Over at the Abbeville Review, John Devanny offers a highly readable and invaluable introduction to the South, the predominant attitudes and values that define it, and how it is changing. Underneath the various changes occurring before our eyes, says Devanny, we can still see the essence that makes the South what it is:
The Southerner was, and a number of them still are, philosophical realists (or as Flannery O’Connor might have said, “hillbilly Thomists”). That is why the natural world was so important to the Southern way of life. The world was real, not a play-ground for the abstractions of secular Puritans or neo-Platonic fantastics. The hillbilly Thomist conforms his mind to reality, seeks to improve what can be improved, ameliorate what can be ameliorated, and endure what cannot be changed. He embraces reality, not virtual reality. We need more hillbilly Thomists.
As Stark Young observed in I’ll Take My Stand, “That a change is now in course all over the South is plain; and it is as plain that the South changing must be the South still, remembering that for no thing can there be any completeness that is outside its own nature.” That was true in 1930 and it is true today. As our Southern grandparents would advise us, “Deal with it.”
This short and information-packed article is as encouraging as it is informative. Highly recommended.
Conservative Heritage Times 
Great article………Obviously, the attacks on Southern Heritage only began with the War of Northern Aggression. (Which I now conclude was more of a Religious War than has been covered.) I’ve met very few Northeners that had any interest, or connection to their ancestors? I once dated an Ohio girl whom was fascinated with our multigenerational family cemetery. I even helped dig some of the graves as a young boy. She found it all to be Greek or worse…….LOL. She had no idea why it was important to me, to know the life of my Great-Great Grandfather, that fought at “Little Round Top” at Gettysburg. And, she naturally assumed that our family had slaves?………..I responded, “Did your family own a large factory?”
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That was a good response to her. Time on the Cross by professors Fogel and Engerman presented the statistics proving that Southern slaves had a better quality of life than the workers in the northern sweat shops.
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Mike……….I hope that you find it much easier in your neck of the woods, than here in Birmingham Alabama and surrounding area, to influence both Gen X and Mililinialists to research their heritage instead of buying into the professor’s philosophy? Many may wonder why the heartbeat of the sixties fight, is now no longer in the news?………Most have accepted white guilt, chose to comply, and have chosen a path of false agreement, in order to appease their minority management. Many small business owners live in Shelby County, south of Bham, and are happy to pay the “Pentenance” in order to do jobs in the Bham area. Birmingham is truly “GONE WITH THE WIND”……..Slums and ghettos now make up the neighborhoods once only privileged and prosperous Doctors and Steel Tycoons once lived. Jewish Mountain Brook (Home of Courtney Cox) still thrives through the tribal system of contacts. Still refered to as “Tiny Kingdom”, they maintain autonomy. Many elderly, Protestant whites, still trapped in the intercity much like South Africa, at the mercy of BLACK LEADERSHIP?……….ALL wish to escape to the rural areas of ALABAMA, where the County Courthouses are a splendid example of the past, but not always possible? If we sell out and move to the Coast, we find Yankee Transplants in huge numbers, gaining more and more control just as the NYNY citizen now controls South Florida? (South Alabama will be South Beach Miami in 10 years!)………..Seccesion is the answer!……..DC no longer works for us!……..We bout out of patience? 😉
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