Who’dathunkit. After all these years and all those national conversations on race, all we gotta do to fix it is remove the confederate flag from public view?
That is what we’re being sold. Remove said flag and a new era of peace, love, and understanding will commence. Never again will mobs burn a CVS once that flag is taken down.
Thing is, the confederate flag isn’t representative of a singular topic. Progressives want it to be because that’s how progressives operate. Construct a narrative, attach it to a person or a thing, and then use it as a vehicle to ease in their agenda. In this case the narrative is racism represented by the confederate flag which must be removed to make way for the progressive agenda.
Obviously the confederate flag represents much more. It was a Democrat symbol from the 1850s well into the previous century. Democrat luminaries waved that flag as they attained electoral victories. The confederate flag represented income inequality. The pre-Civil War American economy featured unique paradigms north and south.
In the south, a very wealthy plantation owning elite dominated poor whites and blacks alike. My ancestors were among those poor whites who struggled to subsist in that economy. Slavery was, of course, a national holocaust. Even in places like Augusta, GA – where slaves lived in their own neighborhoods off the plantation and commuted to and from work – the relatively benign flavor of slavery doesn’t alleviate it’s evil. It’s worth noting that through the process of manumission slavery could have ended, and become a part of history’s vast dustbin.
The confederate battle flag, which is the one people are upset about as opposed to the national flag of the Confederate States of America, represents the Civil War itself and Americans that suffered through a war that nearly ended the United States itself. It doesn’t represent slavery or racism. Rather, it represents a trying time in our collective history where ideological entrenchments severed our country and even households. The battle flag isn’t retained, then, as a symbol of jubilation but rather, as one of somber reflection. Through Reconstruction the former Confederate States of America were restored to the United States and our nation began to heal.
So, the confederate battle flag represents a lot of things. Some are contradictory. Some are repugnant and disgust. Some send a nervous quiver down one’s spine. That’s why the flag is historically important.
Just like the other manifestations of the Civil War, progressives are seeking to evacuate from public view. They want to remove statues and rename boulevards. Where ISIS takes sledgehammers to such things, progressives simply use mechanisms of the state to make history disappear.
That’s ultimately what they want. To fundamentally transform the rich, interwoven tapestry that is our history into a one dimensional comic strip clip.
For a nation without knowledge of it’s past is a nation that doesn’t understand where it’s going. Progressives rely on that lack of understanding to further their goals.
(By the way, If the Confederate battle flag is wrong, so is California’s state flag. It represents the former California Republic which seized control of Mexico’s northwest.
California must change it’s flag and redact the word “Republic” from it. Once they do, we can discuss the validity of the bear on the California state flag.)
Image: http://algerblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/my-letter-to-south-carolina.html
