I have insomnia.
I may be a northerner, but I resent the hatred and opprobrium directed at a symbol which represents true Constitutional rights. This brave man is to be saluted for defending his heritage and a flag under which many brave men suffered, fought and died.
I suppose with the dawn, the currrent crop of Yankee Shermanites and Sheridanites will appear to launch their customary baseless attacks.
Until then....... Good Night!!!
HEYYYY.....y'know, that one could stick!
Shermanites. As in, Amalekites. As in, Edomites. As in, Jebusites and Canaanites and Midianites.
Philistines, all of them!!
What do you think? "Shermanites", for people who are always dumping on the South and, when you poke them with a stick, tell you they wish the rest of it had been burnt down, and all the people done away with? That Sherman didn't hang enough Southerners?
Shermanites. Kinda rhymes with "termites".
Thank you.
As it happens, I was born and for the most part raised it northern Illinois. Like most Illinoisians, I was taught from infancy to worship at the shrine of St. Lincoln and knew little of my mother's family roots in the South. It wasn't until I had some spare time at the end of graduate school and signed up for a year's worth of graduate seminars in history that I had the opportunity to do some research in the archives of the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. What I found there was astonishing.
I learned that the perspective on the nation was different back then, before the so-called Civil War, so that Americans did not consider themselves part of a monolithic entity as we do today, and the idea of seceding from this relatively new experiment was not such a horror. I learned that the idea of secession was based on economics, not slavery, for the South had for a long time been providing 70% of the money in the federal exchequer and receiving 30% of the benefits. I learned too, from reading the originals of Northern newspapers, that Northern editorialists whipped up the Northern populace with horror stories about what was going to happen to the Northern economy if the South were permitted to secede, and it was to a great extent for this reason that Northern men flocked to enlist.
I was also bemused to learn from the original letters of the time that Northern men did not "jine up" because they so ardently wanted their sable brethren in the South to breathe the pure air of freedom. Probably not one man in ten thousand joined the Union Army to die for the freedom of black people. In fact, there were riots among Union soldiers when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and one Yankee general wrote in bitterness that most of the men would never have signed up if they'd known this was going to turn into a battle to free the slaves. No, they joined for the same reason Southerners did: they were told their beloved nation and their lifestyles were threatened by the other guys.
It was a great tragedy, one of the greatest of history. But it's over now, and Southerners have picked up the pieces and rebuilt their broken homeland. While Yankees often abjure Southerners to "get over it," today it's the North that can't get over it, the Northerners who keep on jumping up and down screaming, "WE WON! WE WON! WE WON! ACCEPT OUR CULTURE AND VALUES, SUPPRESS YOUR OWN, 'CAUSE WE WON!" Their contempt for the states and people they vanquished never stops, even after 150 years have passed. The hatred that fuels this is astonishing.