Posted on 07/14/2005 6:10:21 AM PDT by robowombat
Bias against Southerners misses the mark By RICHARD COX Published July 11, 2005
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Does prejudice exist in Pasco County, an area with a very diverse population and seemingly very progressive?
I am certain that African-Americans, Hispanics and people from other countries, the poor and homeless, as well as members of certain religious faiths, experience treatment different from the mainstream populace. However, I am a member of a minority who has experienced attitudes and reactions from many individuals who assume that I am intellectually and socially challenged.
A very large percentage of the population of New Port Richey in particular is from the Northeast. I personally like the outspokenness, mince-no-words attitude, the ability to criticize as well as accept criticism without being offended, that seems to represent the culture in which Northerners grew up.
My family members seem to have the disadvantage of being born and living most of our lives in the South, in our case, Tennessee. I grew up in Knoxville, a city that many people seem to associate only with the fanatical behavior of our college football fans, and my wife is from a small city near Chattanooga.
There still seems to be a stereotype that some people associate with Tennesseans. When those individuals heard the distinct accent of my wife, my stepdaughter, and myself, it seemed to conjure up that redneck image one might associate with the humor of Jeff Foxworthy and other Southern comedians. That image is of a culture of ignorant hillbillies (certainly due to inbreeding!), barefoot, living in a shack with no indoor plumbing (but certainly an outhouse in back), having a dog living under the front porch, and owning an overgrown lawn populated with broken-down, dilapidated automobiles. And, yes, we all chew tobacco and sit on the front porch swing playing the banjo. Everyone also flies a Confederate flag and reminisces about the War Between the States.
I first noticed this attitude when my stepdaughter, an honor student, came home from middle school several days in tears because several other students harassed her daily, calling her an ignorant redneck and hillbilly among other derogatory terms. My wife and I have experienced the sudden change in facial expressions from many when they hear our accent. They seem to associate our accent with ignorance, and speak in simpler terms so that we can understand what they are saying. Telephone conversations often produce the same reaction.
I beg to differ. Tennessee is the home of several major universities, four major metropolitan areas with all the drug and gang problems associated with other large cities, and the most visited national park in the United States. Oak Ridge, in the Knoxville area, probably has as high a percentage of residents with doctorate degrees as any city in the United States. Tennessee has a musical heritage equal to none, and it is not exclusively country or bluegrass genres. Many nationally prominent politicians are from my home state, including three former presidents.
Tennessee has produced many famous musicians, actors, scientists and other intellectual and talented natives.
Well, to set the story straight, rural areas of most states have their own populace and dwellings that approach this stereotype.
My wife and I grew up in your average suburban neighborhoods, we both graduated from major universities and had successful professional careers, and, to risk seeming boastful, are probably as intelligent and knowledgeable, if not more so, than the average American. Believe it or not, East Tennessee, the section of the state we are from, fervently supported the Union during the Civil War.
I have noticed in the Pasco Times notices of meetings for various groups from areas of the Northeast and from other countries. Perhaps Southerners in our area should form a similar group. With apologies to an African-American group with a similar title, we could call our group the NAASF, the National Association for the Advancement of Southern Folks, Pasco County Branch. I hope there are enough local Southern residents available to attract to our organization.
--Richard Cox, a retired middle school science teacher and department head, lives in New Port Richey
Just war, versus factional war for dominance. Our war against the Japanese and the Germans did justice. Lincoln's substituted one injustice for another, and then piled on a few more for good measure.
it has been the experience of ALL here that you NEVER "remember" or KNOW anything that makes your arguments look as empty as "m.eSPINola" head.
about 10 minutes of the documentary was AT the OHIO HQ of the KKK & the Grand Dragon was interviewed on camera.
i'd bet you can't remember that either. rotflmRao!
free dixie,sw
The cause which all Americans (except the appeasing leftists) need to rally around, is the total defeat of the jihadist enemy. If the enemy is able to implement his terrorist plots none of us shall be here debating anything.
My thoughts on the matter were restated in post #763.
free dixie,sw
The same thought occurred to me after I had posted that -- his suggestion, actually, but a good thought. The English, Spanish, and U.S. civil wars could be compared among one another, and then Reconstruction compared with post-World War II reconstruction.
There was an ameliorative impulse in Americans of that generation that Europeans noticed at once whenever they came around them: one British woman once reflected that when the Americans showed up to take part in the War, it was as if someone had opened a window. Everything changed because of the guys who showed up to change it.
There was none of that attitude in the conquering Yankee armies, or in the locust-swarms of carpetbaggers and Union Club ideologues come south to turn freedmen into Republican cat's-paws.
Oh, pshaw. Cat's out of the bag now, pal. You didn't read that piece at all. It directly addressed this topic, and you show zero evidence of having even shouted at it from across the street, much less shaking hands.
The fact is, the status of blacks was changing everywhere, glacially, but more in the South than the North, if only because the gulf from slavery to freedman status was so much greater.
