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Friday, April 22nd, 2022

‘Scary’: how the American South is punishing ‘crimes of thought’ and restricting ‘freedom of movement’

Author:     John Stoehr
Source:     AlterNet
Publication Date:     21 April 2022
 Link: ‘Scary’: how the American South is punishing ‘crimes of thought’ and restricting ‘freedom of movement’
Stephan:   This is another view of the Great Schism Trend. I agree with the trends John Stoehr describes, but I don't think his causal reasoning goes deep enough; he doesn't deal with the psychophysical causation. The South is a cultural manifestation. (See Can American Democracy Survive? Six Trends Hold the Answer in SR archive.) But he has the trends and their importance, and I think it is long past time that we began talking about this. It is not too much to say our future depends on it.

The US isn’t one country. The more we believe it is, the less sense our politics makes. By insisting on “the truth” when the truth is diametric from “the truth,” we end up doing a helluva lot more work. We end up doing all kinds of mental acrobatics to make sure “the truth” is true.

Once we drop the idea of America being one country, things make more sense. We do less work, too, because on seeing the US isn’t one country, the source of our problems – our national problems – becomes clearer. That source is the politics of the American south.

Quarantine self-isolation. Pandemic anxiety. Social distancing. Textured art portrait of bored unhappy annoyed trapped woman in black touching plastic bubble wrap wall in darkness.

There we find the reason the US isn’t one country. The states making up that region don’t want it to be. They have instead committed themselves to a wholly imagined confederacy of the mind and spirit, a fictional subnation inside a factual nation in which “real Americans” fight to restore God’s country to its rightful […]

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