My family arrived after WWI, I am a "come here" and I went to school in the most liberal institutions in the NE, where the politicos send their children

but after I had a long conversation with a lovely polite gentleman in Columbia one day, I decided I needed to know more

and the more I read, the more I dug, the more surprised I became that southerners are as forgiving as they are to the north

hell, in the middle east there are centuries long blood feuds for less

and I began to understand why the US is far more complex than it appears ...because the conquered never write history, and the entire horrific episode of what happened to the southern population has been buried and denigrated as unimportant

As a result you have half the population (the north, the territories) who have never been conquered, who have never experienced defeat and the complex psychological after effect ...and another half who have been as devastated as any country occupied by a brutal invader

and they have to pretend it never happened, or pretend it was all their fault, when in every other war US historians are quick to admit it takes two to tango

No wonder the tensions are building and ready to blow

One looks at the electoral map of 2012, and it breaks down almost identically to that of 1860...

and that's all I'm going to say about that