By Rhum Runner: "Of the southerners I knew in school, I’d say the people from Mississippi and Alabama were probably the most backward, people from Atlanta are more or less Northerners who drink sweet tea. " (Bolding mine)
Northerners who drink sweet tea? Man, you’ll tote an ass whuppin’ if you say that out loud in Atlanta. Talk about an insult!
Mullinator–
Please don’t use a useless translator like Bablefish. I have friends in Germany, France, China and Japan and they all agree that Bablefish is probably the worst way to try and communicate by translation. It doesn’t work folks. Take it from someone who communicates with these languages on a regular basis.
My friends in these countries would much rather communicate in English with me or have me write in their native tongue which I do on a limited basis. But to take these rants and then go to the trouble of putting them through the Bablefish 3000 word dicer and think you are accomplishing some great communication feat… well you are not. It just illuminates your sophmoric proclivities in an unflatering light.
Ok, try this one: Northerners are like people from Atlanta but they don’t drink sweet tea.
C’Mon Cranky. All states have the Senators. Furthermore, Mississippi was favored when Dems were control, (largely, I imagine, because Federal programs are redistributive and Mississippi is a poor state. As they say in Alabama, if you want to keep someone in a ditch…)
And while we’re on the subject of the less-than-perfect heartland
If those in rural states valued rugged independence 1/8 as much as they say they did, they would permit programs that shelter people who fall on hard times, but draw a hard, cold line on Corporate welfare and industry subsidies. Agriculture is one such industry; steel and resource extraction are others.
Furthermore, if family values were so gosh darn popular, I submit that the residents of these states would… (drum roll) divorce less! Let’s look at the breakdown, using the same states as above.
Divorces: Rate per 1000, 1994
Mississippi 5.7
Alabama 6.2
North Carolina 5.1
Georgia 5.2
New York 3.3
New Jersey 3.0
Connecticut 2.8
US Ave 4.6
No Mississippi had very powerful senior ranking senators. When you have a senator that is Chairman of Appropriations and Arms Service for 20 years that means he has a lot of controle over the entire national budget of the US.
Southern Dems in the 70’s and 80’s got along famously with the Rebublicans because they all agreed that the National Defense was the most important thing on the roster. Without it everything else suffers.
Mississippi is the only state to have the chairmanships of Appropriations and Arm Service tied up at one time. The south is known for it barron senators and while the president is much like the pope it is the cardnals in the back room that can call the shots…
Trent on the other hand really at the end of the day very seldom cares about anything much other than Trent. You can stick a fork in him though because he is really kind of lost his edge since his last mismangement of that PR nightmare he got off into…
'scuse me guys for butting in.
We Brits have never been able to understand why you guys, North and South alike, are so preoccupied with a Civil War that has been finished,done and dusted for well over 130 years.
(1861-65?)
You are all citizens of the most powerful nation this Earth has ever seen so what’s with the animosity still?
I have a pal in Alabama and even he swears the war isn’t over, they [the South] are “just waiting on supplies”
I keep telling him he’s nuts.
I was out walking my puppy about a week ago. Not far away, they’re constructing the highest residential building in Europe, which is gonna be 623 ft of condos. Quite a rare sight in a town where most buildings don’t go over 6 stories. It’s gonna be a beautiful building (scroll down to mid page to see what it’ll look like).
As it is, often, when one walks one’s dog, one encounters other dog owners, let the dogs play, and talk for a while:
“It’s goning to be tall,” she said, indicating the buildning.
“Yup,” answer I, “and very, very expensive”
“Well, that means only the towel-heads on welfare will live there.”
This is a women in her early 50’s, clearly working class, but certainly not deprived, in any way. I’ve met her a few times so know roughly where she lives. A nice, quiet working class area, where the only apartments are condos, albeit quite inexpensive.
She’s demonstrating that casual, off-hand xenephobia, which is not really racism per se, but just a general frustration that things aren’t like they used to be and looking for someone to blame. When I say it isn’t racism, though it certainly is ethnic stereotyping, it isn’t grounded in a belief that people from other countries are inferior. In fact, the xenophobia here keeps changing face, to wit: Blacks from the US are cool. Blacks from Africa (here it’s mostly from Somalia) are a burden to society. People from Yogoslavia, that came here during the 60’s, mainly because we needed to import labor, are ok. Serbs, Kroatians and Bosnians are not OK.
When I was in my early teens, back in the early 70’s, everyone ‘knew’ the Yugoslavs and the Greeks kept goats on their back porches and broke up the floor in the living rooms to grow potatoes. Now, everyone ‘knows’ that the Somalians, Libeanese and Iraqis are doing the same thing. Back then, everyone ‘knew’ that the Hungarians lived on welfare and drove big Mercedeses, now, everyone ‘knows’ that Iranians live on welfare, sit in coffeeshops all day, and drive big MB’s. Besides, they’re all cunning theives and not really refugees, coming here to rob our welfare system, steal our jobs, fuck our prestine women, live among themselves and not integrate, celebrate their own strange traditions and oppressing women.
