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We Don’t Care What You Think
Been working since 4 am and that, combined with SJWs on Twitter, I may be a little testy. I apologize, sort of, if this offends anyone, but for those of you that want to rip down our monuments, take down flags and/or whatever other symbols in the South offend people’s sensibilities now, here’s the deal.
If you don’t live here then we don’t want your damn opinion about our monuments, etc. You’re not here, so guess what? You don’t have to look at it! Go about your day and try to forget about us honoring our war dead or people we think were heroic, if not perfect leaders. After all, in the SJW world view, Lincoln himself was racist as well, so it won’t be long before we tear down the Lincoln Memorial. We know now that history began with Obama’s election, so why even acknowledge the past has been a bit more complicated than today’s college student at Evergreen may understand.
The South is plenty conflicted already about race, poverty, the war, and how we feel about some of our collective guilt and whatnot. Now Antifa is going all Taliban on us and tearing down any monuments they feel offends their Social Justice dogma. So don’t take up for them, don’t defend their position, don’t explain how they are really right but just a little overboard on their implementation.
They are wrong and most importantly we don’t give a good G.D. what they think. They need to go back to Seattle or wherever the hell they came from (probably UNC). As far as the Nazis and Antifa protesters go, is Virginia out of rubber bullets and fire hoses or something?
I heard the story as it was passed down
About guts and glory and Rebel stands
Four generations, a whole lot has changed
Robert E. Lee
Martin Luther King
We’ve come a long way rising from the flame
Stay out the way of the southern thing
I thought Trump nailed it today. Funny watching the media completely ignore the reality that the Nazi idiots were provoked by Antifa idiots by doing exactly what you state.
Tearing down monuments: Taliban indeed.
Actual, what I would call “good ol boys” that I work with were all of the opinion that it wouldn’t have been a tragedy if both the Nazis and the Antifa protesters were shot. lol Harsh I know but it wouldn’t be that great a loss, both intellectually and societally.
Amen.
I’ve lived here long enough to know who flies the Rebel flag unironically.
The SJWs may be wrong about basically everything, but I can’t for the life of me understand why people would want to celebrate figures who fought in defense of chattel slavery. Is it merely to be perverse and stick a finger in the eye of people that they don’t like, or is it truly because they like the ideas that the Confederacy stood for?
Let’s be clear here: At best, the people who died in the Civil war might have been your great, great, great grandparent. Possibly, great, great, great, great. It’s not as if they died last week or you knew them by name, so having pride in things that your very distant ancestors did is on the battlefield is nice, but not really directly affecting your life in any way. Having pride or (especially) shame at them for their distant historical actions confuses me.
On GLoP, they were telling a story about a girl who felt intense shame that Nathan Bedford Forrest was her distant relative. I thought: What a ninny she must be. This is the same in my opinion (albeit more defensible) as having pride at that fact.
First off, imposing modern views on the past does not work.
Second, it is less pride and more what the clear intent of the revisionists is. The Civil War was not a simple thing, with one side bad and one side good. What is going on is an attempt to punish people who don’t “think right”.
Third, destruction of past monuments is, and always has been, the work of one religion over another, or the left (but I repeat myself).
You mistake from where the pride is derived. The war was not just about slavery. So sad how successfully the Progressives have been able to rewrite our American history in the minds of the current living generations.
It is all about destroying symbols that disagree with a rigid dogma. Same as the Taliban destroying religious icons they disagree with
Reading the Secession statements alone is enough to give one that impression. I think it was revisionists later who attempted to cook up reasons like “tariffs” and other stuff as being proximal causes, but none of them stand up to the central cause which was slavery.
I would agree with you if we were discussing, say, Roman Crucifixions of Christians. But even in that case, the barbarity of the act was well understood within the frame of that day. We have the benefit of being able to look at history and determine which direction we would like to go in terms of moral progress and we can make fair judgments about events that happened in our history through that lens and decide whether we’d like to go in that direction or away from it.
Herein lies the notion of “Making a more perfect union.”
Obviously, I disagree with the Taliban’s destruction of important archaeological artifacts. But this situation is confusing two different categories: the creations of ancient artifacts by cultures of people that are downright alien to us in many ways and people from a reasonably contemporary period who spoke the same language and whose motivations really aren’t much in doubt because they conveniently wrote their thoughts down for us to peruse.
First of all, who the neck flies a flag ironically? :)
Secondly, plenty of people use that symbol as an expression of regional pride without any thought of racial overtones. However, I agree that the flag is also used more and more as a political symbol for idiot racists.
