Calling all Hillbillies [View All]

[RedLetterRev]

I've seen this term being thrown around as an epithet a lot lately and it's really gotten under my skin. Now, gentle DU friends, I'm not flaming because you don't know that which you don't know. There has been an awful lot of social conditioning that has gone into the use of the term "hillbilly" and I can't undo it all at once, but let me try as gently as I can.

I am a hillbilly.

I am a born an raised Appalachian man, one who has sprung from a culture that has been derided for centuries, caught between squabbles, even between sides in a civil war -- yet without whom much of this nation would not be what it is today. My ancestors didn't just "live off" the land, they lived closely with it, respected it, held it in stewardship (and we would like to think that living "green" and "conservation" are modern concepts). Hillbillies were ingenious at making a living with near-nothing, inventing what they needed on the fly, could make their own clothing (not Nieman-Marxists :)), soap, shoes, anything at all they needed.

During the Civil War, the mountaineers, the hillbillies if you will, were once again caught between cultures; too poor and too independent to own slaves, of no use to the north or the south except as cannon fodder. Up and down the ridge, none of them cared to go to war as they had no dog in the fight. In my own state of NC, Governor Vance marched troops west toward my own ancestors when they threatened to secede as Western Virginia did, and pressed them into the fight. They didn't teach you that in grade school, did they? But it happened.

After the war was over, the north laid obscene taxes on the south, the hillbillies included. Of course they were doubly resentful, having been abused by the south and now taken advantage of by the north. They had little to begin with, now they had nothing and were losing their homes and land because they couldn't pay the reparation taxes. I would highly recommend that my fellow DUers watch the PBS movie "The Price of Dark Corners" that tells a very poignant part of that history. The hillfolk were sterotyped in northern papers as slouching, stupid, slinking, dirty, ignorant, and worse. Those stereotypes exist today.

Today, it's time to lay those 19th-Century stereotypes and terms to rest. I am a hillbilly and I find no shame in my heritage.

To call the Palins "hillbillies", truly is an insult to real hillbillies. They didn't come from the hills; they truly are stupid, cunning, evil and destructive. Call them all those things. Those they deserve. But please don't use the heritage of a proud, independent, strong, intelligent people who gave this nation so much good to describe people who are participating in its destruction.

Thank you for letting me vent.

:grouphug: