In Defense of Hillbillies, Rednecks, Etc.
(Cultural Genocide Against Southerners Continues)by Al Benson, Jr.
12 March 2009
Recently I got an email from a lady in Kentucky who had read the series of articles I recently finished on the NAACP (posted on www.albensonjr.com). She wanted to know if I would consider writing something in defense of “hillbillies.” She had seen a television show narrated by Diane Sawyer which she felt really trashed her part of the country. She noted that: “It was typical hogwash propaganda that has always been bestowed on our area and others.” She also noted that supposedly conservative talk show host, Bill O’Reilly, had even weighed in on the issue and, surprise of surprises, he agreed with Diane Sawyer’s views. The lady in Kentucky got incensed enough at this that she even sent an email to O’Reilly, trying to explain to him that all the people in her part of the country were not like those portrayed on Sawyer’s program—which created that impression.
She’s right, though I doubt that O’Reilly will back off and admit there is another side to the story. I’ve often wondered what some of these so-called “conservative” radio personalities are really all about. I’ve noticed that many of them are all over Obama’s case for the stuff he is pushing (socialism), but they seemed to have no problem with it when Bush was doing the same thing. I guess it all depends on whether it’s Republican socialism or Democratic socialism we’re talking about.
That being said, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that we live in the most stultifying age of political correctness possible. It absolutely smothers you! You can’t say anything remotely negative about blacks, Jews, homosexuals, feminists, or Communists, or any other ethnic group or any other –ists, lest you be opened up to charges of racism, sexism, chauvanism, or whatever else they can think up to throw at you. Yet if you malign white Christian Southerners you are somehow progressive, courageous, open-minded, and “liberated.” No one seems to see the double standard or the contradiction in all of this—or if they see it they hope you don’t. With my suspicious mind, I rather think the latter is the truth.
Those people who knowingly engage in this sort of double-standard activity are guilty of cultural genocide. Their object is to totally destroy and discredit the Christian culture of the Old South, and they will do it in Kentucky just as quickly as they will in Mississippi or Georgia. To them it is all the South—and its culture has to be removed to make way for the “new South,” in which liberalism and the socialist spirit reigns. Anything that smacks of Christianity or the Old Confederacy just has to go. They desire to make of us all nice little Yankee clones and they seem genuinely offended if we don’t want it. It’s like they are bestowing some great gift upon us and we are ingrates for daring to refuse it.
I’ve got news for these Yankee do-gooders. They can keep their Yankee/Marxist culture. I don’t want it. I was born and raised in the North. I didn’t like their Yankee culture when I was there, and I like it even less the more time I spend in the South. And I’m not saying that all Northern folks have that Yankee culture. Thank God many don’t and many up there don’t want it either. I know lots of good Northern folks who detest political correctness just as much as I do.
So the political correctness doesn’t always take. Maybe that’s why we continue to get these so-called “documentaries” about how bad life is in all parts of the South. We’ve all heard the stories about the “gap-toothed racists” who inhabit most of the South. Well, folks, I’ve lived in both North and South, and I’m here to tell you there are just as many of them in the North as in the South, maybe even more. Racism (which is really a Marxist term) is just as prevalent north of the Mason-Dixon line as anywhere else. I now live in Louisiana, and blacks and whites seem to get along better than they did in many places in the North where I once lived. Yes, folks, the Jena 6 charade here in Louisiana was just that—a charade, complete with all the usual race-baiters.
My family and I also spent two years in West Virginia back in the 1970s. Life wasn’t always easy in West Virginia. In fact those two years were among the hardest of our lives in many ways, but that didn’t mean that many people there were not God-fearing and decent people. We knew people there who would literally give you the shirt off their backs if they thought you needed it worse than they did. And here in Louisiana we’ve found a degree of hospitality and contentment that we never found in the North, no matter where we lived.
I’ve read articles in papers over the past few years about various colleges and universities that have courses to “help” Southerners get rid of their Southern accents. Why, I wonder, don’t they have college courses that will help people from New Jersey to get rid of their accent? Well, you see, a New Jersey accent is politically correct, while any sort of Southern accent is not. So the Southern accent and all the colourful speech patterns in the South must be removed so the South can “progress” all the way up to the pristine condition of the North. To which I say—well it’s probably better if I dont say it!
In my opinion Southern folks have the most colourful and rich speech patterns of any place in the country. Maybe it isn’t all perfect English, but the colloquial expressions in the South do indeed add richness and variety to the language. And at least most Southern folks don’t sound like the cookie-cutter versions of those talking heads you see at 6 p.m. on the “news” programs. They all sound to me like they came from—nowhere!
One thing I devoutly wish is that Southern folks would wake up to the egregious attempts at cultural genocide daily perpetrated upon them, their children, and their region, and learn to fight back in the same spirit their ancestors did in 1861. I pray that, Lord willing, they might begin to practice cultural secession and seek to preserve what they have left.
I’ve noticed lately that many states around the country are passing “Tenth Amendment Resolutions,” in which they are basically seeking to reassert their Tenth Amendment rights under the Constitution.
Good for them. So far, six of these states are part of the Old Confederacy, which by the way, never officially surrendered. Maybe the folks in these states also need to begin to tell the perpetrators of cultural genocide on them and their children to back off too. Start telling them flat out that you’ve had it with their attempts to eviscerate your culture and heritage and that you intend to hang onto both, and, thank you just the same, but you don’t give a rip “how they do it up North!”