Reply #24: The important words he spoke [View All]

[kayell]

``What voters in this country want is, they want us to treat them with respect, wherever they live, whatever part of the country, whatever their financial condition, who their family is,'' he said. ``It is enormously important for us as a party to not be elite, to not look down on people and talk down to them, but to give them the kind of respect that they're entitled to.

It is precisly the kind of thing our candidates need to hear if they want to win the South. Living here, I deeply desire the Dems to win the South, but I see people with the knee-jerk responce that all southerners are bigots or poor trash as cutting off any chance of that.

"We don't want you(Yankees) coming down here to the South and telling us what to do" isn't about Jim Crow, it's about northerners who move down and immediately start telling people how they would do it. You probably have a relative or acquantince who always tells you how you should manage your life better (by following their plan). Do you enjoy their company?

I've had (some) northerners make more assumptions about what I believe, simply because of my geography, than I can stand. I've had people ask me why we do everything so slow (it's the heat idiot), why we talk funny, why we're all bigots (we're not), why someone doesn't do something about saving the beaches right after they bought another new condo on the beach, why we are so poor (why don't we try harder) and endless more. It is incredibly irritating.

Edwards isn't my candidate, but his words should be listened to by our candidates, and by many people here at DU.


Edited because he evidently did make the yankees coming down south comment. I would like people to try the experiment of living as a southerner for a few weeks, and see how you feel about it. Believe me, nowadays this comment has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with people who think that they are better than southerner, simply because they were born elsewhere. And yes, I have heard southern blacks make this remark also, often about northern blacks. A certain percentage of northerners are just incredibly condescending to us poor beknighted people.