The mainstream US media has been busy in recent days signaling hard to their elderly, Progressive base that President Trump was wrong when he recently said that Lincoln’s War upon the South should and could have been avoided. The Hill reports:
President Trump during an interview that airs Monday questioned why the country had a Civil War and suggested former President Andrew Jackson could have prevented it had he served later.
“I mean had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart,” Trump said during an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito.
“He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said, ‘There’s no reason for this.'”
The Hill also reports:
President Trump on Monday spurred outrage and mockery by questioning why the Civil War happened and suggesting that President Andrew Jackson could have prevented it.
Democrats and political pundits ripped Trump for his comments, published Monday in the Washington Examiner, and advised him to brush up on his history.
“President Trump doesn’t understand why there was a Civil war,” tweeted Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.).
“It’s because my ancestors and millions of others were enslaved.”
…Some journalists mocked the president, questioning his knowledge of history and criticizing him for claiming no one ever asks why the Civil War began.
Don’t ask questions like that, goy. The history is settled. Trust us. Your ancestors were evil and had to be killed. Your cities had to be burned. Your country had to be placed under a military occupation and then reconstructed in our image.
Even geriatric Leftist icon Dan Rather, has hobbled back onto the scene to mock Trump and insist it was necessary to subjugate Dixie. The Hill once again reports:
Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather is dismissing President Trump’s remarks this week on the Civil War, calling it “sheer craziness” to be questioning whether the conflict needed to occur at all.
…”But the sheer craziness of this obsession by Donald Trump with Andrew Jackson and the Civil War is carnival act unlike anything I have ever seen at the White House,” Rather wrote on Facebook Monday.
“Nevermind that Mr. Trump’s knowledge of American history seems below that of most gradeschoolers. These are the rantings of someone who really should be focused on the job of governing.”
Believe me, sonny. If you question our historical narrative then you are crazy, ignorant and probably evil. I know. Because I am a dying journalist who indocrinated the public for decades prior to the advent of the Internet. Listen to me!
@Billy Ray Jenkins…
Wow! – what a fabulous reply.
That said, after working in the garden all day, I must shower for bible class.
Later, in the coming day, I will study your reply, much as I do your other comments.
Thank you for taking the time to share with me the richness of your perspectives.
@OLD HICKORY
Why do you want to take away the naming of two continents from one of three possible Italian explorers and give it to some nobody merchant? Sounds like someone hates Italians. Please explain. And all references including Wikipedia (at least it can be edited) are all made by corruptible men…only the Bible, which has human errors made by scribes and translators, is really worth quoting from….
I’m technically a Yankee and you chaps make me almost painfully nostalgic for the Old South.
@Irponsides…
‘I’m technically a Yankee and you chaps make me almost painfully nostalgic for the Old South.’
This is not true if you have long been in our midst and identify with us.
Just because you were born in Yankeeland does not necessarily make you a Yankee.
Please bear in mind that many Southerners, completely a full-blooded native of many generations, are, in fact, Yankees.
So, it works both ways.
@Billy Ray Jenkins…
@juniusdaniel
‘That is why I have always said Secession was not the ideal solution, the ideal one would have been a coup followed by trials before the North knew what hit them. This would have been preferrable however the problem was, no one had the sand to do this.’
Okay, Mr. Jenkins, but, you are omitting something, here – and that is that many Southerners, at that time, had reacht the conclusion that we had to be completely, and very permanently, separate from The North; and, that so, you tact, no matter how wise, does not address that.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
‘With the tiny size of the US Army in 1860 and the fact that it was scattered largely in the west, Governor Letcher and the Virginia Militia could have captured Washington right after the 1860 Election, and although the Governor of Maryland, Hicks was a submissionist, I predict that enough men would have risen up in Maryland to help with the enterprise. The problem was that all of the great men, Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Johnston, etc all were fanatical AMERICAN PATRIOTS and would have seen such an endeavor as an attack on all they held dear.’
To be sure, there were a lot of problems to be dealt with. Certainly we, 150+ years later, can see how that was much easier, because time always gives a better perspective.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
‘I doubt even the Southern Reps and Senators would have ever went along with a Junta because of their fanatical devotion to the US Constitution. The Knights of the Golden Circle proposed something along these lines, but again it was rejected for being too radical. Thus Secession was the only solution that satisfied the Constitutionalists and the Military.’
