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Now, as a Conservative Ohioan, I am very glad that the Southern States are still in the Union. But the social ostracization of pro-Confederates, to me, violates both the spirit of 1776, and the Constitution. as well as any sense of elemental fairness. It also illustrates the hubris always present when one generation assumes the right to pass judgment on others who walked in different times, in ways that reflected their own experiences, not the shallow & myopic experiences of their later critics.

Well stated. I think the civil war was an utter tragedy, but I think it has consequences which are still resonating today and which keeps the tragedy going.

I see the Federal government leading us all towards societal collapse, and it looks to me as if the only way to avoid being sucked in by the undertow is to cast off the lifeboats and get away from the wreck.

Insisting that people don't have a right to leave a government which no longer serves their interest, keeps us tied to this slowly sinking ship. I put forth the opinions I have of the past because I recognize the same essential problem in the here and now.

Let me make a suggestion, as to priorities. Many of the issues in looking back to the terrible war in the 1860s, and what led up to it in the 1830s, 1840s & 1850s, as well as what followed the war in the nightmare called Reconstruction, involved problems in the human comedy, as old as demagoguery & the deliberate manipulation of the susceptible by devices as old as what is recorded in Genesis as to the corruption of Eve.

We were--and are--being manipulated towards disaster by methodology that is easily recognized, once it is pointed out. It involves convincing people, who may or may not have a real grievance, that they have one, and they need to hate someone, in some way connected to that "grievance." This is reflected in what might be called The Blame & Envy Cocktail. That, for example, is one of Obama's stock-in-trades.

Another technique, closely related, which has been a common tool of would-be tyrants, and is clearly very evident among those who despise traditional Southern culture--which was actually the most tolerant in the Western World--is in what I would describe as The Compulsion For Uniformity .

I have been fighting these techniques since graduating from High School, and deliberately enrolling in an historically egalitarian oriented college, which was famous for promoting hatred of the Old South, since its founding in the 1830s.

One other point. The arguments that I employ have all been tested many times, through the decades, against the deceptive methodology that I refer to. Properly employed, those destroying the American heritage, have no real answer but to hiss insult.