The Southern Man, A Whipped Dog

My daddy gave me two spankings when I was little bitty that I remember. Both were deserved and effective. To this day I am careful not to splash water all over the bathroom floor or to play on the furniture. Additionally if the eighty-two-year-old man told me today to run out to his truck to fetch his cigarettes, I’d run out to his truck and fetch his cigarettes. (He wouldn’t do that because after smoking for fifty years his doctor told him in 2006 that he could stop or die. Pleased with life, he stopped. Says it was the hardest thing he ever did.)

‘Mark, any man that wont walk ten miles for a cigarette, doesn’t like to smoke.’ He also says that when the doctor tells him he has six months to live, he’s going to smoke from sun up to sun down.

But I digress.

A few moderate butt whoopins at the hands of loving and thoughtful parents can do wonders for the long term formation of one’s habits, character, and conscience. Ass beatings, on the other hand, at the hands of ignorant, angry, or just mean parents, not so much. What they can do hand in hand with other forms of abuse and neglect is produce the junkyard dog or one that sniffs about with its tail tucked between its legs; aka the broken adult.

I may not remember every scolding my father gave any more than I can remember every kiss my mother laid on my pudgy little cheeks or all the sweet nothings she whispered in my ears when I stared up at her from her arms. But they all certainly made an impression.

Southerners, like most Americans, are strangely ignorant of their past, but like all peoples, are subject to their past whether they are aware of it our not. Some time ago the South took an ass beating that few Southerners today can begin to describe in the simplest terms. It was an ass beating that broke the South and that rattled its bones for generations.

But here in 2021 we Southerners have forgotten, and what we do remember is what the Left tells us. And what it tells us is that it was all our fault and that we ought to still hold our head in shame. Which is what the Left wants because to this day the South remains its greatest foe, and demoralising Southerners is mission number one. Besides, if the South is so bad, it must mean the self-righteous South-haters are so good, and nothing makes the self-righteous as righteous as a sinner close by. And nothing makes the self-righteous feel so good as feeling better than.

The Southern Man remains a whipped dog. He doesn’t remember the sounds of the guns, the deafening howl of ten thousand rebel yells, the cries of the dying, or the starving years. Or the humiliation. But it still echoes in his bones and makes him nervous.

The Southern man may be dumber than a box of rocks about his own history but when he sees that Confederate flag, his flag, our flag, something still stirs including a memory of former courage now lost.

The Southern man and right-thinking Northerners and now Westerners need to do a shallow dive into American history and be reminded that there are, in fact, two sides to this story as there are to all stories. Yes it was about slavery and a great deal besides as is evidenced by the robber barons of the Gilded Age that followed, the rise of Marxism in the US, the ongoing war on Christianity, the leviathan state that has emerged, and most tragically, Roe vs. Wade.

The South remains the last great bastion of Western Christendom as well as American Conservatism. If we are to ward off the existential threat the American Left now poses, we need Southerners confident and speaking in their authentic voice. Same goes for Northerners. We’re in this together this time.

You right-thinking Northerners and Westerners and weak-kneed Southerners need to think twice before sacrificing Southern history, including our flag and monuments. It will only serve to further demoralise the very Southerners who are most eager and willing to fight.

Appeasement didn’t work with Hitler, and it will not work with the American Left.

M.C. Atkins

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