Restraining Bad Government . . .

[redcliffsw]

One of my professorial colleagues, a classic example of Midwestern progressive, has a sub-teen son who was moved by the fears about the gasoline supply and the environment. He wrote to the President of the United States: "You should make everybody ride horses."

Now conservation is a good thing, and horses are a good thing. But no Southerner who has a good idea automatically moves to wanting to use the government to make everybody else obey his good idea. Here is the difference between the South and America in a nutshell. It does not occur to a Southerner that he has a duty to correct other people. It would be presumptuous, unneighbourly, and, frankly, un-Christian. It does not occur to us that we have a divine right to stamp out the grapes of wrath wherever we think we see them.
-Dr. Clyde Wilson

Read on:
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/clyde-wilson-library/a-southern-tradition-restraining-bad-government/?mc_cid=6c182e94c6&mc_eid=29256acbee