why is it ok to call me a redneck?

[antigone382]

172. I never said that, but the fact is that the people who bought/stole land in the Appalachian South

...were railroad and coal companies, and most of them had their base of operations in the North.

This is not a vindication of the civil war or of Southern elites. My mother is from Syracuse, in fact. But I will not allow contempt for the Southern poor without acknowledging the very real hand that wealthy Northern industrialists had in parsing up the Appalachian mountains, driving people off their land, forcing them into coal camps, and contributing to environmental destruction on a scale anyone who hasn't seen mountaintop removal mining firsthand cannot really comprehend. That does not justify the fact that environmental and labor laws are crap here, but it is a major factor in the history of this region, and I will not tolerate slurs by those who are ignorant of that history, and refuse to acknowledge that the prosperity of the North was in many ways engendered by it.