Problems is, our welfare state is going broke. Services we took for granted just five years are eroding, while we keep paying the highest taxes in the world. Someone needs to be blamed and it’s so convenient to blame them, because they’re not like us. It doesn’t matter that we’re going broke because of the welfare given out to Swedish people, living in the northern, rural Sweden, where few immigrants dare set foot for fear of harrasment, violence and some really crazed neo-nazis, wanting to defend the Sweden of old and spouting slogans like: “The Indians accepted immigration in America, now they live on reservations!!!”
In short, stupidity, ignorance and a closed mind set is everywhere. It’s prevalent among people with low or no education, stuck in dead end jobs or unemployed, feeling that they have no controll over their lives.
It’s always easier to blame someone else*, than take responsibility for one’s own situation.
*The society, the military-industrial complex, the Illuminatii, the Jewish-Communist-Banker conspiracy or them, coming from somewhere else.
Actually is is more the what the war was fought over and who had the right to do what when. I dont have time at the moment but I will answer you questions later.
It is the “War Between the States” to us Southerners not the Civil War. The south was not trying to take over the federal government they just wanted to leave its jurisdiction and had the constitutional right to do so.
I will give you a little history lesson and it will probably start the war all over again…lol
In the South, we know the war is over. Psychologicaly we just haven’t been able to achieve “closure.”
When I lived in Charleston SC I didn’t run into racism at all, Unlike here in Illinois, However I did run into it when I went into smaller towns in SC and GA. Its just my WAG that its not the whole south thats like this. In my experience its more like “pockets” of racism that I ran into.
Of course the other day a 90 year old woman told me that I was going to hell because thats what happens to “all you little mixed babies. God didn’t intend for the races to mix”. But since I am a “hard worker” and have never “stolen anything thing like some of them other coloreds” That she would say prayers for me and maybe God would make an exception. Gee am I glad that she has a direct line to God, I was really worried about not making it, me being a “mixed baby” and all LOL. This happened in a small town in Illinois.
Racism is everywhere IMHO, and it sucks, but I doubt its going anywhere anytime soon.
Hey TVeblen, well said.
Actually, it is only the Southerners who still think the war is going on. The North forgot and forgave along time ago. For example, going to high school in the north we spent maybe two weeks in history class on the civil war. My redneck classmates (who often went to private schools) from the south had spent almost a full year on the civil war. Aside from a few history buffs who make a hobby out of it, no one in the North is preoccupied with the Civil War in the least.
All these recent threads tend to indicate the opposite. Many people seem determined to pin the racist label on the South, thus avoiding cleaning out their own back yard.
As I’ve explained many times, Virginians are steeped in Civil War tradition. You would be too if your state was one big historical battlefield. Nobody that I am aware of wants to refight the Civil War except as reenactors and in theory as an intellectual exercise. Yes, many of them will do that.
There are racists everywhere. The movement of peoples all over the world makes this thread comical. In Florida, or Atlanta for that matter, the actual number of people with any identification with the Confederacy – whatever that is – is pretty small. What about Van Nguyen, a hypothetical dentist in Buckhead, is he a racist? Don’t tell me that Atlanta isn’t typical of Georgia when it’s half the population.
Well, we’re not steeped in Colonial tradition up here even though there are tons of Revolutionary War sites around here. The main roads have signs pointing to GW’s retreat route in 1776, close by is the site of the Baylor Massacre, a surprise attack perpetrated by none other than Cornwallis, and right by Hackensack, the county seat, there’s Newbridge, a site that was allegedly considered the key to controlling this area during the war and which still has preserved on it a Colonial homestead.
We did have one reenactment a few years ago, but that’s about it.
OTOH, we won, so there’s not a lot of romance surrounding the story of the Revolutionary War. Being that the South lost, it has that irresistible aura of the Lost Cause about it.
But (and I’ve told this story before) when visiting Gettysburg and listening to the narration at the Virginia monument, one guy got up afterwards and walked back through the field saying “We could’ve been free!” at which point I had to explain to my flabbergasted 10 year old son that some people still hadn’t gotten over the war.
I’d venture a guess that, oh, 99 and 44/100s % of those people live south of the Mason Dixon. I could easily see one of these saying something like the guy mentioned above who’s still “waiting on supplies”.
