Last weekend was usually the weekend that we have our local Civil War battle reenactment. Of course, along with most events where crowds over ten persons gather, it was cancelled due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
For as long as I can remember, the little town near our farm would line its streets with Confederate battle flags of all sorts for the entire month of April. Cutouts of General Lee and Stonewall Jackson would be placed in the windows of the old drug store, but not this year. The town is practically a ghost town.
We might not ever be able to celebrate the battle like we have in the past. The political climate in this country has definitely turned anti-Southern in the past decade. Public displays of Confederate pride will become more and more difficult to find as the Baby Boomer generation, who held them up and kept them financed, grows older and passes on. As much angst as the Boomer generation generates among the Dissident Right, they’re the folks that still keep these traditions alive.
This is why a change in strategy is required. The “Heritage not Hate” crowd and the recruiting of as many Confederates of Color that can be found, in order to permit the public celebration of our ancestry, will not be allowed in the “new” America. This is a country that, even in the midst of a global and national pandemic, proudly and publicly celebrates its hatred of you. After all, at the end of the day those Confederates of Color still get to publicly celebrate their underlying ethnicities, and you do not.
The celebrations of our ancestry will have to become more private, familial, and fraternal. We have to instill in our children that, like everyone else that we share this world with, we also have an underlying ethnicity that is distinct from everyone else. We were Dixians long before we were Confederate soldiers.
Before we were called to defend our homes against the invading Yankee armies, we were ship builders, rum-runners, planters, bonded servants, pirates, and frontiersmen. Our ethnogenesis did not begin in the 1860s, but closer to the 1660s. It was then that we went from being Irish, Welsh, German, Scottish, and English, to become a new ethnic people with our own music, food, religion, and dialect. This was God ordained. It was He who decided that there be a new tribe to worship Him and, regardless of any political trends, we should preach this to our wives and children.
All the tribes and nations of God’s creation get to worship Him in their own beautiful way through their individual languages and cultural expressions. We, as Dixians, have no less of a duty to celebrate our Father in our own distinct way.
-By J. Charles
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