Secession is a formal and ethical divorce, Mr. Jenkins, and, as such, I see it as the only longterm solution for The White South to survive. It will have problems, but, one day we will come to this, because the only other way is to choose to be permanently subservient to those not ourselves.
That said, if you don’t like secession, I accept that.
Many Southerners have a lot of problems with the notion of trying to live without Yankee-Doodle-Dandy, I readily admit.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////
‘I do disagree on whether the Yankees would have collapsed. Remember in 1861 the Northeast ie Pennsylvania/Delaware to Maine and the Northwest States didnt particularly like one another, I think major attacks would have been a wedge that drove it all apart. However that didnt happen.’
I do agree with you that this ought to have been done. That said, we do not know if doing such would have brought the Yankees to their knees, or stirred them up worse, like a nest of hornets.
Please don’t forget our great ole historian, Mr. Shelby Foote, who once said, ‘I am convincet that The North fought that war with one arm tied behind their back; that they never really got fully in the fight.’
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
The South in the 1940’s and 1950’s why no one knows exactly had been largely tamed. Sixty years before, brawls, knife fights, shootings dog fights, horse racing making moonshine, gambling was an everyday thing in some places but between 1890 and 1950 there was a slow process of taming the Southern Barbarian (YANKEE TERM NOT MINE). Was it schooling? In part. Was it increased law enforcement prosecuting lawbreakers for doing such wild things? Possibly. Was it the Baptist Church? I reckon it played a part. I estimate it was many different things plus radio movies womens liberation all coming together, plus a large drop in the Southern White birthrate. In 1890 if your wife had less than 10 babies, she was slacking, by 1950 10 babies were considered excessive, the average had gotten down to about 6. All these things did it.’
We became bourgeois, Mr. Jenkins, or, as some of our detractors might say, ‘civilized’. It happened for all the reasons you say, and more.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
‘The Civil Rights Movement saw the common folks remember this, look down on the Sam Bowers types and why did they? Sam Bowers and the Klan represented the violent past, they had been conditioned to reject that slowly over time.’
This is true, just as it is true that, if Sam Bowers committed a crime, it was of being 75 years, or more out of date. Crimes of chronological context often do lead to peculiar circumstances.
That said, is the repute of Wizard Sam Bowers being rehabilitated today?
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
‘Its downright bizarre the mind control that was placed on Dixie incrementally between the Spanish American War and the Korean War. You can see the film of the Jacksonville Confederate Convention of 1914 and American Flags were everywhere. This was only 37 years since Reconstruction ended.’
Yes, it is downright bizarre. That said, we are at a new era, when those forces that remeld us together are rending us apart.
And we have great allies in this process, foremost among which are The Jews; they who will not stop until they so piss off White Men, that they rue the day they were born.
That day is coming. Like it or not, I feel it in the wind.
@juniusdaniel.
I don’t believe i explained myself very well. I support secession 100% and still do today, I just wish it had been the North doing the seceding, leaving the South in possession of the UNITED STATES trademark with all of her foreign alliances intact and her monetary system intact as well. When I say that in a perfect world there would have been a military coup de etat with the South in complete control of the dismemberment of the United States as the United States the nation it founded. As I have said before Secession was the worst solution, but yet it was at the same time the only real solution that satisfied everyone in the ways of legality and such.
The only thing that has always saddened me about Secession is that it was the Northeast who created a new nation unto themselves against the will of everyone else, then seized the Congress in a legal coup ie Immigration giving them more seats in the House and international wealth allowing them to buy allies, and then kicking Dixie in a sense out of the government. This has always struck me like a man who came into your house and threw you out of your own bed and said get out this is my house now. Washington DC was founded on Southern land, by Southerners, populated by Southerners and yet the very city Southerners founded after summarily conquering it, they had the gall to call the South rebels when in fact it was THEY who were the rebels, the freebooters, they highjacked and stole the system and called the Stars and Stripes, the very flag that George Washington fought under, not to mention thousands of Southerners THEIR FLAG.
