On November 6, 2012, America entered a new era – not because B. Hussein Obama was re-elected, but because a majority of American voters now follow the cult of Marxism that he represents. If this were just another political split, it would be a minor issue to be addressed in the next election. It is not. This is a cultural split on a massive scale. Our task as Southern Gentlemen is to move as far away from the center as possible. We must stake out our cultural ground so that there can be no doubt as to which camp we belong.
To that end, this is a list of tangible things we can do, presented in no particular order.
- Boldly proclaim the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Leading a soul to eternal salvation is a greater accomplishment than anything else in this life.
- Live a virtuous life at home, at work, and in public. Always speak the truth. We are ambassadors of our great Southern culture and must serve as an example of what that culture stands for.
- Be part of a church that truly believes The Bible 1. as the literal word of God – and acts on it. There are far too many modernist churches that lower standards and try to become like the rest of the world. If you’re in one of those modernist churches, leave and find a real church that is not focused on entertaining the congregation.
- Use the power of the spoken and written word to advance the cause of restoring civility to America.
- Dress more formally than what is customary in today’s society.
- Pay close attention to manners and etiquette, and make them a part of your daily life.
- Pray – not a vain repetition, but pray like you are talking directly with The God who created the entire universe, because that’s exactly what you are doing. He listens to “specks of dust” like us.
- Seek out like-minded people, and form strong bonds with them.
- Treat others with respect. As conditions worsen, there will be those who proudly provided for their families in the past, but find themselves without work or, if they are fortunate, doing menial work. Your turn may come. While those who willingly live off of money stolen from the productive deserve our open contempt, resist the urge unless pressed.
- Follow the Boy Scout slogan of “Do a Good Turn Daily”. Find some way to help someone who would not expect it.
- Follow the Boy Scout motto of “Be Prepared”. When hard times come, you can depend on no one but yourself and your closest friends and family.
- Produce some of your own food by gardening or small-scale farming, and raising chickens. Those are valuable skills that cannot be learned by just reading a book. It is also the key to our Southern Agrarian culture.
- Understand what Southern Agrarianism is by reading I’ll Take My Stand, by Twelve Southerners.
- If you are living in an urban area, move to a semi-rural or rural area. The cities are not only increasingly dangerous, they are corrosive to the soul.
- Arm yourself and learn and practice to become effective in the defense of yourself and your family. Armed men are free men – disarmed men are slaves.
- Turn off the TV, cancel the cable subscription, and disconnect the antenna. TV has done more than anything else to destroy our culture. Don’t allow the filth and propaganda into your home.
- Home-school your children and help and support other home-schoolers if you can.
- Take control of your future by investing your retirement savings yourself so that the government cannot gain control of it 2.
- Make your home more self-sufficient: dig a well, own a sewing machine 3 to make and repair your clothes, install a wood heating stove, increase the insulation in your attic.
- Secure your home. Rampant crime is just one of the results of a decaying society where civility is no longer revered.
- Embrace old-school ways of doing things: use paper and pen rather than an electronic device for taking notes (bonus points for using a fountain pen 4); shave with a double-edge safety razor and brush and mug rather than the latest multi-blade gizmo; resist the temptation to automatically upgrade to the latest technology; consider using open source software and Linux rather than falling into the Windows/Mac trap.
- Resolve to give no credibility to political correctness. When it comes up, question it and force the source to justify what was said or written. Don’t accept it.
- Watch your language. Make a conscious effort to avoid any obscene or profane word coming from your lips. Crude language identifies the speaker with the worst elements of any society. That such language is now commonly used by “celebrities” is reason enough to shun it.
- Cherish those who are close to you and resolve to repair any relationships that need repairing. Your family, your spouse, your friends – those are more important now than ever, and will become even more so in the future.
- Display the Confederate flag – any one of them – on a regular basis. (see the Code of Confederate Flag Etiquette)
- Sharing a meal as a family is a time-honored tradition. Make the extra effort to have a more formal, structured dinner.
- Resolve to take away the power that the word “racist” has over us; at the same time, remember to treat all men with the respect they deserve.
