Since the 2008 Presidential election, several of the younger members of my family have taken up the Confederate Flag as their personal banner. This despite the fact that no one in our family's history ever fought for the Confederacy.
My family is from Morgantown, West Virginia - a state that exists solely because it left the Confederate state of Virginia to rejoin the Union - and our family did, in fact, fight in the Civil War...for the Union. So, from where this misplaced respect and support for the rebel battle cry, "The South will rise, again!" comes, I have no earthly idea.
It's not that we were in any way raised by or to be racists; prior to moving further south, I never knew that "black" was a thing - to me, they were just people. My mother was never a racist, nor were any of her brothers and sisters, nor her parents. My cousins were never, to my knowledge, raised to be in any way discriminatory toward anyone of color, and yet, as they've matured into adults, several of them have developed a terrifying sense of white entitlement...which is ironic given that each of them lives in some state of financial distress.
My cousin's daughter, while shopping in Wal*Mart, shouted across the store, "Look, mommy! It's a nigger!"
To her credit, my cousin was horrified; to her discredit, her daughter learned it from her parents. Perhaps from her parent, minus the "s," which indicates that this is the type of environment in which she and her siblings (all four of the) will be reared. Had I ever uttered the word, "nigger," or even "spic," my mother would have beaten me until I could not walk. That kind of language was, and still is, unacceptable.
And yet, much to my dismay, after returning to Morgantown after seven years of being thousands of miles away, this type of behavior has become all too frequent. In the short two months since I arrived, I've witnessed several incidents of misplaced Southern Pride, whereby the woes of a lost country have been bemoaned, which leads me to wonder, "Where, exactly, did your country go?"
Invariably, when people utter the phrase, "I want my country back!" they really mean to say, "Why are other people benefitting while I'm left languishing in a pit of my own making?"
And just where did their country go? Is it on vacation? Did it take a trip to Guam or to Madagascar? When their country gets back, will it have brought back souvenirs from its trip abroad in the Socialist Paradise to which they believe it has traveled? Tiny statues of Karl Marx standing upon the Eiffel Tower like King Kong with sacks of euros dangling from his fir grasp having just been ripped from the throngs of the enraged plutocrats circling its base, perhaps?
There's nothing more embarrassing, for me, than when one of my cousins goes on some race-based tirade - the Ā-rab doctor; the spics who take their construction jobs; the nigger who had sixteen items in the Express Checkout lane at Wal*Mart; the chinks who can't drive worth a shit - when I hear these things, it makes me wonder how I managed to avoid all of these pitfalls, despite my similar financial hardships.
I guess the main difference is that I never expected anything to be handed to me without first working for it, and working hard, at that. The sole exception to my boast of not accepting Federal assistance is that I rely on Ryan White to cover the cost of my medications to treat HIV. That being said, I realize that, were I working in a career that afforded me a salary and benefits that would cover it, I would gladly pay the coverage forward to the next person, and donate to 501(c)3 organizations that directly benefit individuals who need assistance.
I don't believe, however, that my cousins would be so forthcoming were they to inadvertently stumble upon any measure of success. As it stands, they are content to game the system, taking advantage of every government program to provide them with some sort of income, given their largely listless "efforts" to find and maintain gainful employment. A $9,000 tax return because of child credits? Let's spend it on tattoos! First paycheck in over a year? Let's purchase a jet ski!
They have become, I am chagrined to report, the prime example of people who bitch about people on welfare while simultaneously accepting copious amounts of it. That 90% of welfare recipients in the U.S. are white does not take away from their insistence that minorities are wasting their hard earned tax dollars - they are certain that Mexicans are stampeding across the border for the sole purpose of collecting $130 a month in welfare.
And yet again, I am left wondering from whence these opinions and beliefs arose. They didn't get it from their flummoxed parents, who frequently wonder where they went wrong, and how their children ended up raising their grandkids to shout "NIGGER!" in the white trash wonderland that is West Virginia. My grandparents are equally humiliated by their great-grandchildren's behavior, not to mention the behavior of their grandchildren. "How did we end up with these racist kids?" they wonder aloud.
Well...to be fair, it's not your fault. It's the fault of an entire generation of white children raised in the specter of the nefarious Reagan Welfare Queen, prowling the night in search of unwary sperm donors to father their illegitimate children so they can collect an extra $50 per child in monthly assistance so she can live high on the government hog; a generation whose concept of patriotism has tossed aside the concept of "...but what you can do for your country," and whose motto has become, "Well, so long as I get mine."
And if nothing else, my cousins and the rest of their generation will get theirs; but in so doing, they will make certain that the South will never, in fact, rise again.
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