I am in 100% agreement a divorce needed to happen, I just wish that it had been the South and not the North in control of the preceedings
@BILLY RAY JENKINS…
@juniusdaniel.
I don’t believe I explained myself very well. I support secession 100% and still do today, I just wish it had been the North doing the seceding, leaving the South in possession of the UNITED STATES trademark with all of her foreign alliances intact and her monetary system intact as well. When I say that in a perfect world there would have been a military coup de etat with the South in complete control of the dismemberment of the United States as the United States the nation it founded. As I have said before Secession was the worst solution, but yet it was at the same time the only real solution that satisfied everyone in the ways of legality and such.
The only thing that has always saddened me about Secession is that it was the Northeast who created a new nation unto themselves against the will of everyone else, then seized the Congress in a legal coup ie Immigration giving them more seats in the House and international wealth allowing them to buy allies, and then kicking Dixie in a sense out of the government. This has always struck me like a man who came into your house and threw you out of your own bed and said get out this is my house now. Washington DC was founded on Southern land, by Southerners, populated by Southerners and yet the very city Southerners founded after summarily conquering it, they had the gall to call the South rebels when in fact it was THEY who were the rebels, the freebooters, they highjacked and stole the system and called the Stars and Stripes, the very flag that George Washington fought under, not to mention thousands of Southerners THEIR FLAG.
I am in 100% agreement a divorce needed to happen, I just wish that it had been the South and not the North in control of the preceedings
///////////////////////////////////////
Dear Mr. Jenkins,
I thank you for the clarification. As always, I enjoy your commentary, and have most often learned from it. You know, reading this, it occurred to me that I ought share with you something I have not done so before. I do it to hear your thinking on it, NOT to hear myself, as I can do that, without bothering to type it out.
Ready?
Here we go…
As you know, my daddy’s folks were Hungarian Ashkenazick city-slicking Jews – most males of the line businessmen- racketeers, and my mama’s folks were Anglo-Saxe Freewill Baptist Southern subsistence farmers, as they had been for centuries unknown, in Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and my home, North Carolina.
Whether I liket it or not, my whole childhood was a daily adventure in witnessing the ridiculous contrasts between these two very different peoples, and trying to figure out what to do with it, or, at least, how to understand it.
Eventually I came to think about these peoples in these terms –
Jews are a people hardened by millenia in Diaspora, and, trained by the adversity of being a tiny foreign minority in the midst of a native majority.
Because of this, Jews train their children to excel at logick, and, most importantly, to recognize their own interests, in any situation, from any angle. Jewish thinking is NOT recta-linear, NOT mono-dimensional, nor tends to be heirarchical in nature, but, instead, is highly flexible, circular, and not very rote, but, improvisational and free flowing.
I am unsure Jews started out this way, but, likely developet this manner of thinking, collectively, because it is the exact kind of thinking you need to do, in order to survive and excell in the face of fields of endless obstacles to your creative outlook for your life, and it’s ambitions.
To be clear, my daddy, as does any Jewish daddy worth his salt, anywhere, pumpt untold funds and energy into my intellectual development – teaching me all he knew, and then, even when I was only 4 or 5 years of age, constantly quizzing me to see how much of it I remembered! Too, sent me to the most expensive Christian private school, hiring endless tutours for me – whether in classical musick, chess, foreign language, or my worst subject – math.
When my daddy chid me for failure at something it was not because what I had done was wrong, but, because it did not work out right.
My mama’s people. on the other hand, taught me about how to shoot and hunt, how to mow the lawn, how to make biscuits and red-eyed gravy, how to restrain myself, how not to cheat on my wife, or anybody.
Too, they taught me how to talk to see The Lord in between the trees and how to hear his voice. They taught me regularity, hard hard work, and unswerving politeness – in other words, they taught me their thinking – which was the then old Southern school of honour.
My mam’s people were very smart, and incredibly talented, as they could seem to build anything from scratch, repair anything, even, at times, without parts, and they could grow anything – without need of YouTube or manuals.
They seemed to need nobody, and specialized in being independent, whereas my daddy Jewish folks specialized at getting ahead in interdependence.
