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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 cared not one whit, until I met a bunch of people for the North East in College, and they openly looked down on me for being Southern. Personally, I have found all the sterotypes of people from the North East being rude and smug to be 100% accurate.
In short, I have a chip on my shoulder because of the behavior of the people of the North. And here we have, in living color, yet another flipping example of the North telling the South how to act. Tell me this: How long, post the Civil Rights Movement, should the South not be allowed to control its own voting districts? How many generations need to pass?
You really shouldn’t care what they think.
But that doesn’t mean that they’re wrong about everything merely by dint of who or what they are. I think there’s plenty of Southern culture that doesn’t revolve around Civil War figures who were involved in rebellion against the nation in defense of a pretty odious institution.
Yes!
If you don’t like how they treated you, you should see how they treat each other… oh, look, one of them is in the White House!
Ahem. Northerners – or more specifically Northeasterners, are a special breed. I was born in Green Bay and much of my family still lives there. It’s the last big city before you get to Canadia basically, and it bears no resemblance to those Northeastern enclaves.
At any rate, I’m in favor of the VRA’s complete repeal, so you don’t have to convince me of that.
There is nothing of NYC culture worth saving. They are the most provincial people I have ever met. Heck, the people of Long Island, just outside the city cannot stand them.
I care what they think because they use their power to mess with my life and always have.
I feel like you’re giving them far too much agency and perceived power over your life.
There isn’t a thing they can do to me, and I know it. They’re free to live in their rabbit warrens.
That is Midwest. Midwesterners are fine. I married a Gal from Central Ohio. I talk of the true Yankees.
Oh? They appear to run Conservatism, Inc. They appear to have far more sway on the GOP than the South does. Same ones who forced out Newt after all.
No, too much power over the Federal Government.
Well as a northerner do you actually have anything to be proud of or take pride in?
I’m proud to be from Ohio and to have ancestors who fought for the Union, and I think you should keep your Robert E. Lee statues right where they are.
There is a statue of Lenin in Seattle.
We should form a mob and go tear it down.
Little Mac was from Ohio, wasn’t he? For anyone who does not know, George McClellan was a major Union general. He ran for president against Abe Lincoln in the middle of the war.
There are things to not admire about Mac. There are things to admire about Mac.
I know soldiers from Ohio felt they were doing their duty and fought hard. :)
Little Mac was from punch-out, I believe.
“So long” meaning… two, three or four months?
It’s obvious why those states which were on the border waited so long: they didn’t want to become battlegrounds and were holding out for a peaceful resolution.
As you said: it’s complicated. At the time that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation he was trying to do a variety of things all at once: Maintain as many states in the Union as possible, assemble a political coalition to Amend the Constitution and fight a war which he needed to win to preserve the Nation.
He couldn’t tick off the slave states that stayed by freeing their slaves immediately but he could convince them to vote for the 13th Amendment (ultimately, those states all ratified it with the exception of Kentucky and Mississippi and Delaware within a few years of its enactment) and he needed their fighting men.
Lincoln accomplished nearly all of these things masterfully by walking a very fine line. Lincoln’s major problem was the lack of an aggressive and competent general who could bring a swift and successful resolution to the hostilities. When he finally was able to put Grant in charge of the effort, the war quickly ended after years of pointless slaughter wrought by wrongheaded tactics that mismatched the available technology.
Some people point to the First World War as the first “modern” war, but I think they’re wrong. The minieball and rifled barrels in combination with horrifically inept medical techniques meant that almost any major wound sustained on the battlefield was surely lethal or would result in amputation. Add in the prevalence of disease (which, if I recall was responsible for more deaths than combat wounds) and it was a recipe for disaster: a war fought with cavalry/infantry tactics except with rifles with hugely increased lethality and accuracy.
Yes. Our nation.
Rich Lowry is a Virginian.
Kevin Williamson is a Texan.
Charles Cooke is a Brit!
Freddy Barnes is a Virginian.
OK… Bill Kristol is a New Yorker.
Who else?
The funny thing is that I don’t disagree with much of this, though you bulldoze over the nuances, and I grew up in Georgia hearing unkind things about “Billy the Torch.”
Even so, I also remember that Joe Johnston surrendered to Sherman in Durham, NC after Lee had surrendered to Grant. Johnston later served as one of Sherman’s pall bearers.
You see, the relationships/interactions between many men after the war suggests feelings of mutual respect whether one wore blue or grey.
It was–and is–complicated.
Yes. Lincoln and Grant respected Lee, but apparently we’re not allowed to anymore.
Right? It breaks my heart, actually. And the irony is that when I give pre-tests to many of my students, they say Robert E. Lee is the guy that burned Atlanta to the ground. It’s amazing to me how many people are offended by names and statues of which they know nothing…. Even more ironic though, I would bet doughnuts to dollars that most of those white supremacists in VA are also ignorant of a lot of Lee’s biography and certainly the nuances of Civil War historiography.
It’s actually slightly more complicated than I made it sound:
According to a story in USNews, the VA confirmed that as of May 26, 2017, she is still alive and receiving pension payments.
Seems that that is the socially acceptable thing to do now: destroying things you don’t like.
