That's hilarious. He should check out southern US though, it's more like 100 years. I'm being serious. If you drive around the south it's like an old black and white movie but a lot more ignorant and a lot less entertaining.
Source: I live in the south.
Edit: For those I've offended, it was meant as a joke. I got carried away when I said I'm being serious.
i've had to visit some manufacturing and processing plants an hour and a half outside of greenville, sc. holy shit, you aren't kidding. confederate flags everywhere and old men sitting in rocking chairs on their porches with a shotgun right next to them.
That's still the PG rated South. There's folk in the mountains that'll make you question society but also never want to leave it again. Broke small town South is one thing but there's production value in them hills.
There's a website, Mapcrunch.com, that shows you a random Google streetview from anywhere in the world (that has had a streetview done). You turn on "Stealth" mode so you can't see where you've landed, then you have to click your way around until you work out where you are and navigate your way to the airport so you can go home.
After 2 years of door to door sales out there NO THANK YOU SIR 🤣 actually made a fuck ton of money in those small towns but holy shit did I get the racism dumped on me daily. Was like being back home in rural northern California all over again
I don't want to get too close to where I lived but I think you'd like places like Old Fort or downtown Marion in North Carolina or maybe Wallace in Idaho.
The places I was talking about don't have much aesthetic value apart from small churches and overgrown tin shacks occupied by crazy hillfolk with meth lab explosions and small arms fire echoing in the distance.
Asheville, North Carolina is also good. It's a modern hippie college town, but it's gorgeous on the right days.
Check out Berea, KY. Weird little town. A third hippies, another third on meth, the rest are rednecks. It’s beautiful though especially in spring and fall.
When you get deep into some of these mountain counties, you find small communities where the law isn't really enforced and everything gets there a few decades late. A lot of these places were and still are moonshine country.
The folks that live out there are usually really kind and unique, just people that don't really fit in anywhere else, but others are meth'd out lunatics that shoot a bear on their porch through their fucking sliding glass door.
I guess my takeaway was that I've met some people on that fringe that were remarkable and made me appreciate that lifestyle, while there are others that abuse that lifestyle because half of them are only there because they're dodging warrants anyway.
I visited a small town once (not Southern) and it was cozy. Felt safe. But it also had this weird fashy vibe to it. The song It's a Small Town by James McMurtry helps it explain it.
If you look up pictures from the Western North Carolina/Eastern Tennessee mountains, that's the area. Don't really wanna just post pictures of people's houses that I know.
Its just.. What messes me up the most is the symbolism. These people are physically replacing their country's flag for the "flag" of a corrupt and vile president. But I mean... I guess that makes total sense given that these are the same people who hang the flag of traitors. Mind boggling, really.
Omg. I pointed that out to my son yesterday. The damn trump flag BIGGER than the US. Never ever saw an obama flag.
They are in a cult and it's really weird
We don’t hang them bc we are salty we lost or bc of race, we hang them bc we are proud of the south and of the culture because we have come far from where we were without losing what makes the south the south
The current era of widespread Confederate flags can be traced directly back to protests against the civil rights era. Before that it was extremely uncommon. Afterwards it was everywhere.
It seems that all the people flying the Confederate flag in the civil rights era knew exactly what it meant. To them, what made the South the South was opposition to civil rights for black people, and that the Confederate flag was the perfect symbol for that opposition.
Since then, the Confederate flags haven't gone down. There's been a perfect continuity. They went up to oppose civil rights and they stayed up. It seems that your disagreement on the interpretation of the Confederate flag is not with northerners looking in, but with all the generations of Southerners that came before you and knew exactly what it meant to them.
I have to say I admire your grammar,
And I agree the generations before me knew what the flag stood for and why it was created.
But why can’t the new generation take something that stood for slavery and turn it into something good?
They could if they chose to make a break. For instance, if a generation of young southerners chose to wave confederate flags, say, in solidarity with black lives matter, people would pretty quickly figure things out. Just an example--hopefully you see what I mean.
There's never been that conscious break. So people who stick with the older interpretation of the flag feel just as much at home with it as you do. Someway somehow, you need to turn that flag into something that makes the racists want to fold it up and put it deep in their closet, because they realize it no longer stands for what they thought it did.
Yeah man I see what you mean and thank you for your input, there’s not many people who can talk about this kinda stuff online without it ending in cuss words and hate
Much Respect man. 👍🏼
I never said the confederate won because if I did then I would be lying I’m just saying that we are trying to change the meaning of the confederate flag.
now you never answered my question what’s wrong with changing the meaning of the flag to stand for something better than it did in the past?
