What Color is Your Neck?

A. Unabashed Pacifist:

What is the down-side to peace?

B. Unabashed Christian:

Holy One,

We are vulnerable beings who need your support.
Thank you for supplying the means to support our fragile bodies
Thank you for providing the stability and imagination to sustain our weak minds.
Thank you for sending love and compassion to undergird our volatile psyches.
Thank you for offering us what we need to develop our lasting souls.
Amen

C. Un-quoting Jesus:

“Beggars can’t be choosers – I’m the Messiah.”

[No we can’t; No, He didn’t say it.]

D. Blog: Think You Know Redneck?

[From the Online Etymology Dictionary]

“cracker” - 1893; attested 1830 in more specialized sense ("This may be ascribed to the Red Necks, a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians in Fayetteville," from Ann Royall, "Southern Tour I," p.148). According to various theories, red perhaps from anger, or from pellagra, but most likely from mule farmers' outdoor labor in the sun, wearing a shirt and straw hat, with the neck exposed.

[And, from Wikipedia]

The National Covenant and The Solemn League of Covenant (a.k.a. Covenanters) signed documents stating that Scotland desired a Presbyterian Church government, and rejected the Church of England as their official church (no Anglican congregation was ever accepted as the official church in Scotland). What the Covenanters rejected was episcopacy — rule by bishops — the preferred form of church government in England. Many of the Covenanters signed these documents using their own blood, and many in the movement began wearing red pieces of cloth around their neck to signify their position to the public. They were referred to as rednecks. Large numbers of these Scottish Presbyterians migrated from their lowland Scottish home to Ulster (the northern province of Ireland and soon settled in considerable numbers in North America throughout the 18th century. Some emigrated directly from Scotland to the American colonies in the late 18th and early 19th-centuries as a result of the Lowland Clearances. This etymological theory holds that since many Scots-Irish Americans and Scottish Americans who settled in Appalachia and the South were Presbyterian, the term was bestowed upon them and their descendants.

Possible American etymologies

Another possible source of the term redneck comes from The West Virginia Coal Miners March or the Battle of Blair Mountain, when coal miners wore red bandanas around their necks to identify themselves as seeking the opportunity to unionize. Another popular but unlikely etymology says that the term derives from such individuals having a red neck caused by working outdoors in the sunlight over the course of their lifetime. Similarly, some historians claim that the term redneck originated in 17th century Virginia, because fair-skinned unfree labourers were sunburnt while tending plantation crops.

Another popular etymology is that the term was originally used by African Americans as a pejorative for white people in general, in the same manner that peckerwood and ofay were coined by blacks.
It is clear that by the post-Reconstruction era (after the departure of Federal troops from the American South in 1874-1878), the term had worked its way into popular usage. Several blackface minstrel shows used the word in a derogatory manner, comparing slave life over that of the poor rural whites. This may have much to do with the social, political and economic struggle between Populists, the Redeemers and Republican Carpetbaggers of the post-Civil War South and Appalachia, where the new middle class of the South (professionals, bankers, industrialists) displaced the pre-war planter class as the leaders of the Southern states. The Populist movement, with its message of economic equality, represented a threat to the status quo. The use of a derogative term, such as redneck to belittle the working class, would have assisted in the gradual disenfranchisement of most of the Southern lower class, both black and white, which occurred by 1910.