The Gutting of The South
I read a story where some guy said he spoke to a US veteran who once spoke to a veteran of the American Civil War. He said something poetic about his hand touching the hand of history or something like that.
When I was born in 1965 -- a hundred years after the American Civil War ended -- there were people still alive who knew people who fought in or lived through the American Civil War. When they were tots, some people alive today sat on the knee of a grandparent who experienced that firsthand or whose parents or grandparents experienced it firsthand.
Just like Blacks have family stories about lynchings which didn't end until I was three and is not ancient history in the minds of Black Americans, the descendants of slave owners have family stories about how their families and family wealth and privilege were destroyed by the Civil War and they take it personally. This is why the War of Northern Aggression isn't really over.
My mother grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath. My father fought in the front lines of both World War II in his youth and Vietnam in his forties.
Growing up in the 'burbs with no bombs falling in my backyard and food reliably on the table, I was growing up in an emotional war zone where my parents couldn't stop fighting.
While our older sister in her teens tried to serve as some kind of untrained therapist or peacemaker while mom and dad yelled at each other in the living room, my brother and I hid in his bedroom hearing almost every word and trying to not giggle too loud when mom would say "I never slept with another man!!!" and dad would reply "Neither did I!!!!!"
In your head, in your head, they're still fighting
With their tanks and their bombs, and their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head, they are dying
And Southerners descended from slave owners still feel the loss of Southern high society. I know because my mother's mother came from a low-level German noble family and I insanely want to start my own clothing line to meet my mother's expectations of appropriate dress because no store on the planet can sell me a wardrobe in line with how she dressed me.
She sewed a lot of my clothes and though she's dead and gone I feel like a skank every minute of every day. And I had no idea until my mid to late forties how insanely upper class my mother's expectations were.
I was homeless for a year before I understood that my "middle class values" were something more like the values of European royalty. I just spent the first twenty-five years of my adult life feeling like a failure who didn't know how to budget or something.
To this day when I talk about that and say stuff like "I didn't know they had such upper class values because we didn't have money." my kids bust me with "Except for all the money they had."
They know my dad had three quarters of the cost of my childhood home in the bank when they bought it and my dad was frequently unemployed for months at a time, yet the power was never cut due to non-payment.
So I know for a fact there are Southerners alive today feeling like they don't expect much and can't get it who don't quite realize what they expect requires your daddy and all your friends' daddies to be plantation owners. They just think TV killed those balls or something.
And plantation owners were extraordinarily wealthy and owned slaves, sometimes hundreds of them.
And though it's wrong, they take their shit out on Blacks because on some level they feel like "YOU owe me!!!!! It's YOUR fault I can't dress like Scarlett O'Hara and have a cotillion."
Blacks who are descended from people who were captured and shipped to another continent to be sold into slavery and separated from their people and their culture even though some of them were princes or similar themselves.
The Civil War gutted the Southern economy because it ended slavery but also because most of the battles were fought on Southern lands and also because the North burned Atlanta to the ground to intentionally destroy its economy as a tactic of war.
It gutted the government because slave states had a perfect tax solution that made all tax-paying citizens happy which you never see. They mostly taxed people on the number of slaves they owned and you weren't seeing a lot of bickering amongst tax-paying citizens like you usually do.
Whether rich or poor, free citizens in The South were not arguing about whether you should tax x or y and how x amounts to taxing the rich and y amounts to taxing the poor, you abusive rat bastard. It was only Black people who were unhappy with the system and they didn't get a vote.
And it didn't stop when the war ended.
The exodus out of The South of so many Blacks during the 1900s gutted The South a second time. It gutted it of skilled labor that moved to Northern cities in large numbers to get access to more education for their children.
And then The North got credit for the industrial boom fueled by Black factory workers. Detroit is nearly eighty percent Black. If you drive an American-made car, it's probably mostly made by Black Americans, the descendants of Southern slaves.
The ones who LEFT were the best and brightest and most ambitious. The Blacks still in The South are the dregs, the ones who couldn't leave a situation they absolutely didn't want to stay in.
And when Black Americans complain about being shafted by America for four hundred years and wanting Reparations, it's not socially acceptable for White Southerners to say "What about what we lost when Northerners invaded and wrecked our shit without provocation? Don't we deserve something for the harm done to us?"
I don't believe slavery is the entirety of the explanation for the fact that at one time The South was the height of American culture and civilization.
The South defacto has honorifics like ancient Asian cultures. It's a mark of a high level of widespread cultural development and it's found nowhere else in the US.
A well-educated, dyed-in-the-wool Southerner told me the feminist Mz was born of Southern manners. They smooshed Miss and Mrs. together to have a form of address in a Southern drawl that didn't invade your privacy and ask you to disclose private information about your marital status and feminists who recognized that this is a question of women's rights stole the idea without crediting The South.
Southern Manners are not just rooted in Southern religiosity. It's a political heritage from colonists who were from noble families imbuing the entire culture with diplomatic practices from the courts of Europe -- from the social lives of the ruling classes where respecting people with whom you interacted was designed to avoid unnecessary wars.
The term court used in our legal system is rooted in the fact that the legal system and people passing judgement were not separate from the political leaders and wealthy families of Europe historically.
Etymology of courtesyThe word "courtesy" originates from the Old French term curteisie, which means "courtly" or "courteous." It entered the English language during the Middle English period, around the year 1225. The term reflects ideals of chivalry and politeness associated with noble conduct in medieval courts. The evolution of the word also connects to the concept of courtly manners and respect, highlighting its historical significance in social interactions.
People in The South are famously courteous and well mannered because someone decided all free citizens should be treated equally like members of the court. They decided to raise up the masses to all be equally expected to be educated in important matters of diplomacy as part of daily life.
And now us ignorant fools who mostly don't understand where the wealth of nations comes from squabble over the golden eggs we've crushed under our boots while completely missing the important detail we killed all the geese laying them.
If you want the War of Northern Aggression to finally die its final death, let me suggest that bars do not a prison make and the Reparations Black Americans most desperately need have nothing to do with asking Whites to write them a check.
The worst marks of historic slavery still leaving deep and ugly marks on the lives of Blacks are in the diseases they suffer, like high blood pressure and diabetes, which impair their productivity, bleed them for expensive ongoing treatment, help make their average lifespan shorter than that of Whites and actively prevent an accumulation of material wealth.
Some island off the coast of Georgia was left to the slaves. And their descendants were selling it off piece by piece in part because it was the only means to pay for treatment for diabetes which is deadly when untreated. It was becoming a White owned wealthy enclave of pricy vacation resorts.
A check won't fix their lives and won't pay anyone back for 400 years of suffering.
And checking my hypotheses about slave foods -- high consumption of pork -- causing high blood pressure in Blacks and diabetes being rooted in unrecognized infections from sexual assault of Black slaves doesn't per se shrink the bank accounts of White people or make their houses smaller.
Maybe rethink what you should be mad about and stop boiling The South in anger at your immediate neighbors still living in The South with you like it's their fault your ancestors bought their ancestors against their will and then The North vilified you and pretended you were bad people with nasty habits who deserved to be robbed because you got tired of paying transfer payments to The North and they weren't okay with you announcing "I'm taking my toys and going home, ASSHOLES."