You are soft-pedaling, for polemical reasons, the fact that the Northern and Midwestern States were dragging their feet on rights for blacks with every bit as much recalcitrance as the ex-Confederates. I posted it, and you're contradicting my historical source without support. Buncombe!
You belabor the Southern States for passing restrictive black codes, while scoffing at the very real concerns they had, which TexConfederate pointed out to you, and at the same time exonerating the Northern States' absolute refusal to grant the pitiful numbers of ex-slaves and free blacks in their midst the same suffrage rights that the Radicals were demanding for armies of ex-slaves in the South.
What was that crack about sauces and ganders?
Now that would depend on which end of the stick you were holding, wouldn't it? I'm sure that the Germans and the Japanese believed their cause to be just and their war to be necessary. And in the end they wound up with their cities flattened, the allies imposing governments and constitutions on them, forcing them to toss out customs and beliefs held for centuries. And you don't hear them complaining. But southroners? You people cry like 4 year old infants deprived of their bottle over nothing by comparison.
There you go again. You really like that cruel-shoes stuff, don't you?
You'd despise that man if he never said a word to you, if he was crawling on the ground trailing blood and holding his guts in his shirt-tails. Like you said, "CSfreakinA".
Bump right back to you.
And I'm sure that you do remember. Of all the people on this forum you have been blessed with the most imaginative of memories, capable of recalling things that never could have happened and things that cannot be verified.
I dispise the man for his positions on the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Blacks, the flag, and my country. Your hyperbole about guts and shirt-tails notwithstanding.
Right on, brother!
I must say, that is a bunch of nonsense. Just can't admit the Union was honorable, can ya? Or that the South was not so honorable, despite their constant use of the word. The Samaurai of Japan used that word a lot, too, and they were a bunch of thugs, who also had to be dealt with a similar manner.
Women were insulting soldiers. They were told to stop. Boo hoo. As for not being able to fight back, the South was full of bushwackers.
Fallacy of false dilemma. Con job 101, freshman logic (or illogic).
Not everyone served under the same circumstances of duress. Lee survived the war; Pat Cleburne and Leonidas Polk did not. Their service was measurably more severe than General Lee's, even if his services to the South were greater.
It doesn't mean that men who were slow to reconcile, or completely proof against its charms (perhaps they'd met a carpetbagger?), were better or worse than men who, like Lee and Longstreet, tried their best to reconcile themselves to having lost the war despite their best efforts, and accepted like gentlemen the terms of their paroles. They were, after all, conquered men and no longer equals or citizens. They had to accept what Congress handed out, and they'd agreed to accept it, in order in the first place to spare their men, and in the second place in order to try to lead them as civic exemplars as best they knew how in the bitterly unequal and exploitive peace that followed.
Far from taunting TexConfederate with the rebuke that Lee was a collaborator (that's what you meant, wasn't it?), you ought to be on your knees thanking God that Lee and Davis didn't decide on a course of guerrilla warfare before the Petersburg defenses broke down.
If Lee, Longstreet, and A.P. Hill could have got away with the Richmond commissary and rolling stock, and effected a junction with Johnston, Forrest, and Bragg, they could have put together a hell of a guerrilla war. And if they'd held together, the war might have gone on another year, who knows?
So think before you sneer and jeer.
I'm not a troll, I'm a strongly opinionated person (sometimes). A troll is someone who taunts a lot, unbidden and unprovoked, like Non-Sequitur and his Boston towel-buddy do, in order to provoke flame wars and generally stir up bad blood, or to propagandize against e.g. Christian morals on a church-group's BBS the way gay propagandists do, and sometimes Nazis, or Satanists, none of whom can stand believing, witnessing Christians. (Truth in advocacy, I'm not one of those Christians -- I mention them because they draw a lot of that kind of trolling and irritation by anti-Christian ideologues and libertines.)
"before you post a FICTION, which makes you look IGNORANT of the FACTS& or UNtruthful, check your sources.
in this particular case, you don't know what you're talking about."
What a fool. A smart person would have stated some facts, made an argument. But your response is one of a fool.
I'll leave the sneering and jeering to you, along with the fallacies.
That's pretty rich coming from Palmerston, considering what his appointee, Lord Clyde, did in India after the Sepoy Mutiny was put down. Here's a taste:
"In the early months of the British recovery, few sepoys were left alive after their positions were overrun. The British soldiers seemed to have made a collective decision not to take prisoners and most actions ended with a frenzied use of the bayonet. On the line of march whole villages were sometimes hanged for some real or imagined sympathy for the mutineers. Looting was endemic and neither the sanctity of holy places nor the rank of Indian aristocrats could prevent the wholesale theft of their possessions. Many a British family saw its fortune made during the pacification of northern India. Later, when prisoners started to be taken and trials held, those convicted of mutiny were lashed to the muzzles of cannon and had a roundshot fired through their body. It was a particularly cruel punishment with a religious dimension in that by blowing the body to pieces the victim lost all hope of entering paradise."
http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/5443/indmut6.htm
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