Human beings are an odd lot. The collective attitudes of the people in your geographical area have absolutely nothing to do with your individual character. Who you are is a product of the choices you make as an autonomous individual. This whole business of who and what "my people" are is pure tribalism, the irrational desire to shift personal, individual identity to the faceless, collective masses. This is the same kind of knee-jerk behavior that causes lemmings to run off cliffs.
It is beyond me why people get angry over general characterizations of a particular region, as if I walked up and kicked your dog. The truth is that you, me, and anyone else reading this post are not southern, or northern, or anything in between; we're individual human beings with thoughts, dreams, and desires that exist nowhere but our own minds.
I shouldn't be surprised. We now live in the regressive era, where lessons we supposedly learned 200 years ago have lost their didactic inertia. We have re-become a people who identify ourselves not as individual, principled beings with agency over our own lives, but as slavish devotees to clans, tribes, and flags.
Well thought out post but I would disagree with a couple of points. First, identifying with a historical, geographic or familial group is not completely negative and is in fact the basis of human culture. No one said that people who consider themselves southerners, yankees, or mid-westerners somehow were not individual human beings with free thought and opinions.
Rejecting family, regional social and moral values in favor of modern media/political tribalism is the current trend and based on rampant worship of electronic consumerism and electronic instant news bites which are propagated by non-journalists who always have an underlying motive. What is missing today in current society is the ability and desire to critically question and evaluate what they read on their phones for accuracy and truth instead of searching for an opinion which roughly reinforces whatever bias they hold for the moment. You obviously don't fit into that category. The second issue with your post is that lemmings do not in fact perform mass suicide by leaping off cliffs. Carry on.