I agree. I’m a Yankee. I was born in Detroit; except for a short four-year period, I’ve always lived in the North. But my father was a Southerner – born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama – and all my relatives on his side of the family are Southerners. My Southern ancestors in my father’s/grandfather’s/great-grandfather’s line did not (so far as I can determine) fight in the Civil War – either too old or too young. But my great-grandmother is another story. Her father fought in the war and her uncle was killed in the Battle of Jonesboro (outside Atlanta). So far as I can determine, none of my relatives owned slaves; they were poor farmers and a slave (not to mention slaves) would have been too expensive for them to afford. At the time of the Civil War, the average Southerner did not consider himself an American first; he considered himself an Alabaman, a Georgian, a Virginian, etc. As with Robert E. Lee, who declined Lincoln’s offer of the command of the Union Army because he could not take up arms against his state, they fought, by and large, because their states had seceded and the Northerners could not accept that fact, but instead decided to invade the South; Their states called them to repel the Northern invader and they responded. Not that they did not support the institution of slavery; it was a system they grew up with and were used to. Most would not have questioned the system they were familiar with, the one their economy was organized around. I suspect that by and large they considered Negroes (to use the old name) to be lesser people than whites, as most people – North or South – probably did then (not to mention their view of Asians or Native Americans, etc.). They probably believed – in general – that Negroes were not much better than beasts and that they were fit to serve only as servants or farmhands. I don’t respect or agree with that view. Who among us does? Thankfully we have come to believe that we are all equally the children of God. But I don’t believe the men who fought for the Confederacy were evil racists. They were, as we all are, products of their time and place. Other than exceptional individuals, they believed what they were raised to believe – as do most of us. Their memorials remind us that good men can believe terrible things, and can be brave in support of the wrong causes. If these memorials are evil, then are Civil War re-enactors who proudly portray Confederate soldiers also evil because they pay homage to an institution we believe was abominable? All our beliefs would be so easy to arrive at if we knew what future generations would think of us. As we generally think that if we’d been born centuries ago we would be born into the aristocracy (though the reality is that we’d mostly be peasants), we also somehow think that if we’d been born in 19th century America, we would have been appalled at slavery and given our lives to end it. And so, secure in this belief, we find it easy to condemn our Southern ancestors and the monuments that have been raised in their memory.
Oh boy. Looking forward to the stripper names thread. @DocJay, @MikeLaroche, …
Destiny Hope Cyrus
Sure there is. I love the place and so do millions, maybe tens of millions of others. If the reader is not one of us, the post’s title, I Don’t Care What You Think, expresses my attitude.
That doesn’t mean I don’t care for what Bryan, Fake John/Jane and RMR might say about any other subjects, but I don’t see why defending the South means you get to run down the people of my home town with impunity. Well, yeah, it’s the internet, I suppose we can all do whatever we want with impunity. It’s still the kind of regional hostility and cliches that the OP is complaining about. We have our war dead too, our cemeteries, our monuments, our memories. We are proud of the cause and the flag that we fought for. No apologies for that.
I come to this post sympathetic to resentment over the way the South has been portrayed in the media since, forever, but I see no reason to let this by.
My father’s parents were both born in 1898. I grew up on stories of how the family was impoverished by Reconstruction. They were very proud of the way they survived on little, and managed to make sure that the sharecroppers (former slave families) were able to feed themselves as well as bring in a cash crop. When the Depression hit, it made no difference; they were already destitute. Three banks had failed with their money during the two decades prior to the Great Crash.
They were glad to have banking regulation that FDR championed. They bitterly regretted the spiteful Yankees who made banking regulation a vehicle for new punishments for Southerners. Banks were forbidden to close on Confederate holidays. Government offices were forbidden to close on Confederate holidays. That is how they smothered our Confederate holidays. That was done in the 1930s, when my parents were children.
When someone asks why is the War Between the States still such a thing in the South, I reply that we grew up with parents who still felt the effects of living in Occupied Territory.
I still suffer these effects. The textbooks and educational fads in our public schools come from Yankee publishing houses and Yankee elite university curriculum development centers, pressed onto us by a Yankee-dominated Department of Big Education. It is Yankees who weaponized the Department of Labor, and Yankees who weaponized the IRS. There are dozens of ways in which our daily lives are shaped by Yankees who leverage their influence in Washington and have us dancing to their tunes.
In the years leading up to the War, Yankees rammed through a tariff structure with confiscatory charges on exports of cotton. This made Southern cotton growers captives who sold their cotton to Yankee textile mills for less than they could have earned if not for the punitive tariffs. It was a deliberate scheme to transfer wealth from Southern cotton growers to Yankee mill owners, while also improving the U.S. balance of trade.
Yankees are still using the levers of government power to control our lives.
I am living in Occupied Territory.
The United States wouldn’t have been divided. It would have been smaller. There would have been 2 countries between Canada and Mexico, instead of one.
My tremendous respect for @docjay notwithstanding, but to suggest AC/DC is better in any way to Lynyrd Skynyrd is (ahem) questionable at best.
1.) That’s fair, I agree with you.
2.) The point of all this is that it seems that the movers and shakers within the GOP (as well as the media and corporate world) are trying to make it so that we can’t have that, and must be made to suffer and be subject to constant harassment for resisting that narrative, a fate most Southerners wouldn’t wish on their worst enemy…..which naturally makes us regard such attempts as hateful, spiteful and opportunistic cultural persecution, not only by our political enemies but by those who claimed to be our friends and allies, yet keep trying to subject us to this pain despite our telling you of this over and over and over again. That is why tempers are flaring, we do not regard this as a philosophical or intellectual diversion, but an attempt to cruelly deny to us something that we perceive as integral to our culture and social psychology, not to mention our happiness….not just for a time, but for our entire lives and to be denied to our posterity, and for no better reason than that ya’ll regard this cultural characteristic as mildly offensive and politically inconvenient.