“Payback’s a Bitch”: Rural Wisdom and the Gathering Storm

July 9, 2015 by Fred Reed

 

The furor over the Confederate flag, think I, has little to do with the Confederate flag, which is a pretext, an uninvolved bystander. Rather it is about a seething anger in the United States that we must not mention. It is the anger of people who see everything they are and believe under attack by people they aren’t and do not want to be—their heritage, their religion, their values and way of life all mocked and even made criminal.
The talking heads inside Washington’s beltway, in editorial suites in New York, do not know of this anger. They do not talk to people in Joe’s Bar in Chicago or in barbecue joints in Wheeling. They are cloistered, smug, sure of themselves. And they are asking for it.
We are dealing with things visceral, not rational. Confusing the two is dangerous. Hatreds can boil over as syllogisms cannot. The banning of the flag infuriates, for example, me. Why? Although a Southerner by raising, I would far prefer to live in New York City than in Memphis. Yet I value my boyhood in Virginia and Alabama. My ancestors go back to the house of Burgesses, and I remember long slow summer days on the Rappahannock and in the limestone of Athens, Alabama.
When the federal government and the talking heads want to ban my past—here, permit me to exit momentarily the fraudulent objectivity of literature—I hate the sonsofbitches.
A lot of people quietly hate the sonsofbitches.
To them, to us, the Confederate flag stands for resistance to control from afar, to meddling and instruction from people we detest. It is the flag of “Leave me the hell alone.” And this Washington, Boston, and New York will…not…do.
A surprise may be coming.
What is the anger about? Most visibly, but far from uniquely, race: the illegals, the Knock-Out game, and Washington’s protection of both. The racial hostility that pervades the country today is largely the doing of the talking heads and its perverse social policies. The rancor is unlike anything I have seen.
Curious. When I was a lad ages ago, I thought well of Brown vs. the School board. Southerners said that integration would never work and they were right, but what came before was just wrong. I thought so then, and I think so now. I favored the civil-rights acts. I reluctantly favored affirmative action (I was very young) thinking it meant a hand up instead of an entitlement. I wrote hopefully of the prospect of educating blacks.
But look what happened. We now see forced hiring of the incompetent as a right, endless accounts of blacks destroying shopping malls, burning cities, brutally attacking whites in gangs, and the giving to blacks of anything they want because they are black. You don’t like the Confederate flag, Jesse? Why then, it must go. Whatever you say, Jesse.
It wasn’t this way, but it is now. It is getting worse. But there is far more than race.  We now are compelled to live in a national sexual-freak show. Day after day after day the media are full of trans-this and trans-that, of homosexual marriages, all thrust in our faces, a parade of prancing peculiarities demanding and demanding and demanding. People who dare not say so are sick of it.

Read the rest @ http://fredoneverything.org/paybacks-a-bitch-rural-wisdom-and-the-gathering-storm/