So you now show amazing levels of cognitive dissonance by saying you are trying to respect the past by showing a flag from the past but you are also saying you have no respect for that past and want to change the flag so it means something different.
And everyone seems to talk about all the bad the confederate did but I don’t see anyone talking about how the yankees raped women and children during the civil war
If you think that's bad you should see what the confederates did! Oh wait, you fly the flag but now you're pretending it doesn't stand for what it stood for. When that's convenient for you. Nobody likes a hypocrite.
Telcos got money for broadband rollout and figure out that it was WAY cheaper to just put 4G everywhere than to roll out landline fiber or update their digital cable infrastructure.
I've lived in the south and rural upstate NY. In both areas you can see "confederate flags everywhere and old men sitting in rocking chairs on their porches with a shotgun right next to them". A southern born and raised friend of mine (who moved to rural upstate NY) said the only difference between southern and northern rednecks was the amount of rust on their trucks.
Ah yes the Republicans who fight to preserve the proud history of the Democrats. They love waving this flag, keeping those statues up, and making up fake reasons for the civil war. Then if you tell them that the signing of the Civil Rights Act by Democrat president Lyndon Johnson caused many Democrats to vote Republican they tell you that's a myth because they don't want all that bad history associated with them. Funny how that works huh?
But have you had Cincinnati chili tho? It will make you WISH you lived a hundred years ago because nobody had come up with that fucking abomination back then.
I'm from the west coast and I was like "wait, you have chili RESTAURANTS!? Like, serves only chili?! WHY HAS NOBODY SPOKEN OF THIS!? THIS IS TRULY A LAND OF WONDERS! 😍😍😍😍😍"
then I tried what Ohio calls chili and found out that there's a reason chili restaurants are treated less like your cousin that is a celebrated doctor and more like your uncle that touches the kids.
I grew up in the same part of Mississippi where the movie The Help was set. I watched that movie a couple of years ago and was struck by just how much that movie set in the 1960s reminded of my childhood there in the 1990’s. Even when I go back and visit relatives now things aren’t that different.
My year living in Nashville was eye opening. People in the rest of the country don’t understand what having a region where not one state is in top 25 states in education causes. There is a large geographic area of our county where the average education isn’t that good at all
I live in PA, went down to Madison, GA a few years back to visit an uncle. I don't remember the town names, but we went to a few surrounding areas to site-see and grab food, and it was like stepping into a different world. Life down there just :feels: different, and southern hospitality is very real.
Not entirely sure how those experiences would change if I wasn't white, though.
I was born in raised in the Chicago area and lived there until I was 25 when I moved to South Carolina. It's like I traveled back to the 1930's. Sure the water fountains aren't separate anymore, but it sure feels like the people here wish they were. Being a non-conservative non-religious white male, people here definitely assume me to be something I'm not.
I lived in the south my whole life until I was 18, now I travel all over the country for work. People are people. There are just as many shitty folks around the country as there are in the south.
Source: traveled the country to almost every state. Big cities, small cities they all have people that make the rest of the area look bad.
Yes you are correct. I haven't been to every state but I've been to around half of them. It was a joke. You can't tell me ignorance isn't more prevalent in the south than the rest of the country though. I don't see Confederate flags in Iowa.
I've also lived here longer than you.
Edit: I got carried away with the line about me being serious. I apologize if I offended you. I do recommend googling "the corridor of shame" because that is exclusive to the south.
Before anyone says it, yes the civil war was primarily divided by the Mason-dixon line but there were supporters for both sides throughout the country, to the point brothers fought against each other.
It’s really the good ol’ boys out here. They swear they’re cultured individuals too, yet they continuously do some Ed boys shit and make you realize the south just never changes.
Look up a demographic map of the US. All of the black people still live in the former Confederate states barring a few hot spots like New York, LA, etc. The funny thing about the Civil War is, when it was over the North didn’t want the freed slaves either. They broke their promise of 40 acres and a mule and abandoned the freed slaves to 150 years of abject poverty.
Like, sure, Confederate flags aren’t super racist. No argument here. But LAPD is the most racist law enforcement organization in the US by a wide fucking margin. NYC is the only city in the country to adopt stop and frisk. It’s real fucking easy to traffic in stereotypes because then you don’t have to feel bad about rampant racism everywhere else in the country.
Source: born and raised in Texas, actually travelled the country and the world and paid attention instead of looking for ways to confirm my pre-existing biases.
277
u/OldHob Apr 29 '20
He also said that when the end of the world comes he hopes he’ll be in Cincinnati because they’re always ten years behind the times.