I didn’t know this  until the other day, but being from South Carolina I probably always suspected as much. 

It seems, you see, that Georgians are more likely than anyone else in the U.S. to take selfies of themselves working out in the gym, the narcissists. Or so says a since deleted press release announcing a survey that probably found its way into spam email folders of hack editors at newspapers all over the state.  

Even weirder is the claim that nearly 10 percent of Georgians who take selfies in gyms take them of their butts, the release said the study said. I have no inkling as to why. 

Perhaps they really want to know what’s going on back there, or maybe it’s some sort of dating game or mating ritual, but never mind that. That sort of stuff leaves images of bulldogs in a bag that will kind of put you off for a while, if you know what I mean. 

Besides it’s embarrassing, is what it is. You ask how I know it’s embarrassing since I’m just a dumb hack editor with a goblin butt that would break the camera!? I know because when’s the last time you heard Gov. Brian Kemp out there touting Georgia being No. 1 in gym butt selfies. No. 1 in football? Check. Business? Check. Butt selfies? Uh, no thank you. And anyway if I’m going to be taking butt pictures, the butts in the picture won’t be mine. 

To be fair from my brief reading it was unclear what age group or sex these folks in the survey belong to, though I suspect if you don’t know what a selfie is there’s a good chance you haven’t snapped one of your gluteus maximus recently.  

Still, there’s a better chance some of those identified as Georgians in the aforementioned press release came to the good old Peach State from somewhere else. Millions have in the last decade or two.  That leads me to wonder how many Georgians who take selfies of their butts are native Georgians and how many wound up down here. I think there should be a distinction made, somehow, if someone could figure out how. 

Here’s why:

What usually happens when some weirdo relocates to Richmond Hill and then does something to get in trouble to the degree it makes the news. The stories on TV probably start with “A Richmond Hill man is behind bars after he set his drawers on fire to protest …”  

It’s not Richmond Hill’s fault the man got in trouble. He wasn’t born here, he probably wasn’t even raised here. And yet, there he is on TV making people from other places think people in Richmond Hill can’t behave themselves. To take this a bit further: What if two guys originally from Upstate New York go out on a boat at Fort McAllister, get drunk and get stuck on a sandbar, then try to walk back and wind up even more stuck before they get rescued by the Coast Guard, DNR, the sheriff’s department’s in four counties and 11 fire departments. What do the TV reporters say? 

“Two Richmond Hill men are in good condition after they were rescued following a 14 hour search!”

If  some folks I know are watching it they’ll be saying, “Boy them boys over in Richmond Hill are pretty (bleep) dumb to go out on that tide,” which in my extended family would probably provoke the reaction, “Heck, they’s probably some of them Richmond Hill yankees, they got money but ain’t go no sense.”

And then, well, there’s Florida man. 

One of those most extreme examples of places getting bad raps because of transplants is Florida. That’s because Florida has filled up with people from other places who can’t stay out of trouble. The heat makes ‘em crazy, and so many of them do dumb stuff there are places on the internet you can go to read all about them. 

Do we want Georgia to end up like that, with a whole website filled with Georgia Man news, or filled to the gills with people taking butt selfies at Georgia’s gyms? Of course not, and I have a solution. 

You know how we always hear local government officials talk about providing services to their “citizens,” as if someone who lived in, say, Pembroke was a citizen of that town, or Savannah was a citizen of that town? 

In truth, and if I learned anything in journalism school I learned this,  people are residents of a town, city, county, state, etc. They’re citizens of a country. That’s why nobody needs to get a passport to move from, say, Ohio or Poughkeepsie or Scranton to Georgia, although there are some in Georgia who probably would like to change that. 

Now might be the time. 

Before it’s too late.