Humanity suffers from the disease of self hate, the collective feeling each of us has that we are worthless, the result of being put down as children, the capacity of the mind to repress pain from the past to deal with the exigencies of staying alive in the present, and the projection on others that they are evil if something they do threatens to re-awaken that pain.
This is our condition, living without real internal self respect, we identify with anything and everything imaginable in the external environment that we can become worshipers of as something that's great. We desperately long to be members of the good guys since we feel empty ourselves within. Thus it is we all become bigots, believers that our team, or way of thought, our race, our country, our club is the best and if whatever it is we have identified with that substitutes for our own self respect loses the door to how worthless we really feel begins to form cracks.
Then our blind defensiveness as bigots comes into play and we devote our full attention to repairing those cracks with infinite rationalization and denial. The truth is always seen as that which will tell us we deserve our own self hate.
It is this fear of the truth that we are worthless that brings about war, this fear that is a lie anyway. We have no idea in our state of repression and denial that our watchword is that "it is better that you die then that I feel my self hate."
Once one actually sees that this is the real condition of man, understanding everything that people do is easy.
The South was made to feel worthless because they lost the war, their social structure based on the supremacy of the white man, economic wealth, etc. And when folk are made to feel worthless they always develop some new form of inferiority based pride. Southern pride and even Black pride for the most severely damaged victims. All forms of pride in externals and abstractions are nothing more than the manifestation of unconscious inner self hate, the need for anything at all to hang on to to survive the real feeling that we are worthless.
So among those who feel worthless to greater and greater degrees, those who were more and more put down as children, we see the greatest resistance to adaption and change, the greatest conservatism. They are the ones who are most protective because they feel they have more to lose. These become the greatest proponents of whatever it was they first identified with and attached to. They are the first to war. They are the parade people who have a need to stick their superiority in your face. Here we get our greatest egotists, authoritarians and hypocrites. These are the folk up to their noses in shit that chant and vigil night and day that nobody anywhere make any waves.
This thread is the product of the tension is our culture between those who carry this kind of cultural baggage they still feel a need to defend and the wave of change that is happening elsewhere. We are witnessing the reactions of Southern culture defensive aggression and it's back lash from those it tries to hold back. The youth will leave that culture and join some potentially new disastrous way of life because it's no longer cool to be Southern with all the negative baggage in the new coming world. For those still stuck with their bigotry, it's long past time to die. You don't need to be a butt anchor any longer for the rest of the human race. See this truth and know that there is really nothing wrong with you. We are all the same. Let's make what we are really really great. There's nothing like being a happy ape filled with joy and swinging through the trees. Relax and be happy. Have a banana. Have a bunch.