In the end, I will tell you that my mama’s folks thought in a very recta-linear manner about seemingly everything, and which had a habit of ruling out much and many of the angles, in between. There always was, or so it seemed, a right way to do everything, and all other ways were wrong.
And when I did something, my mama’s folks would not chide me so much for for failure, if failure it was, but, for moral deficiencies – such as being impatient and in taking short-cuts, or starting a job not correctly prepared.
My mam’as folks had a very upright and straightforward approach to life, which my daddy’s folks did not have, though, my Jewish grandma was the exception, she being as righteous as her husband, my granddaddy, was bookmaking and racketeering.
At this point, you may wonder why I tell you this.
Well, it’s because of this secession thing, and how The White South is going to survive, and what failed or succeeded before.
You see, Jews have made a many millenia war on life; – they ever attempting to get it to bend better their way.
My Southron Brethren don’t understand that just because a war has not been declared, does not mean that you are not in someone’s crosshairs. whether they term it that way or not, Jews view life as an endless war, and, in this sense, I think they are right, if for only that, if you think this way, you are not very likely to have your bones pickt over.
Southerners ‘seceded’, Mr. Jenkins, because it was appropriate (recta-linear) and, in light of that situation, the most moral thing that could be done. (recta-linear)
When they realized their failures and mistakes, by the fall of 1865, many of them exchanged their recta-linear uniforms of butternut and grey for free-form scarlet red hoods and robes, and, for a short time, conducted themselves like free-form vigilante Jews – if ever their could be such a thing!
And so they snatched victory from defeat; a triumph which protected their future heirs, for nearly 80+ years.
Unfortunately, Southerners, as a whole, and because of recta-linear thinking, have been loathe to grasp that a persistent undeclared war, from 360 degrees, has been waged on us – as you mentioned with your comment on the bizarre attempts to beguile us into thinking that we are ‘Americans’.
In the end, honour is what you refuse to do in pursuit of your own aims – and that is why The South has such a hard time competing. Our Lord Jesus Chryst said that such people would suffer on earth but, win the kingdom of heaven, just as those triumphing by draconian means would lose the eternal world.
I concluded some years back that, if the White South is to survive, we would have to learn to play a 360 degree game, and, to that end, I try to help my fellow Southern patriots every day.
We can put a hurting on those who our enemies, but, we have to be willing to learn how!; and then DO IT!!!
If we don’t, The White South, lands, people, and culture, will be a historical footnote by the beginning of the next century.
We have to prevent that.
Thoughts?
@junius
I reckon I am more improvisational and I understand what you mean about recta-linear thinking. The idea there is a RIGHT WAY and a WRONG WAY and that honor is more important than life itself. This was simultaneously a STRENGTH and a WEAKNESS. Strength in that it created statesmen and soldiers, WEAKNESS in that it was inflexible. This is likely why during the war the Confederate high command couldn’t understand the concept of total war. The Christian rules of warfare, which had existed since the end of the West Roman Empire, had governed war between Christian rulers. A Christian King who didnt follow these rules risked excommunication.
Stonewall Jackson thought outside these bounds. He saw himself in the vein of Joshua and when Joshua entered Caanan with the Israelites, God’s command was to kill everything in sight, and they did as long as Joshua lived.
These two visions of Christian Knights vs Joshua of Old couldn’t ever truly exist on two equal planes. One or the other it couldn’t be both.
@Billy Ray …
Oh, you definitely get it, Billy Ray!; and, save for Misters James Owen, Wayne Willingham, Mark Saint, or leaders, and former, of the League of the South -Brad Griffin, Michael Tubbs, Pat Hines, Dr. Michael Hill, Pastor John Weaver, Mark Thomey, Harold Crews, and Michael and Cushman, I doubt there is anyone, in all the many many Southerners I know, who gets it so well as you, or, even, 1/10th as well as you..
To be downright blunt, Billy Ray, your comment, here, leads me to believe that you struggle with yourself, much as I do – stuck betwixt your sense of honour, and your growing fury over what is happenin’ to our Dixie.
Honour is more important than life itself. No truer word could be spoke; and yet : I have been wondering, as of late, what is ‘honourable’ about allowin’ your country to be wipet off the map, under the ruse of rule of law?
