As the Republican Party and its emotionally challenged younger brother, the Tea Party, rally to fight “Obamacare” with lawsuits, I have remained on the sidelines, watching the red-faced zeal with which these political ape-men beat upon podiums and hang flags from balconies.

I have been able to remain on the sidelines until they called on North Carolina to join in on the fun.

South Carolina. Louisiana. Texas. Alabama. Virginia.

Almost 150 years ago, politicos from these same states bounded around the political arenas of their respective locales with bellows of “damn the star-spangled banner!” North Carolina, my home since birth, had not yet committed to the growing insurgency that was sweeping the American South. It is true that slavery permeated our culture as was true with our neighbor, South Carolina, but we had not yet given ourselves over to the passion of rebellion.

The order of secession, in the South, reads like a story out of the gospels. South Carolina, the red-blooded, stars-and-bars-hearted hero, beats his chest and calls for faith and allegiance to dissolution from the evil federal union. The Deep South follows faithfully, pulling out even before the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston – yet, there are those who have not committed to the act of separation. There are those who lack the necessary cojones, the faith, the big fat tea-bagging balls of “I”m out of here” attitude. North Carolina is among these.

Looking at our nation today, the Solid South is still solid – with two majors exceptions. Virginia and North Carolina are now shaded in another primary color. We are, for all intents and purposes and, according to any election map you find, “Blue States”.

And yet, the one of the defacto leaders of the South, Virginia, is counted among the states plotting to deny “Obamacare” to its citizens.

In the annals of American history, two states claim to be the “Last to Secede”. Tennessee and North Carolina.

As the rotund and drawled leaders of our neighbor-states to the south continued to hop the train to “freedom”, North Carolina remained standing by the tracks – we would, most knew, either fall to our death in trying to leap onto the speeding locomotive or be left behind, alone and unprotected in a vast sea of rebellion.

William Woods Holden, a prominent North Carolina politician, describes in his memoir the leap that, despite our foot-dragging, eventually took place:

“The Convention, in which I served for some time, consisted of about 70 Democrats and 50 Conservatives. Their political antipathies were deep and strong, yet they controlled themselves admirably, and nothing occurred to interrupt their personal friendships. I remember well, that when the act of secession was consummated, the body looked like a sea partly in storm, partly calm, the Secessionists shouting and throwing up their hats and rejoicing, the Conservatives sitting quietly, calm, and depressed.”

Our rhetorically-gifted and ultimately more zealous neighbors brought us, confused and only halfhearted, into the most disastrous split in American history.  We divorced ourselves from the union into which we had entered not even 100 years earlier, we marched to war and we revised our flag.

 

By the end of the war in 1865, what little industry we had lay in ruin. Tens of thousands of our citizens, men and women, had been killed in a needless and, again, halfhearted war based on the premise of “states rights vs. tyranny”. Our black citizens would be hounded and persecuted, horribly and inhumanely degraded for more than a century. Poverty rang, and continues to ring its disgusting, prejudiced wail from our Appalachian communities to the Piedmont and Outer Banks. Quakers were harassed and chased for their lack of commitment and rifts formed in perfect geographical symmetry, entire communities within North Carolina set in absolute ideological opposition to one another. Do not imagine for a moment that the legacy of the Civil War has faded from the South – and though some seem to savor its “bad ass attitude” taste and “anti-Federal” notions, there are those of us, myself included, who have ancestors who lost 4 of their 8 boys in the conflict.

Watching the absurdities that now swirl at Tea Party rallies and on Fox News and the claims made that reform was shoved down the throats of the people, though only after more than a year of haranguing and deliberation, I do not desire to be overly dramatic and compare our current predicament to that of the United States in the spring of 1861. I do find it comical, however, that our nation has bounded headlong into unwarranted and unjustified military conflict in less than half the time it took for healthcare reform to become law.

I do recognize the similar situation: a situation in which other states, particularly those of our own geographic persuasion, would like for North Carolina to once again become the awkward middle-child – bullied on both sides by belligerent and pseudo-revolutionary siblings clamoring for conflict, rhetorical and perhaps even physically violent.

I'll be goddamned if I stand by and let that happen.