I have been mighty chagrined by the way my northern bretheren have been so willing and so quick to assume all southerners are moronic, half-wit, rascist, and a general waste of time in the fight to reclaim our beloved country. I haven't heard one southern Kossack try to deny some of the sadder and destructive parts of our history on this board. I DO NOT like the confederate flag. I don't fly it. I would like to fry it on some days.
There has been a tone of arrogance and dismissal tossed at us at every turn and some demand to justify ourselves. A smarter Kossack than myself suggest we need a Southern Kossack lobby and I wish one of my more articulate fellow southerners would work on that. Like Northerners, we are a diverse lot: some of us are even married to or friends with folks of different races. Some of us are devotely Christian and we do not vote Republican and never have. Some of us are gay and very open. Some of us are white, black, and increasingly hispanic. Most southerners do have a secondary religion: football. I wasn't born here so mine is hockey.
I am rural which is another southern subset. There has been scant attention paid to the number of progressives and Kossacks on this board who are rural. I sense, possibly unfairly, that there is an urban bias on this board. I lived in Mid-Town Memphis before doing the country thing and loved every minute of it but my husband from Alabama grew up in the sticks and wanted his land fantasy and I adapted oddly quickly. Yes, I have a gun. No I do not ever want to use it on a human but I will if my life is threatened, and most people out here use guns safely and constructively because they respect them and grew up with them.
Many of us hunt. My husband sometimes ate what Daddy put on the table. Hunting for sport makes me ill, but eating a deer I killed is far more ethical in my mind, than chewing on a steak from an antibiotic ridden cow from a pen.
Rather than beg like a victim not to abandon the south and to keep the 50 state strategy intact I have another idea: Adopt a fellow Kossack. Northerners seek out a fellow southern Kossack and get to know them. You might be astonished by the common ground you find. We are just as contrary, peace loving, contradictory, as you my northern friends. Hold out your hands, shake firmly and get to know us. We will do the same. We won't even need foreign countries and expensive lawyers to faciliate this adoption just an eagerness to learn about one another. How about it? PS, I will start a war with my fellow southerners just to get them going and out of the woodwork. Memphis barbecue is the best, baby.