The South Won't Do It Again: Thoughts on the Confederate Flag
Hanging out during Mardis Gras in Pass Christian, Mississippi, a city draped in Confederate Flags, I get a gut feeling that a deep love of old Southern values has not died. Unlike Virginia and Tennessee, Rebel Flags do not accompany American Flags. Rather, they stand alone, proud symbols of a defeated cause, a depressing cause, a cause as pathetic as it is forgotten.
Nobody knows better than these Confederate Flag waving Rebels that the South cannot do it again, that Mississippi, one of the nation's poorest states, has been forgotten. From slavery, to lynchings, to a government that prefers to invest Katrina Relief money into ports rather than people, Mississippi cannot help but view itself as a dying phoenix, burnt to ashes, longing to rise again, clinging to its despicable past to distract itself from the violence of the present, a violence caused by Northern neglect.
The Confederate Flag often causes anger in Northern people who believe their regions excel in social justice. What these self-righteous folks forget is that the North has a history as bloody and violent, as racist and deadly as the South. From police violence in San Francisco and New York to fast-rising hate groups like World Church of the Creator in Chicago,no part of this occupied nation founded in genocide and slavery lacks a bloodbath history and a reprehensibly racist present.
The Confederate Flag symbolizes poor, broken white people's desires to live the lives of slave-owners again. Disturbing? Yes. Threatening. Not particularly.
M ore threatening to people of color are the criminal bankers siphoning the people's money, violent cops, pre-prison schools, and the prison industrial complex. The tawdry impotence of the Confederate Flag and the broke white folks who wave it have little to do with the racism, genocidal tendencies, and violence our system continues to fuel itself on. These Rebels are victims too.
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Thoughts on the Confederate Flag
There is a saying in the South that opinions are like Posteriors, everybody has one, some stink more than others.
As opinions go this one reeks. It is your opinion that the Confederate Cause was defeated, that is mostly correct, it was depressing, well you are entitled to your opinion, most Native Southerners don't feel that way, but where you step over the line is calling it "pathetic and forgotten". You saw a bunch of Confederate Flags, so either you are blind or it wasn't forgotten? Pathetic, anything more than 240,000 men, women, and children are willing to die for is hardly pathetic. We might not agree with their cause but the word pathetic is earned by those who beliefs usually runs out at the time the first punch is thrown or the first shot is fired.
You say, "The Confederate Flag symbolizes poor, broken white people's desires to live the lives of slave-owners again". Since you are clearly such a scholar about such subjects, can you tell the public exactly or even closely what percentage of Southern's owned Slaves in the Year 1861? What about Northerners? Unless you look that up on Wikapedia which is wrong, I'd bet you don't get within 10% of the right answer! You have also chosen to express what any/all Confederate Flags means to me and others who proudly fly some version of a symbol that expresses what people will do when their land is invaded. Among the more than 10,000 members of the Son's of the Confederate Veterans, and more than 2,000 or so members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy I have never heard a single person express a desire to own another person, or approve of Slavery where it still exist in more than 14 Countries.
I am 1/8 Cherokee and I know many others who are members of the SCV, I know Black members, and a mulitude of Hispanics who are members, and the common thread is that most of us would like for our nation to once again be the Constitutional Republic it started out to be. One Nation with a Government that was the servant of the individual states, not the way it is now.
I hold concession or compromise to be fatal. If we concede an inch, concession would follow concession — compromise would follow compromise, until our ranks would be so broken that effectual resistance would be impossible. John C. Calhoun