Truly, Billy Ray, I want to continue being a Christian Knight, and yet, I have the distinct feeling that the Jew England government is double dog daring me to become a Confederate Joshua of Old.
What about that now?
@Junius
My sentiments exactly. I am not a scholar in the vein of Dr. Hill Mr. Cushman or even Brad, in fact I have learned much from all of them. Growing up in the North, I grew up with A LOT of mixed signals on certain issues. For instance my mother, who is an Ohio and a Northern native going all the way back to the boat her family got off of in the 1700’s, she strongly pushed the whole assimilation line, you have to be like everyone else. My Daddy who is Southern born didn’t object but my Grandmother did. Every time I went down there, being that Daddy is her oldest, she would always give me the talk, btw she didnt do this to anyone but me. Here were the high points.
“You ain’t like these other people, you’re one of us and never forget where you come from. Kentucky is home and it will always be home. Don’t turn your back on other folks from the hills either.”
I believe she gave me a variation of this talk, interspersed with a lot of Christian teaching from about the time I was five until i was grown. I’ll admit I bristled at it, I didn’t know how to take it or what she was even talking about until I grew up enough to reason it out. I remember when it first came out. We had this history teacher, a Civil War Re-Enactor who was from here but had at Ohio University (about 45 miles from the Ohio River) as he taught on the war he sad one day something that went this way “Well you know the North had to win, our enemies were a bunch of barefoot hillbillies, you know down in the hills they live in school buses.” I remember I raised my hand and I said, “You have alot of nerve insulting our ancestors, because theres alot of us in this room whose families come from those very hills you’re insulting.” I knew there were kids in that class whose mother or father came from down South, they didnt raise a word, but I did. I remember my mother found out and she said, “That teachers no good, but must you always try to stick up for the South? It makes you stick out and Ohio people don’t like folks who stick out.” This is the typical Ohioan idea about life, grumble about what you dont like but don’t you dare speak out about it because that just causes problems. In other words in all things don’t take any real stand, just go along to get along and hate yourself for doing it. I just couldnt do this, I had to stand up for my grandparents. If I didn’t Id be a scumbag.
Years later a man I worked with gave me the same talk my grandmother did. It all started one day when there was a theft at work and we were accused. Of course I was 25 miles away in bed when it happened but I was still questioned and lie detectored by the cops, which of course cleared me. I came back angry to work and two men I worked with, one came from along the Ohio River and the other was from Virginia they both talked to me and I remember them saying this,
“Northern people will never really accept you as one of them, they know who you are and where you’re from they can tell that just by your name and the way about you. You’re one of us and you’d best face it that to them we’re second class citizens.”
I got mad when he said this and I said, “Steve I was born in Ohio.”
He said, “That don’t mean shit to them, you’re one of us.”
I remember the other man was there, he grew up in Norfolk and he smiled at me and said my name and said,
“Steve’s right, you’re just going to have to get used to this because you’re one of us. Some of these people hate us just because we’re from the South.”
This discussion, 18 years ago sticks with me to this day and I never forgot it. As the years went by I saw that what they told me in many things, was the truth.
Dear Billy Ray,
I am very touched that you would share this with me. It’s dang hard for men, particularly online, to allow themselves to be vulnerable with one another.
Look, I read this with the greatest of interest, and I have some fairly blunt things to say to you.
#1. You are a Southern Confederate. I’ve never doubted it for a minute, and I don’t doubt it now.
These things are difficult to explain, but, let me say this – you don’t know where you were or who you were before you were born in 1976? Also, scientist have recently discovered that states of mind of ancestors can be transmitted via genetick aspects. We could talk on this at length, but, suffice it to say : very strong states of mind, or hard reactions to traumatick experiences that your ancestors had, could be bubbling in your blood and influencing your psyche.
I know about this stuff because I have to wrestle with this from the time I was born. You see, from the earliest times I could remember I associated with German and Russian things – most particularly the Waffen SS.
This happened because my Jewish daddy taught me his life from the time I was about 4. Part of that was his experience in the 29th Infantry Division and fighting in Normandy, in 1944-45.
You see, my daddy was always extremely kind and generous to me, and, though I am not much in my perspectives and values as was he, I always appreciated him and loved him.