Be that as it may, my brother lives in Texas, and my sister in Georgia, and you couldn’t get either of them out of there with anything short of a ton of high explosives. In both cases, because, despite the folks like the above and the Fundies and the lingering racism here and there, they like the people down there and the way they are way better than the people in any other part of the country.
Neither has lost their Bronx accents either, especially my sister.
I really don’t think the “two weeks in history class in the North!” substantiates this claim.
I think people remain interested in it because it represents a rare thing in the U.S.: a war taking place on our soil, between people who spoke the same language, shared the same religious beliefs, and had many other things (including nationality) in common. I think we are still coming to an understanding that it wasn’t just about Good vs. Evil, with the bad guys losing, but instead a terrible time for our country, when people agonized over the issues involved and the loss of life. Some people even struggled over what side to be on, and their are poignant stories of best friends and military colleagues facing each other on battlefields. Ponder the irony that R.E. Lee was asked by the federal government to lead Northern troops.
It was a national disaster. I hope we never forget it.
You know… people talk like 138 years is a long time. Well, in a way it is… in another way it’s the blink of an eye. The Civil War was the worst, most bloody, most divisive, most destructive war ever fought by our nation… and it happened here, not across an ocean. That kind of thing causes wounds that don’t heal easily. 138 years sounds like a long time… especially when our country has only existed for 226 years… but did you know that there are some 200 surviving children of Civil war veterans? There are thousands of surviving grandchildren of veterans… these are people not very far removed at all from those men who bled the ground red at Shiloh, Wilderness and Antiedam. Those of us who’s families lived through the direct result of having the war fought around our homes, who went through the pain of defeat and occupation told their stories and we still remember them. Sure we’re mostly over it, the south is thriving and as the years go by the scars will continue to fade, like they do for any war… but for now they’re still there and admonishments for us to ‘get over it’ only rub them a little more raw.
I’m just relating my experience. As a freshman in college I was shocked to learn from my southern classmates how much the Civil War was still an issue in the South, and how it had dominated their history classes in high school. I was just responding to the other Doper who seemed to think that everyone in the US is still taken up with the civil war. That isn’t the case in my experience.
I suppose some of that is due to geography. Maybe it simply is more relevant when the battlefields are right there. Still, I have union war veterans in my family (great-great-grandfather, I believe) and the neither the civil war or his involvement in it was ever a focus of familial history.
Again, just my experience.
Would someone please change the name of the “civil” war?
It does not compute.
Rhum
— Actually, it is only the Southerners who still think the war is going on. The North forgot and forgave along time ago. For example, going to high school in the north we spent maybe two weeks in history class on the civil war.
Beagle
---- All these recent threads tend to indicate the opposite. Many people seem determined to pin the racist label on the South, thus
avoiding cleaning out their own back yard.
That’s the thing. When I think of “Southern Racism”, I think of Bull O’Conner, circa the 1950s, not Bull Run circa the 1860s.
For better or worse, I just don’t think the North is as steeped in the Civil War Tradition as some in the South are. Heck, even the expression, “Civil War Tradition” sounds odd to my ears.
I’m surprised to hear of people taking American history classes that spend little time on the Civil War. It is, to my mind, the seminal moment in American history, and more central to the forging of the character of this nation than any other event, including the Revolutionary War. Those years in the early 1860s represent a monumental shift from America as a loose conglomeration of genuinely sovereign states into a unified, centrally organized nation. Alexander Hamilton may got the better of Thomas Jefferson in the argument over federal power during the time of the founding, but Hamilton’s vision wasn’t truly realized until after the Civil War.
An example: Robert E. Lee, and many Confederate troops, didn’t consider themselves truly fighting for “the Confederacy,” but rather for Viriginia, or whatever theirhome state might have been. I think that view was probably commonplace in American military conflicts before the Civil War. It became almost unheard of afterwards. The kids who stormed Normandy were fighting for the U.S, not for Massachusetts or Virigina or wherever.
The Civil War strikes a chord with Americans because it remains the clearest reflection of our character. There’s a reason PBS’s most well-known documentary is Ken Burn’s treatment of that conflict. The Civil War is a microcosm of everything good and bad about American society: racism, brutality, stubbornness, yes, but also loyalty, courage and sacrifice. It’s important. We ignore it at our peril.
Having said that, I think it probably is a bigger deal in the South. This is less so because of the war itself (though Sherman is still a bad word in Atlanta) and more because of the political fallout in the war’s aftermath. Reconstruction imposed on the south political strictures that endured long after the war, and which shaped the political culture in that part of the country for years.
And having said that, let me add that I grew up in Texas, so the the Texas War for Independence was the biggest deal in our history classes (we all remember the Alamo, but how many of you non-Texans remember Goliad?). But then, Texas still considers itself soveriegn, nevermind the events of 1845. 