Can't help commenting on the remarkable events that truly depict the Old South/Continental divide. Recent legilation in North Carolina, Arkansas, Texas and Florida have made clear the essential disagreements about values that suggest these southern states were correct. They should seceede.
I am from the upper Midwest a state with a wildly swinging political base...home of the Republican party and Joe McCarthy as well as fighting Bob LaFollette and Senators Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin moving to Massachusetts in 1991, I encountered the Bluest state and learned it was far from that. Dominated by a socially conservative and corrupt Democratic Party, the legislature was a sharade, espousing oportunities for all while taking paybacks, manipulating voting districts and demeaning public teachers. Shameless, and that system remains in force. Speakers of the House have been indicted, convicted suffered disbarrment and been imprisoned, but the "system" prevails.
Yes, the understanding of Democratic/liberal values varies accross this great land; but there is agreement about the priority of rights and government comittments. Fiscal conservatives in Wisconsin resist union worker claims, but have not pressed for Stand your Ground and related "Gun Rights" laws. Lacking racial and ethnic diversity, Wisconsinites overall lack the racial and ethnic distrust and hatred that are an essential element of the culture of Florida and its Southern neighbors.
The Southern Sate mentality is anithema to the day to day experiences of most Americans. We live side by side with people of different religions, cultural backgrounds, races and sexual oreintations, and we make day to day efforts to reach out, be friendly and approach them with the most optomistic intrepretation of their intentions and goals. We assume the best and in nearly all intsances are rewarded.
In Texas, Florida, Alabama, North Carolina and its kin in contiguous states, these day to day experiences are approached with distrust and veiled aggression. Poor people are viewed as undeserving and lazy, black and Hispanics as inferior and gays as immoral. The "12 Years a Slave" mentality lives deep in the heart of long term and recent immigrants to these states; and they quietly accept the premise of dicrimination that informs their illusions of superiority.
More to follow....too aggarvated to continue now.
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