Who's a Reneck Now?

1. • I recently made reference on Facebook to my now being officially old, as I just turned sixty, and being officially a redneck as I just got another big pick-up truck. A friend asked, You mean you are just now becoming a redneck. This gave rise to a treatise that I've shared before, but which I have revisited in this update.  It is more fitting for this blog than it is for FB.
   • Am I a redneck?
   • Doug Wright Lise, it depends upon your definition of redneck. It was first applied to Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants disparagingly because they were mostly self-educated farmers with fair skin whose necks became very bright red because their work-ethic necessitated long hours of exposure to the sun while working their farms. This term was migrated a bit and somehow came to stand for a variety of groups--but all uses were disparaging epithets. One of those groups was Southerners, living in the Bible Belt, as labeled by the Northerners Would-be Elite who were too poorly educated to know their geography.
   •  Then it kinda blurred over to mean bigoted and narrow-minded Southerners who were being pegged by the much more refined long-haired wannabe hippie dopers from California and greater West as was portrayed in a cult film starring almost actor Pete Fonda that borrowed a name from a flash-in-the pan but okay band--both which tried with some success to glorify smuggling dope and engaging prostitutes as GOOD things.( I bought that one for a brief season.)
   • Blacks, as they once preferred being called, but who now purportedly prefer African American, prolly applied the term most accurately when referring to ANY Caucasians, whom they wanted to disparage, due to the latter's tendency to turn anywhere from pink to red to orange when getting out in the sun. This all mixed and devolved, mostly as incorrectly used by Liberals in academia to mostly disparage Conservatives or mostly Christian religion believers--most especially Mormons and Baptists. It might surprise you that many who now know me on FB, who also knew me back when as a Liberal-- find it entertaining for me to now refer to myself as a redneck--as I once used it to make fun of those who held such silly Conservative beliefs as I do now.
   • You get one guess regarding which institution, the members with whom my association and the doctrines from whom I learned, most altered my beliefs from cool to redneck--in the views of many--since I was unable to merge those two conceptual labels. Some still try (to merge or rather reconcile those labels, but it cannot be done.) Even more contemporary trending is using redneck to mean Christians of any flavor or anyone slightly right of the far-left.
   •  But I find it fascinating that those attributes once disparagingly applied to mean intolerant, prejudiced, ignorant, mean-spirited, hateful, narrow-minded, etc. have come full circle to fit what I call the NEW Liberal Redneck--such as those who now call for lynchings and murders of those who want to uphold the Constitution and whose cultures believe that guns are not always bad things.
   • So, YOU TELL ME--if I was a redneck previously--the pick-up truck is a stale motif, intended as a joke on myself. At any rate, redneck IS a disparaging term--ALWAYS. It may be permissible for one to apply the term to himself--but it is NEVER proper to apply it to another--without risking insult--except by those who also consider themselves rednecks as well--and I believe this is universally accepted and intuitive.