Daybreak in Dixie: Poems of the Confederacy by Linda Lee. Privately published, 2019.
For those of us who value the history of our Southern people, these are the worst of times. Public discourse is pervaded by a Cultural Marxist hysteria that wants what we love to be dead, forever. I rightly use the term Marxist because the campaign against us, and indeed our entire air, reflects a typical Communist regime, lacking only the full development of a police state. History has been abolished except in a form that is altered and twisted to fit a party line, a la Orwell. Only one opinion is allowed. Meaningless ideological abstractions like “white privilege” replace facts.
Yet we should be comforted. What is true and noble cannot be entirely extinguished, and reminders of our heritage, like this wonderful collection of new poems by the Florida writer Linda Lee, continue to flower among the dead landscape of contemporary culture. The poet delivers a wonderful and fresh contemplation of the heroism, sacrifice, and suffering of our people, fighters and civilians both, in their struggle against a brutal invader.
For one example, among many, she reflects on the destruction of “Silent Sam” at the University of North Carolina, a monument to the University’s Confederate soldiers. “The Sin of Silence”:
He watched them spray paint evil words
With minds filled up with hate.
He watched as crowds be began to curse,
He felt them pull him down,
He felt the crushing of their feet
By others standing ‘round.
Sam wondered why the cops stood by,
No lifting of their hand,
Would no one there protect him now,
Back home on Southron land?
Our history now is being lost
By those we’ve never known
And those that went before us now
Are never welcome home.
Somewhere along the path of time
Some things have gone awry
And they expect us to stand down
And watch our Southland die.
We are dealing with people who have no heritage and don’t even know what is meant by the term. They merely want to destroy what others love—a despicable motive.
Florida patriot Connie Chastain writes in a Foreword: “Most people today cannot conceptualize the depth of personal and regional trauma that the war and its aftermath poured out upon the South like a fiery lava flow. . . . The regional and personal trauma of our ancestors is a part of our collective memory. . . .” Now they want to remove all Confederate memory from the battlefields, making the battlefields as meaningless as Lenin’s corpse. The loss of our collective memory is literally the destruction of America as well as of the South.
