOPE scholly and more students staying in state. (JMO.)
 

Mack

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redmule said:
We are a pessimistic lot. By training and by nature, we seek the flaw, the defect, the weak link. We have to. People die or are maimed if the O ring fails, if the support collapses, if the circuit shorts. While vigorously defending our designs, we desire criticism from those we consider knowledgeable. We bring this to our non professional life. My wife is constantly complaining, "Would you stop with the What Ifs!" That is why we obsess and moan about the state of our athletic programs. I really cannot find significant fault with the Institute itself. It's reputation, capabilities, student body, facilities, faculty, growth, research, etc. exceed anything I expected when I matriculated 40+ years ago. What it has done for me and my extended family in terms of material, professional, and personal satisfaction is beyond the wildest hopes I had when growing up in small town Georgia half a century ago. "Fix the d----d athletics" cries out the engineer in me and us as that is the only thing we really have to obsess about.

Our friends to the east, though, fill the pathetic slot. I read Dawg Rant at times. I must admit there are topics on there I find congenial, as there are more small town rural Georgia guys at uga than at Tech so I can relate in some sense. A few threads lately have reminded me how pathetic, relative to Tech, their situation is. They can beat us in football. I give them that. But they are still a pathetic lot. For instance, they were orgasmic when it was announced they would play Notre Dame. Some even said they knew they would not get tickets but were going anyway just for the experience. A trip to ND for Tech fans is nice, but not novel. Most have literally never seen uga play at a major college campus outside the Southeast. This makes them parochial and irrelevant to college football nationally.

But what really caught my eye a few days ago was a thread about how they are overtaking Tech in academics. Baghdad Bob must have studied in athens. We (Tech) are being defeated on every front. All that is left is for the nation and world to recognize that Athens, Greece has been resurrected in athens, Georgia 2500 years later. Now, there is no doubt that when you been crawling all your life, learning to walk must seem like discovering relativity, and they are taking some baby steps. But once again, pathetic. I have a simple question for them, " If uga disappeared tomorrow, would anything distinctive be lost?" Not really. There are a dozen more just like them within easy driving distance: Auburn, Bama, UT, Clemson, Florida, LSU. Essentially same students, majors, faculty, facilities, academics. You get my point, but again they're pathetic. All those I've listed have won National Championships in football, some multiple times, since uga. Now ask yourself that same question about Tech. How far to find another like us? With a National Championship in football within living memory? They have been assimilated. We have maintained (and increased) our distinctiveness.

They claim to own the state. Guess that is the limit of their aspirations: big fish in a small pond. Pathetic. I believe we look beyond the horizon. Now fix the d----d athletics!!! And let's take even that away from the leg humpers.
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Pretty good english there my friend and for a country boy I ..........think I understood most of it and you are spot on...........good post.
 

Mack

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dressedcheeseside said:
I think living in Georgia has a good deal to do with a Tech fans outlook, too. I was a lot more pessimistic when I lived in Georgia. Now that I live in Florida, it's not nearly as bad. Even though there are tons of mutt fans in Jacksonville, they don't go out of their way to bark in my face when I'm wearing a GT hat. They bother Gator fans more than me.
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For 28 yrs I made the trek from Wadley to Savannah for drill with the air wing and around Ga vs Fla time I-16 would be loaded with all kind of signs and pom poms etc and the puppies went south..........when they got beat by the GATERS they would come back home via I-16 and ..................all the signs and marking disappeared...........they can leave quickly when they get beat.............would blow the horn at then with my GT hat on over my uniform..........funtime it was !
 
Old South Stands

Old South Stands

Jolly Good Fellow
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Northeast Stinger said:
Yes, there is something about being a Tech fan that encourages a critical approach to things, no doubt about it. There is a parallel phenomenon that exacerbates the problem for a Tech fan and that is that the culture in the state of Georgia has a deep brooding inferiority streak. One sees the compensation for this going on everywhere. Towns in Georgia will brag about things all out of proportion to the reality. Does your town have an art museum? Some people in that town will say it rivals the museums of New York. Does your town have a side walk cafe? If will be spoken of as if nothing in Paris compares. Does your municipality have a developing music scene? Stand back jazz clubs of Chicago. I could go on but I hope some of you have noticed this and I don't have to explain. People in Georgia tend to exaggerate their progress all out of proportion to the reality. In some rare cases this "fake it until you make it" approach may work. More times than not, however, it only ends up deluding the local population while people from other parts of the country just shake their heads at how backward we Georgians are.
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I was born and raised in Atlanta and experienced (and once felt) a lot of this inferiority complex with regards to being from Georgia... I thought it was just me, but maybe the culture's part of it. Don't know whether the overall mood came from "losing the war" and the city being burned to the ground. It seemed like Atlanta was always trying to be the best at something -- whatever that something might be -- or to be something it's not. Many years ago I joked to a fellow Tech student that Atlanta would import sand and build a large wave pool right in the middle of the city just to lay claim to having the "best beach in the world". Not long after that, ironically, Atlanta is suddenly trying to get the Olympics to come to town, an incredibly audacious move at the time. I remember when Smokey and the Bandit came out in theaters, how proud I was as a kid that Atlanta was the setting for a movie and that people all over the country would see it, as silly as it now seems. Then a few years later we have the largest airport in the world. It seems incongruous having the world's largest aquarium right there by the Omni Hotel... Yet it's a fantastic aquarium; I've seen the one at Motnerey, CA, once the world's largest and also an active research facility, and the Atlanta aquarium compares favorably. It's a lot better aquarium than the one we have here in Charleston. Still, it seems out of place, like a lot of what you find in Atlanta.

If Atlanta had this built-in inferiority complex -- losing sports teams and all -- I can't imagine what must go on in the more rural parts. It may explain some of the bad behavior UGA fans directed towards Tech people in the wake of their '80 championship. The early 80's was a terrible time to be a Tech fan in high school, especially if your HS mascot happened to be the Bulldogs (or the principal and one of your coaches played for UGA!). The hazing and teasing I got for wearing a Tech jersey to football practice or in the school halls was intense and in-your-face... Rarely have I seen anyone win with less grace than UGA fans in the immediate aftermath of '80. Even as recently as the '90s a good friend from Tech went to a game in Athens and had to run the gauntlet of drunk and disorderlies trying to pick a fight with him on his way out of the stadium and back to the parking lot. UGA won that game; don't know what they would have done to him had they lost! A couple days ago a South Carolina paper warned Clemson fans not to tease UGA fans inordinately, to be respectful while in Athens.

The prevailing culture here in South Carolina is vastly different, especially in Charleston. South Carolina ranks at the bottom of many national categories, from education to unemployment and standard of living, yet it doesn't seem to bother a lot of people. There's not much of an inferiority complex here, except perhaps among the Ohio arrivals. People generally like who they are and are comfortable with their history and traditions. They like their dialects (gullah, geechie, etc.) and cuisine. The love South Carolinians have for their state is rivaled only by perhaps Texas. Georgia seems much more fragmented than SC.
 

GTBME

Georgia Tech Fan
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17
Great post by the OP. Our daughter is a freshman at GT coming out of a competitive private school in Atlanta and GT got the top kids in her class. There is a huge difference (GPA/SAT) between her classmates that were admitted to GT and UGA. Not even close. I can't stop laughing when I hear that "UGA is closing the academic gap". I did not grow up in Georgia and my self esteem was not challenged growing up, I am a side walk fan that got a sun burn today. Please chuckle when you hear about the ivy school in Athens closing the gap. Let's see if they even get their engineering program off the ground.
 
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