Today my kitty calendar says: Everyone is entitled to be stupid but some abuse the privilege. We do have a few of those in this country.

This land of ours is vast, and there should be room enough for all points of view. That’s one of the reasons I support a small federal government. Regions and states should be allowed to develop and live by their own traditions and cultural norms. That’s true diversity.

I was born and raised here, so were both my parents. My father and I both enlisted and served honorably in this country’s armed forces in time of war.

I have every right to be here. I have no intention of going anywhere or asking anyone for permission. And if anyone here thinks I don’t look, act, or think like a “real American”, they’re just going to have to get used to it because I don’t care what they think.

One overlooked factor is the cultural one. The South, and its current inheritors, the conservative Right, came from the same mind-set. They have always considered themselves the true native Americans, and felt culturally threatened by the urban, immigrant, industrial North. Back then it was Jews, Italians, the Irish and other European immigrants coming to the North’s factories they found objectionable, and so easy to blame for their troubles (besides their own slaves, which they were terrified of for very good reason). Today they have a whole new catalog of immigrants to hate and blame for their troubles. They always conveniently forget that these “foreigners” are here by invitation, even the blacks. None would be here if they hadn’t been brought in as cheap labor by the very people who now despise them. The traditional South also resented the freeholding, tolerant, liberal farmer and small businessman of the North and Midwest and the ferocious independence and iconoclasm of the West because of the threat they felt they posed to the plantation/sharecropper and essentially feudal and pseudo-aristocratic culture of the South. The divisions are no longer as geographically determined these days, but the historical roots still operate.

I was born and raised in the Deep South, and I’m old enough to remember the Civil Rights movement as it swept across the land during my high school years. I also remember extremely well the obscenity that was Southern segregation and Jim Crow, and even worse, the self-serving rationalizations and excuses that were constantly being made to justify them. My grandparents were immigrants, they suffered from that hatred. I was brought up speaking a foreign language at home, but I look “American” and I can quickly drop into a very convincing Southern drawl when I have to. I can pass for white. This combination gave me both the perspective and the camouflage to understand what was going on around me and make sense of it all.

The Southern/Conservative constellation of identifying characteristics; religious fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, militarism, fascism, nationalism, laissez-faire capitalism, and racism isn’t shared by all there (there are always exceptions and special cases), and even those who share some of these traits do not necessarily carry all of them, and there are many, many good and decent people in the South, too. But you see the pattern often enough to trace the unifying and identifying factors way back, to the Civil War and beyond, to the earliest days of the Republic.

But to these folks, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived there, or even how long your family has lived there. You are not entitled to their much-vaunted hospitality if they think you are an outsider. And no one who doesn’t look or think or act exactly like them can ever be anything but an outsider. I know these people, even with their flaws, they are MY people. I am a Southerner, too. I know them better than they can ever know themselves. But they are dumb, and they are mean, and what’s worse, they are proud of it. And they are cowards, that’s why they wear hoods and only come at night in great numbers.

It’s a good thing its got lots of footnotes, or Tom might not take it seriously.

My Cuban-American mother used to tell me
“Some of these Crackers [our generic term for anyone who was not Latino or Negro] can be really nice, but they are still very strange. They just aren’t like normal people.”

My mother was born of Cuban parents in New York City, and was raised in a Jewish neighborhood. She even spoke English with a Jewish accent! She understood multiculturalism perfectly well. But nothing really prepared her for the Deep South.

Much of the political and social attitudes described in this article were quite common in rural Florida in the early 1960s. Yes, I know the two shouldn’t have anything to do with each other, but they do. You’ll just have to take my word for it. This isn’t so much about politics as it is about culture. I’ve known all about “conservatives” since before I knew what the word meant.

Of course, for those embedded in this culture, who have been born and raised in it and have no way of comparing or contrasting it to anything else, this is impossible to grasp or to comprehend. You can’t explain water to a fish.