I understood his fight against Hitler and the whole Nazi thing, and yet – whenever we watched a WWII film together, I rooted for The Germans. Of course, that was a terrible thing to do, and I sensed that something was wrong in me to do this, so, for that reason, I kept it a secret until I was an adult.
Still, I could never help that I rooted in secret for The Germans, and, as well, that I had many fragments of dreams which, as I became a teen, I came to believe were former lives – one of which was that of being East Prussian and serving in the 4th SS Polizei Division until my death in the fighting around Konigsberg or Danzig? in late winter of 1945.
Of course, on a rational level, such a thing is beyond ridiculous, yet, as I went through my life, I kept bumping into Germans, Russians, and Poles, from that time – almost as if God were trying to say something to me about who I had been.
Then, one day, my daddy’s youngest brother’s wife gave me a book on those Americans who, having recollections like mine, had these incredible stories of dying in ‘the holocaust’.
Their stories were just like mine, only, my story was the mirror opposite of theirs – many of them having been born Anglo-Saxe in this life, but, having been Jewish before.
#2. It is my honour to know, correspond with, and collaborate with Confederates all over this country, and more than a few I know from The Buckeye State.. In fact, I have come to think of Indiana and Ohio, below the center latitude lines, as Confederate Country, or, at least, if not that, then surely borderlands, where persons’ allegiances vary with the house.
#3. You are definitely ‘one of us’. I know, and am related to, modern day Confederates, and Confederates of old, all over Dixie. I always know my own kind, and need no birth certificate or government papers of any kind to tell me what is what.
#4. If you still live in Ohio, you ought think about moving down here with us.
Though problems follow us everywhere, money cannot buy the enjoyment of being with your own kind. I’ve lived in 13 states, and the last long exile my wife and I made in New England sorely tried our patience. Now that we are home in the oldest part of Dixie, hell will freeze over before we ever leave again.
Hell, I don’t even want to leave Dixie for a 3 day vacation. I don’t feel comfortable anywhere else, and, believe you me, I have traveled, appreciated human culture all over, and speak foreign languages coming and going.
Heaven for me is in the Piney Confederate woods, where churches and friendly good-ole-boys abound – where Southern gals speak with that honeyed tongue, and where hunting clubs and fine barbecue buffets are never more than a short ride away. I love my Magnolia trees, Crape Myrtles, and my Southern swamps, and, hell, I even like Southern snakes. In fact, sometimes I think I remind myself of a Copperhead snake.
So, again, thank you, and just know that you are accepted for who you really are.
In the end, you are what you are only prepared to live, fight, and die for.
Birthplaces can be very deceptive, indeed!
@Junius
You shared with me so I shared with you all is fair. There is a curious thing here because of so many families being from the South were you will literally have after two generations still a semblance of Southern traits about them. They all came here for work before during and after WWII my father’s family mostly left and went to Fort Wayne Indiana and some went to Dayton OH but ours came here to this particular spot.
The reason I think about all this was that in life there is a synchronicity, It never really occured to me why oftentimes the kids whose families were from down South tended to be friends to each other in fact i dont think I really noticed it till one day when I was an adult. I think my Daddy said to me more off the cuff about FOLKS FROM THE HILLS KNOW EACH OTHER. I mean I understood it with him, he was born and raised there never lost his twang and about 1/2 or more of the guys he worked with were also from KY TN W.VA I didn’t think being born here it’d extend to me, till like i said one day as an adult i just had an epiphany that it really is true. Usually folks from the Hills will be friendly to most people, but they’ll greet other folks from down there special like HOW YOU DOIN’ BUDDY? Ive had this happen to me on multiple occasions with folks I never met in my life, There was one old man i worked with nice guy, first time I met him I didn’t really tell him anything about me, and he’s like I know you’re from Kentucky i can tell by looking at you.I still used to think, how is that even possible? Almost like a {hillbilly} sixth sense.
I know folks would laugh about this but Im here to tell you, its true.,
Yes, absolutely, Billy Ray. No laughing at you here.
Smalltown Southerners, and, even more so, rural ones have a thick aura about them that precedes their accent, if you are the sort to watch these things in folks.