I don’t see your point. The Taliban doesn’t destroy these things because they don’t understand them. They do it because they are completely intolerant of any symbols that they feel contradict and offends their rigid beliefs….as do the SJWs who pull down the figure of Robert E Lee at a memorial for war dead because it offends their rigid beliefs. Actually I would say the Taliban has a better understandung of ancient religions than modetm college kids understand the moral dichotomies that were personified by a man like Lee in the 1860’s.
The kind of people who don’t get irony!
I think times change, and things that once meant something to a vast majority of people can take on whole new meanings given different contexts.
As a Northerner, I don’t recall there ever being a time when we were asked to display our pride at being “northerners” or having won the war.
In my case this would obviously be non sequitir anyways… So, in trying to figure this phenomenon out, is there something to the notion that losing steeled the resolve of Southerners and that losing wounded their pride such that they have to make a big show about this and they inculcated their children with the mythology of how nobly their ancestor fought?
This is a serious question. I have relatives who fought in wars too – but obviously on the winning side. This sort of “honor culture” wasn’t really part of any family story that I recall.
Completely agree, and in my opinion to fly the flag say, in the back of my truck, would be childish and also show a callousness towards others that I would not be comfortable with.
I will defend the honor of my Southern ancestors against all who would demean them. Those who are tearing down monuments and other symbols are ideological fanatics wish to take us to Year Zero.
Northerners have looked down on the South since before the war. Winning just added fuel to the fire.
Southerners are more likely to have old fashion pride in their state. There is no “Sweet Home New York” songs.
Know-nothingism is not just an American political movement. And there is a difference between the Buddhas that were annihilated by the Taliban and a statue of Lee: one was the object of religious veneration and the other is merely a totem of an historical figure admired by some. Southern culture is, I can report, a unique and distinct thing, but it is not as distinct from the rest of America as Islam is from Buddhism. The sum of southern culture is not tied up in the existence of these statues.
Keep in mind that I’m not arguing for the removal of (most) of these monuments, but that mostly it was unwise to erect them to begin with. They also aren’t themselves important historical artifacts in the same way that, say, the Sphinx or the Great Pyramid are. The Islamists wanted to raze those at one point if I’m not mistaken.
Nope. This is about moving to New York, not missing home.
I guess I don’t have this bias, and I was raised exclusively in the North, by Northerners. I did grow up around Southerner transplants and married a Louisianan.
Would it be putting too fine a point on it to say that it’s just possible Southerners are overly concerned with what prats from Boston think?
Argue for the depth/limits of your understanding, and sure enough it is yours. Little if any of humanity’s activities can be correctly, compactly, colored and reduced to a single cause and effect. Your box of crayons may only have 8 colors; some boxes of crayons provide much larger collections of shades and hues.
Lynyrd Skynyrd isn’t as good as AC/DC. This seems pretty close to an objective fact. :D
This is the gist of the discussion. I can’t exactly explain to you the pride in being “southern any more than you can explain why you don’t have that feeling about the Northeast. I think part is probably due to the Scotts Irish influences ethnically. I would say the pride and “honor culture” predates losing the war and probably contributed to it’s start. That’s the part of my post that is the pure gut reaction of not caring what “outsiders” and yankees think. We know they don’t have the same regional pride to be from Ohio or Connecticut as someone does from Mississippi or South Carolina so they obviously don’t understand.
I’ve spent enough time reading and thinking about it, having taken plenty of American history courses, watched plenty of documentary information on the war and it seems to me that this was the central cause of the conflict.
There were other ancillary things, but without that no conflagration.
I would encourage you to fill in the picture by writing a post about the other proximal causes of the conflict. I’m sure it will be educational.
I think Frank Sinatra answered that one pretty well. Contra what it says a few comments up, the song is about someone returning to New York.
There was an article in the Missoulian today about people wanting to take down a confederate monument in Montana. So many people in that thread talking about how Southerners are a scourge for daring to think of the Confederacy in a positive light. The longer I’m outside the South, the more people I find who hate Southerners that speak with an accent or aren’t penitent in regards to the Civil War.
This. And don’t forget how dumb and backwards we are.
Well that, and most of us are sick of being looked down on from people not of the South for not being self-hating Southerners. Or being told how we ought to think.
Yup! I am a software engineer and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had some Northerner business person act like I’m a complete moron due to my accent.
Is this more along the lines of “don’t come into my house and tell me to change the decor because you don’t like it”?
Who ARE the people doing the defacing and tearing down?