Take down that confederate flag.
South Carolina to remove battle flag from the Capitol grounds. It’s a good start, and only a hundred and fifty years or so after the South lost the war.
I grew up in Texas, one of those proud states that was on the side of the Confederacy. I must have been in my twenties before I met some Yankee who told me the Rebels were not the Good Guys. My mother and older sister read Gone With The Wind on a semi-annual basis, rebel flags were a common sight-and obviously still are, and everyone I knew seemed to take great pride in our glorious past. Even as a child, I found all this a bit odd, since we were what I would later come to think of as poor white trash ourselves. Our superior tint of skin seemed to have given us no clear advantage in life.
The fact that Ken Burns’ The Civil War single handedly kept the lights on at PBS for many years was a good clue that a lot of people still love the story of Americans slaughtering Americans.
I’ve traveled all over the country and it seems that every town in the South with a courthouse has a Confederate Monument in front of it. I think all of these piles of rocks should be taken down as well. The South lost, get over it. We don’t fly the Nazi swastika and the Imperial Rising Sun at World War II monuments. We don’t sing the praises of George III on the Fourth of July. And most of us couldn’t even name the countless other places we’ve gone to war with over the past couple of hundred years.
The losers don’t get the glory. Well, except for one.
The movement is underway to remove the Confederate flag from license plates, government buildings, and anywhere else it has been sanctioned for placement by Good Old Boys in the past.
Of course, what got all this started was a white man killing nine black people in a church. The sad fact of the matter is there is nothing to be done about that. We can’t bring them back and we can’t stop other like-minded inbreds from acting the same way in the future. We have no way of looking into a person’s heart and mind and seeing that they are worthless pieces of shit.
In the end, this is just busy work. Polishing the brass on the Titanic.
I was in New Mexico a few years back. There are a lot of old white people living there. I meet one living near the border and asked him what he did for fun in the middle of nowhere. He said: “We’ve got a pretty active unit of the Klan. We stay busy.” He wasn’t joking.
What is depressing about the terrorist attack at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is that the shooter was so young. Like countless others, I have always thought things would be better once all the old bastards were dead. But it seems there’s always a new crop of bastards following right behind them.
I still hear people bitching and moaning about school integration and forced busing-and that was 50 years ago. Racism isn’t just rednecks in the South who love them some rebel flags.
The Confederate flag, in any and all forms, should be locked away with Black Face and Pickaninnies. Just remember that it’s a symbol of hatred, not the hatred itself.
