The poorest, least educated and most violent home of White America. Sorry about repeating that, I just wanted to make sure I got that right. Every place has it's trash, and I'm sure Kansas has it's share. I wonder, is it a hip thing to bash the south? Some people don't know what they're talking about.
It's a very hip thing. The South hasn't forgotten the War, and the rest of the country won't let up until they do.
I could honestly care less about the war, and I poke fun at those who do. They drive me nuts sometimes. Especially with their bumper stickers and flags.
Blame Lincoln. The Civil War was an expression of his hubris. For all the South's faults, if the Constitution provides a mechanism for new states to join the Union it surely must provide a mechanism for existing states to depart. The Civil War was not about slavery: It continued to be legal in Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. Lincoln tossed that in to win back the support of Northern abolitionists when it appeared that his war might be lost. The Civil War was arguably the bloodiest war in modern history, killing a full three percent of America's population. It created wounds that have not healed in 140 years. Northerners and Southerners still distrust each other, as illustrated by the way the Virginia state government mistreats the increasingly Yankee culture of the federal commuters in its northern counties. Every other country in the New World except Haiti allowed slavery to end peacefully, by economic attrition, and the skin color of the population of all those countries today is a blended spectrum of brown. This would have happened in an independent Confederacy within a generation, as its artificial preindustrial economy sputtered to a halt and it accepted the Queen's inevitable offer-you-can't-refuse to rejoin the Commonwealth. Instead, we are the only country in the hemisphere with separate "black" and "white" communities with their own dialect, music and social customs. To understand this, visit entire parks in the South that are memorials to the destruction fraudulently represented as for the benefit of black Americans. Or the millions of families in the North who still honor great-great-grandparents who died in battles fraudulently represented as for the benefit of black Americans. This in a people who otherwise are proudly and almost totally ignorant of history, even their own! The Civil War was fought so that Lincoln could be assured of a place in the history books. He is there all right, labeled incorrectly as a hero. His legacy is a rift between Yankees and Rebels, and another one between white Americans and black Americans, both of which may take many more generations to repair. If the Civil war had not been fought, the South would be a prosperous former British colony like Australia, the boundary between Maryland and Virginia would be as unimportant as the one between Minnesota and Manitoba, and the color of our skins would be no more noteworthy than it is in Brazil.
