To our Yankee friends, we say— Get a Life!

By: Jim Brown

Our friends up north need to let it go. According
to a cross section of northern commentators,
the Second Reconstruction may be
over, but they think a third one may be necessary.
The first came with the demise of
the South following the Civil War. The
second began a century later when the
Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965.
But this is no longer the ’60s, and the
Supreme Court, with whom I often disagree,
got this one right. The South can
finally be treated like everyone else. And
this apparently makes a good number of
our northern friends, particularly on the
east coast, disgruntled.
Consider the Washington Post’s take
in an Op Ed by their columnist Harold
Meyerson. He writes: “If the federal government
wants to build a fence that keeps the United
States safe from the danger of lower wages
and poverty and their attendant ills and the
all-around fruitcakery of the right wing white
South, it should build the fence from Norfolk to
Dallas. There is nothing wrong with the fence as
long as you put it in the right place.”
This kind of attitude goes much further than
just having a problem with voiding the Voting
Rights Act. When you refer to Southerners as
fruitcakes, and suggest a border to keep them in
their place, it reflects a weird desire for sectionalism,
and a long tired grudge to keep re-fighting
the Civil War. Look, we down here acknowledge
that the South lost the war. But that was then,
and most of the South has let it go. But it appears
that many in the North still have trouble with it.