As most of you daily readers know, I was born in upstate NY, then moved to GA a couple months before my 19th birthday. I spent the next 30 years of my life becoming intimately familiar with all things "southern". It's a mindset I found instantly alien to my upbringing, based in traditions that involved a plantation lifestyle none of them have lived, and romanticizing a terrible war that divided the nation and brought misery, death, and destruction to our country not yet 100 years old.
Not all of these traditions are bad - the food and polite manners are exemplary. The dedication to preserving the memory and details of our Civil War would be respectable, were it not colored by the deliberate ignorance of its root cause. The "war of northern aggression" was started by the South to preserve slavery and all the brutality that it entailed, but the "true suhthuner" would never admit that.
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