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Originally Posted by ptownrob
With apologies to Slidell, LA!
So let's cheer Texas and the rest of the Sovereign South. Still fighting the centuries' old game of "State's Rights" to cover over the self-destructive desire to lower the standards of living for all so that taxes don’t have to be paid.
Never mind that secessionist Texas governor Rick Davis was the first to come running back to the government to get help with swine flu.
Secession-minded Southern-states apologists seem to ignore or simply deny, that they have the lowest standard of living, have the worst health care, worst dental care, lowest rates of graduation, highest illiteracy rates lowest paying jobs, worst living conditions, HIGHEST teen pregnancy rates, HIGHEST divorce rates... on and on.
Like "Proud to be a Redneck" bumper stickers, it's as if an alcholic knows" that his lot improves everytime he takes another drink, all the while destroying his liver. With all the remarkable gifts that the South has to offer, with all the advances it receives from the allocation of money from the Federal Government, it amazes me how combative "so called" secessionists can be.
I also doubt the memo writer's conclusion about the South "rising" again. In fact, given that it's viral, there may very well be a lot of innaccuracies in it from the start. History shows that the South has been on the wrong side of virtually every social justice movement since the Emancipation Proclamation, defiantly proud that "states' rights" keeps the bulk of Dixie seething in its own hatred.
Slavery, Voting Rights, Segregation, Academies, Women's Rights, Interracial Marriage, Privacy in the Bedroom, a Woman's Right to Choice, and now the right of same-sex couples to affirm their love and dedication to each other. The South still seems to deny its culpability, and only wants to run and hide.
Every time one of these issues arise, one can be certain to hear the screams of condemnation, fear and bigotry coming from some Southern TV preacher, or some outraged southern politico.
The cultural divide does get wider, but is either side ever going to say, "We need to talk about this?" That would be the first step to smoothing out the edges. We may never be able to expect much more from that.
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Apparently it's "ignorance" if it doesn't agree with the enlightened view at the far end of Cape Cod.
What you call free choice, others call feticide.
What you call worst living conditions - I've been in northern public housing projects, and pretty they aren't. I can remember the Columbia Point Housing Project in Boston which PBS once documented in a program called "Biography of a Vertical Slum." Things haven't gotten much better since.
High paying jobs in the North? Apparently the folks in Brockton, Lowell, Pittsfield, Worcester, Chelsea, Revere, Rockland, Taunton, New Bedford, and many other places within a two-hour drive from Boston need to know where those jobs are. That information may help ease the double-digit unemployment rate in those locations and provide more tax money to clean the streets.
Yes, there is a cultural divide, but it has little to do with regionalism.
Proud to be a redneck - if you only understood what "redneck" really was. The smug urbanite view is far from reality, and mostly from a little envy, which explains its need to belittle what the urbanite can't be. But I guess it's like the joy of motorcycling - If I have to explain it, you wouldn't understand....
As far as the South being on the wrong side of anything, that again is nothing but northern snobbery as seeing itself in such a know-it-all fashion that nothing else could possibly be correct.
The real ignorance is looking in the mirror and seeing the reflection as being the only correct image of an American.
When you check the demographic shifts within this nation, you will find there a lot more folk moving to the South than the North, and it has been that way for many a year. If it's so good up North, why aren't more people staying there?