One of the traits of North Carolinians is our endless friendliness. Hell, many times I am walking around my town, and people I don’t know (Negroes, too) will greet me, or, even when they are passing by in cars, wave at me.
When the wife and I got back from that long exile in New England, and this kind of stuff started happening to us, I turned to my wife, many times, in fact, and said, ‘Honey, you can’t buy a thing like this – not for a million dollars.’
Even when we drive on lonely stretches of rural road, some drivers, coming from the other direction, will wave at you.
And, in town, like our grocery store, folks hold open freezer doors for each other, smile at each other, and almost never try to avoid the eyes of another man. This goes for Negroes and White, excepting the young Negroes who come here from the big cities to go to our school and don’t have our culture.
And we still live Jim Crow – being that we stay pretty much separate, but, the friendliness and courtesy is always there, ‘tween the races.
Of course, the are some unfriendly people, but, they are few and far between.
Now, speakin’ of New England, I uset to walk all over the town where we lived and, as I always have done, I would greet everyone I met with a great big, ‘howdy’.
In such a situation half of them would refuse to even look you in the eye, much less say something to you.
One day, the wife and I were comin’ out of the town library, when I greeted a sequence of passers-by, whom I knew not, and, in typical fashion, not a dang one of them bothered themselves to look at me, much less reply.
That was when my wife, she feeling hurt on my behalf erupted and said, ‘Junius, when are ye gonna learn? : they don’t do friendliness up here!’
To which I replied, in a rather testy fashion, ‘And I don’t give a good God-dang whether they do or not, I ain’t letting ’em change who I am!’
In the Midwest people normally reserve friendliness for home folks, they act with formal courteousness to outsiders. Yes there is a difference. In Appalachia where my family is from, they are friendly just like the rest of the South to a point., HOWEVER if they sense you are a Government Man or someone come to snoop around, the friendliness turns to something else real fast.
My cousin I believe who worked for either a Commonwealth Agency in KY or the County I cant remember which, he dealt with some pretty scary threats from the people who dwelt way back in the woods, because in their minds, if you have a nice car and a clipboard and look like the government, then you’re the enemy. My other cousin who carried the mail he was lucky because he knew everyone on his route but even he told me there’s places down here even I wont go today. Back when I was a little boy you went snooping around up there, you were liable to get shot. He’s about 73 or 74 now
Well, most folks are very friendly here, but, as you write, if they sense that you are not from here, particularly, The north, and that you have come with an attitude, it DOES change right quick.
All in all, in Northeastern North Carolina, ‘government-men’ don’t exist, outside of the mailmen – if you want to call them ‘government men.
Mostly the wife and I refer to them as ‘the postal Negroes’…
For us all government is either very local (police, sheriffs, and or food inspectors) or from Raleigh – i.e. legislation that may affect us, such as voter I.D. laws.
80% of the terrain of North Carolina is this way, as it is very small town and rural, and we pretty much govern ourselves.
As to your mail-carrying cousin, that is a funny vignette, no doubt!
Junius A government man in Eastern Kentucky is usually inferred to be a Revenuer
Yes, Billy Ray – the ole-timers, in the moonshining hill country of North Carolina called them this, too!
“In fact, I have come to think of Indiana and Ohio, below the center latitude lines, as Confederate Country, or, at least, if not that, then surely borderlands, where persons’ allegiances vary with the house.”
You can extend that east into Southwestern Pennsylvania as well, particularly the part about being friendly until one is suspected of being a Government Man.
@6184…
Junius said…
“In fact, I have come to think of Indiana and Ohio, below the center latitude lines, as Confederate Country, or, at least, if not that, then surely borderlands, where persons’ allegiances vary with the house.”
6184 replied…
You can extend that east into Southwestern Pennsylvania as well, particularly the part about being friendly until one is suspected of being a Government Man.
Yes, 6184 – many of us noticed how Trump won in Pennsylvania, and we knew that something must have tilted heavily in his favour, and it could not have been the eastern New England wannabe part.
So, we thank the Mennonites and other fellow Biblethumpers in the central part of the Keystone State, and our would-be Rebel Brethren in the southwest.
No matter how disappointing Trump has been, since late March, he’s a world better than Hillary Clinton.