In the piece below, I explained how my being reared in rural SC in the 40s and 50s gave me experience with the Old South.

When I took a semester in grad school in 1992 one professor was an Afrikaner. When I walked up and addressed him in die Taal, it took him a minute to recognize his native tongue, since he did not expect it HERE.

I was talking to a woman finishing her PhD in Political Science and mentioned that one of apartheid’s least-mentioned problems was illegal BLACK immigration from the Glorious Free Countries to her north. There were other students sitting around.

She replied, “Well, they were just coming there so they could EAT.”

I replied, “Well, when you’re starving, just getting something to eat can be pretty important.”

Everybody laughed — at her.

What she said was condescension of the cruelest sort, but NOBODY else would have called her on it.

Mantra Thinking.

Everybody agrees that slavery was awful while the Secret Six, who financed John Brown, were Liberators. The Secret Six got their money from New England industry, as did the VERY well paid New England abolitionist ministers. They got their money from working children fourteen hours a day.

But the really big difference between industrial slavery of whites and chattel slavery of blacks was much like the difference between me and the Modern, Caring Libservative on Homelessness. As I said, their conscience, such as it is, is OK as long as they sit in a warm house and demand that we become more Third World and at the same time that the homeless get regulation housing from somewhere.

Many, many children got crippled in those factories which paid the monstrous salaries of fashionable New England ministers. What did the factory owners do for them?

Those kids, or the older workers, actually did STARVE. The ministers preaching within a mile of them did not mention that at all. They were busy with Southern slavery, which was what they got paid for.

That sounds a LOT like the Christian Right today.

The girl who thought black starvation in southern Africa was nothing compared to having black faces in government there would have LOVED abolitionist New England. Tens of thousands of whites were crippled and starving there, but that was unimportant.

It’s a good thing that nobody who was important to those preachers ever said anything about the mote in someone else’s eye and the beam in your own.

Ain’t Compassion great?

— Poverty

We have spent (so far) sixty something years listening to the self-styled Greatest Generation whining, “I got SHOT at, you ain’t got no real EXPERIENCE unless you got SHOT at in the Big War!”

“Gimme money!”

So let me talk about experience.

It is important that I was raised a century and a half ago. I mean this literally in a sense. The South Carolina I was raised in really did resemble a hundred and fifty years ago. We had “our” blacks in houses we gave them and they were on the walk from my house to the plantation, or brick plant.

Thanks to Our Glorious Union and discriminatory rail rates, the South was still in the state of subjugation and poverty it had been since The Glorious Union had been saved by another group that would have called itself the Greatest Generation if they had had a Tom Brokaw around.

But in a way I kept up this century and a half old experience. I was all over the third world, centuries back. I actually saw people STARVING, and smelled them. That word “starvation” has a meaning way beyond malnutrition or the maid bringing in the Mocha half an hour late, which is what Jane Fonda means by it when she says children in South Carolina are starving.

It’s funny how the Greatest Generation talks about the agony they went through in the process of dropping their weapons on Normandy Beach, but they NEVER mention the agony of children who were actually starving in Europe after “Liberation” — not under the Nazi occupation. They had their rations, but being really without food was not an EXPERIENCE, you see.

But my experience with real starvation and an entirely different thing, real poverty, makes me think a bit differently. Let’s start with something I worked with a lot in the drug recovery program, the Homeless.

I was outraged, not that there weren’t enough bureaucrats to give them all homes, but that bureaucrats kept them from building their own. During the Depression there were shanty towns that sprang up.

Not now. There is nowhere to build them. I am in South Carolina, where people are not “street smart” and helpless. Whereas street smarts in Harlem know how to threaten and bully their way into other people’s money and houses, the sobering up group I knew in SC would have been happy to build themselves a shanty town instead of wandering on the streets.

As one guy said, “Why stay in a fifty thousand dollar house when you can live under a million-dollar bridge?”

He would rather make his shanty, but the bridge has a PERMIT and he doesn’t.

There are no “woods” any more. You can’t go out into the woods and built something, just anything, to keep the rain off. But this is the sort of thing I would notice. Others would sit in their warm dry homes and say they need to bitch until somebody builds more houses or something.

It’s exactly like the people who feel their only obligation is to bitch about how “White people STOLE America from the Indians!”

I repeat, if you receive stolen property your first obligation is not to FEEL guilty about it and yell at the other thieves.

Your ONLY moral and legal obligation when you receive PART of any stolen good is to GIVE IT BACK! Buying stolen land is called “receiving stolen goods” and a prison sentence goes with it. The SECOND you REALIZE it is stolen, you become a criminal unless you GIVE IT BACK ***IMMEDIATELY***.

I am serious here. Anyone who says America was stolen has a legal and moral obligation to have reservations already confirmed to GET OUT.

This is Mantra Logic.

Those who have only dealt with homelessness today consider that the problem is a shortage of bureaucrats. The homeless must be put into certified homes ASAP. The homeless, on the other hand, would rather MAKE a shelter for themselves RIGHT NOW while they’re waiting.

They’re going to wait forever. As we import the entire third world, standards of poverty are going to keep going down, not up. We could have provided for white Americans, but there is no way we are going to give certified housing to the waves of immigrants landing here.

Our homeless problem comes from too many bureaucrats, not a shortage of them.

Try to explain that to Jane Fonda or somebody in The Greatest Generation, and lots of luck.