Confederate flag: Should The North let the South secede? Photo credit: Shutterstock
The American Civil War, 1861 to 1865, began with secession of 11 Southern states objecting to the ending of slavery in Northern states; it ended, at a cost of 750,000 soldiers’ lives, with the reformation of the United States of America.
The Washington Post‘s five myths about Southern secession and the Civil War.
But, some argue, America has never really been whole since. Culturally, temperamentally, economically, the Southern and Northern states remain divided along the same fault lines as during the Civil War. And as Chuck Thompson, a veteran travel writer, argues in his recent book, Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, it’s time for an amicable divorce. Thompson spoke with AlterNet last week about why he’s very serious that it’s time for the South to secede – and the North to help them.
“There’s this seething frustration people have. There’s this kneejerk reaction to blame the South. The sort of Northern media strafing of the South for a lot of the nation’s ills is a longstanding tradition. What I wanted to do was to get away from the traditional stereotypes of the dim-witted, mouth-breathing, Southern racist redneck and really look at what’s going on today. Find out why people are still having these issues with the South, and put some hard research and some facts and figures behind this general unease with the influence that the South has on the rest of the country.
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What really led to this call for secession was understanding that a lot of people from the South are just as sick and tired of people like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid having an impact on their country as I am sick of people like Newt Gingrich and Jeff Sessions, Eric Cantor, Haley Barbour having an impact on my country.
So why shouldn’t each of these societies that are really very different from each other in the way they approach the fundamental building blocks of society – education, religion, commerce, politics – both sides of the country really approach their problems in the way they want to put their societies together in very diametrically opposed ways.”
What do you think? Americans, is it time for the Union and the Confederacy to call it quits on this social experiment?
