...in the former states of the Confederacy.
(This will do nothing for my sentiment analysis.)
Are people "basically good"?
I don't know. I know that some people seem genuinely good, like Sir Nicholas Winton.
But far too many of us seem readily capable of committing genuine evil, or tolerating it.
It seems that centuries of enslaving people has saturated the soil of the Confederacy with hatred. And some people grow up with it as a part of their nature, like fish in water. They float in it, it bears them up, and they are utterly oblivious to it.
The thing about the Legacy Museum in Montgomery is that you're looking at centuries of history, and that the terrible beliefs that sustained that evil across those centuries extend right up to the present.
Slavery may not exist, Jim Crow may be down (but not out, apparently), but the hatred is still present.
The current propaganda slogan is "Heritage, not hate."
Hate is their heritage.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:03 Friday, 10 May 2024