For US citizens

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the only northern hate i'd ever hear was basically that they treat the south like s**t...which they do.

Okay, maybe I was wrong. Still, why is it okay for the cities to be bashed. Maybe it isn't a North-South issue, but a Rural-Urban issue.

In case, my disliking the south is about the civil war. I am nationalistic about the US (I believe, we are a great nation, that has made mistakes, and I love it dearly, and doesn't want it to break apart. The intensity of my nationalism, I think, is about 1-2 notches below Ataturk.) Also, I have the mental association of the 60's racism to the south in my mind.

Edit: At the very least, the federal government needs to help the rust belt to attract capital. From my, and my parents point of view, they are in a death spiral. They give more money to the feds then they get back. That needs to change until the Rust Belt is in better shape.

But, now I do remember about Southern Chivalry, and some other positive things. Still, I would appreciate if the South would stop attacking our great cities.

I'm as Northern as they come (lifelong Seattlite) and I agree that most of the "North-South" hate that I see comes from the North against the South. Here in Seattle, to be Southern is synonymous with being a redneck, a racist, or just backwards, never mind that Colonel Sanders is about as close as most people here have come to meeting an actual Southerner. The worst thing that most Southerners might assume about anyone from the North is that they are a "liberal", which while not a good thing, is still a long way from assuming that they are stupid and bigoted.
As to mocking Northern cities, many times they deserve to be mocked. I talk more smack about Seattle than anyone I've ever met, Northern, Southern or otherwise, because I'm familiar with the particular brand of stupidity that infects the place. It's a sort of smug uptightness that is pretty unique to Seattle, and maybe San Francisco, and as far as I'm concerned, the more people mock it the better. I'm sick of having to establish my free thinking bonafides whenever someone hears where I'm from, if it takes a little mockery to do that so be it.

I wouldn't typically count Seattle as a "Northern" city, mainly because you guys weren't around in the Civil War when the whole North-South dichotomy was an issue. Of course, my home Cincinnati is a Northern city but probably had more people rooting for the South. We're too close to the Kentucky border, so we've got plenty of stereotypical southern rednecks despite being "Northern."

I'm not particularly nationalistic (to me the US is mostly just a relatively nice place to live). It seems silly to hold a grudge against a huge chunk of the country for something that people living in that general area did 150 years ago, and the North wasn't exactly blameless in the Civil War either. As far as 60s racism, again, that was 40 years ago, and they're mostly over it. There's probably as much racism in the Midwest as in the South.

Maybe we weren't around back when we could have been a Union state, but we most definitely would have been. I was mostly talking about the contempt that many Seattlites hold for the Southern states in general, which directly contradicts the OP's opinion that all of this animosity is exclusively coming from the South. I actually doubt that many in the South really care all that much what their Northern neighbors are up to, so long as they mind their own business.

Why? What did they do? Disagree with Washington and White House? Decide by democratic vote that they did not wish to be part of the Union? Get invaded when they did? Are these all really so hate-worthy concepts? Lots of people disagree with how Washington runs things. It's virtually a recognised hobby in some places.

For my two-centsworth: Current US policy seems to all too accurately reflect the Federal Policies of the 1860s. That is: Someone disagrees with us.. let us go there and beat them with our big stick until they do as they are told for the good of democracy. Militarily speaking, a brigade or ten is a very big and unsubtle stick. One wonders what current US policy would be, had the war gone differently....