It eta no surprise to me
Many southerners in the USA
Still “fight” the American civil war philosophically.
I was called a “Yankee” often when I lived in Nashville;
Didn’t take it personally;
There is a baseball team they may mean. 
Southern traditional Christian churchers killed by a BOY.
They watch TV cover the worst ad-nausea,
Copy/act upon misconceptions
No home training to enable common sense.
Today’s media “news directors” cover the worst man has to offer
Where is the good news balance?
As a veteran Black American, I understand both sides.
One is steeped in southern comfort confederacy,
The other having overcome except
Government allowed influx of similar beings;
Meanwhile were not educated to get the memo.
One state still flies the “crossed stars”.
This kid learns distorted history with rednecks in bars
Copycat actors and corporate deceptive news race card protractors,
Keeping the poison flowing in the (un) United race States;
“They reinforce it at the dinner table”,
My dad would always say. 
Government-encouraged family decapitation;
Beheaded family now causes poor deportment repetition.
As too many again watch TV cover a sad example.
Of American multicultural mismanagement;
Yet another racial worldwide national embarrassment.
Upon their first brown-skinned President’s watch.
Achilliad's Blog 
I like your poem, and I understand your ambivalence, but I assume that this is a real sign on display in public that says: “In the US you are free to live as you wish unless you are White, Straight, Republican, a gun owner or Southern.”
The “free to live as you wish” is ironic on two levels. If you are a woman, an immigrant, a person of color, a gay or transgender person, you face constant discrimination often based on religious precepts, racial or sexist biases, or socially cultivated hatred (“at the dinner table” and in the bars). Republicans have lead a full-frontal assault on all of these groups, passing or attempting to pass laws which diminish women’s health and reproductive choices as well as their income, laws to limit or degrade immigrants’ rights, laws which eliminate workers’ and unions’ rights, laws which cynically limit voting rights (especially of minorities, but of Democrats in general).
The other side of the irony of the “as you wish” lament means that those listed on the sign “wish” to be bigoted, sexist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic, and furthermore, both implicitly and explicitly, they are frustrated when they are thwarted in their attempts to curtail the rights of others. Sadly, “Southern” in this case, not only in the minds of much of the rest of the nation, but in the minds of too many Southerners, is code for all of the above. It has little to do with the everyday Southerner, but it relates directly to the things that their elected representatives do every day in their name. The same could certainly be said of too much of the “mid-west,” but they don’t have a central identity or flag or heritage to which they cling.
Finally, as with all internal, social arguments, its important to remember that, aside from most blacks, who have every reason to be aggrieved by Southern “heritage,” many, and often a majority, of whites in the south also resent the civil war heritage in which the most racist, misogynist xenophobes drape themselves.
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Tim! I appreciate your insightful comment so much! You tap into the to and fro of this situation explicitly! I am, surprisingly more “conservative” than I thought I would be at this time of my life and think the USA, as we were taught it should be back in “social studies” classes circa the 1960s, is sadly almost dead and I don’t want to live here anymore if they keep degrading our once proud “land of the free and home of the (straight or stay in the closet) brave”. Did you ever watch “All In The Family”? I rest my case.
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Thank you for your well-thought out comment, Tim. It is strange, but I am more like the “Archie Bunker” character on the 1970s sitcom “All In The Family” than I ever thought I would be and not ashamed of it. The USA should protect it’s “brand” and not let all these Trojan Horse “commies and camel jockies” in here to do harm to us!
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