Schanilec
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Joined: 6/12/2010
From: Grand Forks, ND
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
There are regional differences (and even differences within regions) in a country as large as the USA, of course. The people of the regions have reputations, and there is some truth to them, but perhpas mostly exaggeration.
New Englanders are supposedly taciturn; New Yorkers gruff, and southerners polite, independent, bigoted and not as well educated. There is some truth in this, but some is absolutely wrong.
Through the early 2000s, I had never left the "Confederate States" as an adult. For more than 30 years, life limited me to travel in the southern states. My family are southerners. My ancestors served in the southern army. We love the south and its heritage, even while cringing a bit at some of its excesses, suspecting that our flaws, naturally, are much less than those of others.
When I took my family north for the first time, on camping trips to Maryland and Pennsylvania in 2003, and then to New York and New England in 2004, we honestly expectted to encounter the gruff, taciturn, and sometimes even rude Yankees we'd always heard about. Instead, we found people who were exactly like us. They were polite and friendly and curious about us. We quickly learned that but for fate having us born in the South, had we been born in the North we would have been perfectly happy.
But what I had already known is that this feeling of "oneness" wasn't new to our geneeration. Somehow, this goes back many generations. In the aftermath of a truly monumental civil war, America very quickly reunited and become one people...and I'm not even sure they were really ever "more than one."
My father, the great grandson of a Confederate soldier who was a guard at Andersonville, served in the US Army in World War II. He is 89 years old today and an American first. He's always been an American first, rather than a southerner or a Floridian, though he is very proud to be a southerner.
And it didn't arise with his generation that came along in the 1920s. It started shortly after the Civil War, which has to be some kind of miracle of reunifcation. Confederate cavalry general Joseph Wheeler served as a major general in the United States Army in the Spanish American War in 1898, just 33 years after the Civil War ended. The highest ranking United States Army office killed in combat in World War II was Lt. General Simon Bolivar Buckner (Okinawa, 1945), whose father was a major general in the Confederate Army (and one of the big players in the Battle of Chickamauga). Archie Vandergrift, the commander of the US Marines at Guadalcanal, was a Virginian whose ancestors had served the South. The same went for Patton, a bunch of those famous naval officers in the Pacific, and all of the boys in the national guard from Bedford, Virginia, who were killed on the beaches at Normandy.
And about those "reputations" southerners have. The county (Floyd County, Georgia) where I live is about 90% white. The county government consists of five commissioners elected countwyide (not by district). One of those five commissioners is a black man. He's never been defeated in elections and usually doesn't face opposition. How is it possible that a black man is elected in a very conservative part of the South? Because he's a good man who represents the values of the people here.
With the exception of a few numbskulls, the people of the South are kind, tolerant, and unbigoted. We judge people by their character and not the color of their skin. We welcome them into our places of business, our churches and sometimes into our families.
We southerners are proud to be southerners, but we are even more fiercely American. But we don't tell our Yankee "brothers" that, because it's fun to tease them and "yank their chains." And on July 4, I jokingly tell my Yankee friends that we don't celebrate the day because its the anniversary of the fall of Vicksburg, but we do, and proudly.
Pardon my editorializing, but perhaps in some sense this conveys why proud southerners like to kid northerners, while actually giving thanks that we are one.
Very good. Thank you CB.
Should help all understand our stance up here on the Fighting Sioux nickname issue. We are all one up here, Sioux and Ojibwa (Chippewa). Unfortunately others (mostly the NCAA) from outside the area figures we should knee to political correctness to heel thier guilt of the past.
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OT: Chickamauga Soujourn - 
) for all non-US people if you could explain what does it mean TODAY to be a proud Southerner. I mean, everybody has read alot about Civil War, the reasons why South was looking for secession, different styles of life and so on... but today what are the differences? What Southerners think about Yankees and viceversa? When I've visited Texas and Louisiana I haven't got the feeling that people was different than Yankees of East Coast or Westerners, so what I've missed? I don't know if I've been able to let all of you understand what I mean, but I'd be really interested in your opinions and ideas. Thx everybody. 
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