Reconstruction Round Two

I have always seen myself as a Southerner I do not know anything else and how could I? My family has been here for almost four hundred years, enough time to shed the cultural identity of their ancestral homelands. They were Southerners as am I, when I look back it is not to the forest of Germany, the Scottish highlands, or the English county side; it is to the hills of Tennessee, the Alabama pines, and the open plains of Texas. While I can appreciate my ancestral roots it is the South that is my home, it is the South that calls to me.

That South, the one I call home no longer exists. It has been deracinated its traditions, and culture sold for profit and its heroes vilified. It has been a long time coming. Decades of anti-Southern propaganda in public schools browbeat the native population into submission. Transplants from the west coast and northeast have demographically displaced Southerners. Recently South and Central Americans have flooded small Southern towns. Mass market media has choked out local and regional customs and replaced them with one generic “American culture”.

It’s a hard pill to swallow but it’s true. The Southern culture that exists today is largely relegated to small towns that are on their last leg. They are just the memory of a bygone era fated to disappear into the ether. Replaced by the same Targets, Wal-Marts, and vape shops found across rural America. The New South a South made up of T.S. Elliot’s hollow men.

For those Southerners like me, you must accept this reality that in essence you have been conquered and your territory has been occupied. Your monuments have been torn down, schools renamed, and graves robbed. Tell me is this not what a conquering army does? This was no accident, it’s not a bug in the system the feds were always going to destroy the South this was all intentional. They won’t rest until the last Confederate gave is overturned and defiled.

This may seem like a black pill, but there is a silver lining. There is freedom in accepting reality. You no longer have to send your sons to die in their wars out of patriotic duty. You no longer have to support the interests of the regime out of loyalty. You no longer have to pay lip service to a government that hates you, the mask has slipped and the true nature of a union of states has been revealed as a lie. They simply allowed Southerners a sense of reconciliation long enough to soften our resolve before they began to snuff out our culture.

Now, all we have left is freedom and duty. Freedom to honor our own culture and traditions without having to make excuses or balance dual loyalty and a duty to pay respect to our ancestors, and keep their memory alive. We cannot resurrect the Old South but we can move forward carrying our traditions with us in preparation to build something new.

-TJS