- Language is an important part of any culture – the English language is the language of our people. Don’t allow yourself to slip into the sloppy language habits that have become a mark of modern popular culture. Writing and speaking well are the marks of a civilized man. Use correct English in your speech and writing. 5
- Collect books – not digital text, but real paper and ink books that can be read without batteries. As the popularity of digital text increases, there are bargains to be found in used books. 6
- Carry a pocket knife. A generation ago, every Southern male carried a pocket knife – it was almost a rite of passage. Somewhere along the way, the Nanny-state took over, and an incredibly useful tool came to be viewed as a dangerous weapon and a threat to be banned.
- Get out of debt as quickly as possible. Make it a top priority.
- Reduce or eliminate your income dependence by laying the foundation for your own business. Find something that you truly enjoy doing and that others are willing to pay for, and acquire the tools and the skills to provide that service or product at a profit. 7
- The Christmas season has become the emblem of materialism in America and a brief glance at the mayhem of “Black Friday” shopping will confirm that. Turning away from the greed and materialism is a wonderful opportunity for a family lesson in setting priorities. Rejecting materialism now will make life easier later when it is forced on America by a failing economy.
- Find something that you can grow or make at home to give away to others. For some, it is home-canned vegetables or preserves or home-made soap; for my wife and I, it is vanilla extract; for our son, it is egg nog in a variety of flavors. Turn back the clock a bit to a day when people didn’t buy everything from the store, but made it themselves. We also give away much of what our garden produces, and the surplus eggs from our chickens.
This list was inspired by a list posted at The Thinking Housewife blog. Be sure to read the Thinking Housewife post since it covers some things that I did not cover in this post. What can you add to this list?
Notes:
- Finding a church that insists on using only the King James Version is a big step in the right direction ↩
- There are currently efforts under way to nationalize IRA and 401(k) accounts ↩
- The old cast iron ones will last for generations. Treadle and hand-crank sewing machines in excellent condition are still readily available – we have several of them in our home. ↩
- While a quality fountain pen is not inexpensive, they will last for generations if well cared for. I have my father’s fountain pen that he purchased in the 1950’s. I had it refurbished and it is now as “good as new”. ↩
- There are, no doubt, plenty of errors in grammar scattered throughout the Confederate Colonel blog. If you find them, please let me know so I can correct them. ↩
- A first-class library can be assembled by making regular visits to your local Goodwill or Salvation Army store. ↩
- I spent nine months of evenings and weekends developing the software package that has provided a comfortable living for my family since 1995 – it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. ↩
Hi, I just stumbled on you while surfing. Though I’m a lone wolf of a Yankee I’m reading I’ll Take My Stand and underlining nearly every line. You’re clearly a lot further on the road to Godknowswhere than I am, so can you recommend other foundational texts?
I’ll Take My Stand is clearly the “Number One” book on Southern Agrarianism, but there are others that have different approaches to it. A nice short read is The Maxims of Robert E. Lee for Young Gentlemen, edited by Richard G. Williams, Jr. (Mr. Williams is the publisher of Old Virginia blog, part of my daily reading, and highly recommended.
Another book on my shelf is A Defense of Virginia and The South, by R. L. Dabney. Mr. Dabney was a Confederate Army Chaplain and biographer to Stonewall Jackson.
I recently received an email from a reader in which he mentioned several books that I am not familiar with, but I have listed them below:
A Band of Prophets: The Vanderbilt Agrarians After Fifty Years – 1982
The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought – 2000
The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays after I’ll Take My Stand – 2001
The Southern Agrarians – 2001
The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America – 2004
This was a great list, Stephen, just great…especially #1, #2, & #3. I also must comment on #23. Our society is so degraded that crude or obscene language is normal for most people. It is a big thing with me, handed down from my father. I recently took our pastor to task for using a crude expression from the pulpit. People, even many Christians, just don’t care. I have tried to teach our children that clean speech will mark you as different, usually as a Christian, even if you say nothing at all about your faith. Anyway, thanks for this. BTW, I am a border stater (Maryland) by birth, raised a Yankee and now in the Northwest, but with you in spirit!
