Tag: Old South

Closing Thought–16May19

I live in the Deep South and I hear all the time just how the South has changed they are calling it the “New South”…..that attitudes are changing and that the old days are gone…..

I never believed the hype! I have not seen anything changing in my region and then I read this from Georgia…..

A Georgia councilman who came to the defense of the city’s mayor after she was accused of racism said that interracial marriage is “just not the way a Christian is supposed to live.”

Mayor Theresa Kenerly of Hoschton came under fire recently after she allegedly told a member of the council that she rejected a job applicant “because he is black, and the city isn’t ready for this,” according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Kenerly later denied that she made the remarks.

“I do not recall making the statement attributed to me regarding any applicant for the City Administrator position, and I deny that I made any statement that suggest (sic) prejudice,” she said in a statement.

Hoschton, which is nearly all white, has a city code against discrimination based on “race, national origin, color, religion, creed, age, sex.”

Councilwoman Hope Weeks confirmed in an email that Kenerly made similar remarks to her in the parking lot.

Read the entire report here.

There is nothing “new” about the South…the same bigoted opinions are still there…just hiding beneath some smiles and lies.

The “New South” looks and sounds a lot like the “Old South”.

The South Will Rise Again

Since the circus (Congress) has shut down and the clowns have taken their pathetic act on the road……I will look at history……as long as there is NO breaking news that needs attention….look and learn……

Today is 01 July and I will posting a week of American history stuff to commemorate the Declaration of Independence…..but first there is another anniversary to acknowledge and that is the Battle at Gettysburg……which took place 150 years ago today….

The South Shall Rise Again!  I live in Mississippi and I have heard this slogan since I moved here in 1961….the people here are proud of their Southern heritage, as they should be….Mississippi has a long history of events….some memorable and some pretty damn shameful…….but this glorification of the South and the American Civil War is just short of perverted…….there is NOTHING about this part of the history of the state that should be glorified in any way……

………the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, and odds are we’ll hear a lot about heroism and that famed address, Tony Horwitz writes at the Atlantic—and almost nothing about the “unromantic slaughter” in places like Iverson’s Pits, where soldiers described being “sprayed by the brains” of troops in front of them. “The Civil War today is generally seen as a necessary and ennobling sacrifice, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves,” Horwitz writes. But recent historians are daring to ask: “Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans?” These historians argue that we need to weigh the full horrors of the war—which killed more of our citizens than all other American wars combined. The South nearly won, or, at least, came close to getting the North to give up, raising “the very real possibility that many thousands of Americans might have died only to entrench secession and slavery.” And there’s a lesson to be learned, today, from Iraq and Afghanistan, which “remind us, yet again, that the aftermath of war matters as much as its initial outcome.” Pan out to 1870, when the North abandoned Reconstruction, or to the Jim Crow South, and “the story of the Civil War isn’t quite so uplifting. … In some respects, the struggle for racial justice, and for national cohesion, continues still.” Click for his full piece.

Sorry, to say….if the South continues along the lines it is traveling today….it shall NEVER rise again!

Jesse Helms Dead

Former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a conservative icon who represented the Tarheel State in the Senate for 30 years, died early this morning at the age of 86.

Helms served in the Senate from 1972 to 2002, where he became a leading voice of the right wing of the Republican Party. Nicknamed “Senator No” by his many critics, Helms was a fierce anti-communist whose support for Ronald Reagan in 1976 proved a critical juncture in Reagan’s eventual rise to the Oval Office. To many on the right, it was Helms, not Reagan, who was the true heart of the conservative movement.
But as much as he was lionized by the right, Helms was vilified by the left for his “Old South” racial politics, as well as his open scorn for the press, gays, liberals, and the United Nations. During his 1990 reelection battle with Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte, his campaign ran an infamous ad that shows a pair of white hands crumpling up a job rejection letter, as the narrator says, “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is.”

In the early 1960s, Helms became an on-air commentator for WRAL-TV in Raleigh and began to gain a statewide following. Helms vehemently opposed the civil-rights movement, and he made a frequent target of the University of North Carolina, which he saw as a bastion of liberalism in an otherwise conservative state. “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights,” Helms said in a 1963 TV editorial.

Slowly, but slowly the “Old South” good old boys, the people that fought against civil rights and such, are slowly dying off.  In a way it is good, maybe then we can put the racial BS behind us and move on to a better country.