The_Cinephile wrote:
I can't stand that classic southern ignorance...
I try not to stereotype, but all southerners with southern accents that I know are like that.
Either you don't know many Southerns, or you just had a bad pick of them.
I've lived in both the South and the North, for about equal amounts of time now... a little bit longer in the South, but it doesn't matter much. And I have to say, I found so much more ignorance in the North. So, so much more. The town that I live in now is a teeny, racist, homophobic, closed minded hovel with people who think they're better than everyone else, especially Southerns. The town I lived in in the South was also fairly tiny, but it was far more open, and about half the population was in some minority or another (whether it be a racial minority, sexual minority, ect), and everyone was absolutely fine with it.
The questions I got when I moved up here were absurd: "Did you ever get in trouble for calling someone a scallyway/carpetbagger?" "Do blacks really sell watermelons by the highway there?" "Do you know a lot of people in the KKK?" The answer to all of them was no (actually, my answer to the last one was that yeah, there was a meeting every Sunday in the church, but people took me seriously (I was being sarcastic), so I switched to no), and each person seemed disappointed. At first, I couldn't figure out why they were even asking those questions. Then in the later years of middle school and earlier years of high school, we talked about the Civil War. To hear the history teachers talk, you'd think we all had plantations and went around lynching everyone who wasn't white, which is so far from reality that it's not even in the same dimension. They teach them up here that we're all a bunch of racist, ignorant brats; we're not.
Is the lifestyle different? Oh, yeah, and perhaps that's why the two parts don't tend to get along. Everything is rushed and industry related up here; not much's changed. Down South, people move slowly, they relax more, and most of us tend to like the land more than anything. Most are more content with simple things; fancy devices aren't necessary, aren't wanted. In the North, it seems to be the opposite; the amount of people that claim they just can't
live without that brand new cellphone indicts that a lot of them should be dead by now.
My Southern accent is about gone; I pick it up sometimes, but not too often anymore; in fact, it's one of the few accents I can't imitate (I'm usually pretty good with them), which is unfortunate. Even when I had it in full force though, I was far more informed than the majority of people I've met up North. Not all of them, of course, but most.
Of course, there are outliers in every group, and there are closed minded people on both sides. But to say one side is completely that way is entirely absurd. I have no doubt that there's some open minded, nice people up North; I haven't met them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I don't hate all Yankees on principle. I've met many more ignorant Yankees than Southerns, but that's just my experience.
And believe it or not, there's no division of intelligence across the states. I have a fairly high IQ and I was born and raised Southern; my father has a high IQ as well, and he was born and lived in the North for quite some time.
I'm moving back South late next year. Y'all can keep the North if you want it.
_________________
"Nothing worth having is easy."
Three years!