Thank you for the kind words. I’ve been wanting to do this list for a while – it lets me say a lot of things that are important to me but perhaps hard to form into a full post.
Regarding your Note #5 above, you refer to “grammatical errors”. I recall an expert some years ago saying that the proper terminology is “errors in grammar” because an error cannot be grammatical.
I am just passing this along and hope you are not offended. Personally, I prefer to say “errors in grammar”. Thank you.
Wyandotte,
Thank you for letting me know and giving me the opportunity to correct that – and to learn. It’s always good to hear from you!
I like a lot of these ideas. My wife and I are currently looking for an authentic church. These are much more rare than many may think. It is amazing how standards have slipped in just a few years. Now there are all kinds of entertainment oriented “services” that don’t resemble anything from the New Testament. Trying to find an assembly that is reverent, Christ centered and serious about the Gospel is very difficult. If I hear another stupid joke from the pulpit, another sermon that totally ignores the context of the Scripture used in it or another round of outlandish posturing, I don’t know what I will do. I have heard “sermons” based on greeting cards. I have heard the pastor go on about his knowledge of Greek, which makes him smarter than the men who translated the KJV in his eyes. I have heard “special music” that goes from being just silly to bordering on blasphemy. Some churches are country clubs, some are just dead spiritually and some are just a big show.I am a Baptist who feels that all of a sudden it is like everyone in the church wants to imitate the world and I can’t feel comfortable anywhere.
Mark, you have described the very core of the problem. Finding the church that I now attend has changed my life in so many ways – all of them good. I was previously in the same kind of church you describe, and some of my family still goes there. The key question is this: “is The Holy Bible (not one of the modern perversions, but the Authorized KJV) the final authority in all matters?” If the answer is anything but an unequivocal “YES”, then it’s time to look elsewhere.
Here is the web site of our church (I also built and maintain that site). A good place to start looking is the church directory at BibleBelievers.com .
Stephen,
Thanks for the info. I am someone that just has a hard time fitting in most anywhere I guess. I expect churches to be what they claim to be and get upset when they aren’t.
Recently had a situation occur at a place my wife and I attended. We had not gone to this church before, even though it was quite old and established and not too far away. The name had been changed and I told my wife that I figured someone new had come in as preacher.I figured he had overthrown the old doctrines, etc and totally changed the place from what it was. Well, we went a few times and while it was nothing to get real excited about, we thought we would go there for a while. There had been a new preacher and when we visited with him he said that there had been some major changes though he didn’t elaborate much.
He told me he had gone to some school in California to get his training and it had some connection to John MacArthur. This put me on guard due to the controvery over his doctrines concerning the Blood of Christ. The preacher didn’t seem like he took this on so I figured he was OK.
To make a long story short, one day a member made a comment to me that indicated the church believed in unconditional election. I asked the preacher about this. He said he wanted to study with me about it. I asked him again if the church believed this and he went on a 5 minute tirade that really said nothing. I finally said, Look, I’ve had a hard day. Do you believe in unconditional election or not? He hemmed and hawed and finally said they did. I told him that was a deal breaker for me and that we would no longer be attending there.
You have to be careful. The doctrinal statement on the church web site was not clear on this and it was not preached about when we were there. They, like so may other churches these days, are sneaky about what they say on their sites and they are not very forthcoming. I feel it is deceitful. I’ve seen so many church web sites that I can usually catch the buzz words used and decode what the group really is. Every once in a while though they slip one past me like this so-called “Bible Church” that taught this Calvinistic stuff.
Excellent in every detail. Today, January 1, 2013, is my first visit to your website and this is just the posting that I needed to read. Thanks. -Ken
Good to hear from you, Ken! I hope that all of us are able to incorporate at least some of these into our daily lives.
Have a Happy and Prosperous New Year, sir. Take care and God Bless.
That is a great list of resolutions, that most us should be working on for the rest of this year. One often feels weak and weary living in the degenerate culture of today, but we must move forward and work.