Guess I shouldn't display my Cross either
Posted on 02/17/2004 5:44:59 AM PST by stainlessbanner
As a child growing up in an all-black Tallahassee neighborhood, the sight of a truck rumbling up my street with a Confederate battle flag in the window made me and my friends shudder in fear.
Maybe the pickup had a reason for passing through, but the combination of the Southern cross and a gun rack always was seen as a harbinger of violence. Usually, I ran in the house.
Some 30 years later I shudder because people are still holding on to this symbol of racism. Controversy about the flag has arisen at Tarpon Springs High and Hudson High. Integration and other significant steps in racial progress have not deterred people from passing along a remarkable sign of hatred to another generation.
When people argue that the fight over the flag creates healthy dialogue, I think back to when I was given that opportunity. My boys were 5 and 7 when we went to dinner at Buddy Freddy's, on a day when a Confederate organization was meeting in the restaurant's banquet room. Ethan saw the flag in the other room and exclaimed, "Look at that cool flag."
For the rest of the dinner, I had to explain why the flag wasn't cool. Young minds, more accustomed to learning about phonics, soaked in lessons about slavery, freedom and a time when Americans killed Americans.
By meal's end, the restaurant's hostess had given the boys toys from the gift shop. I think she wanted to reward them for listening patiently as their father struggled to explain the inexplicable.
Of course, the flag represents more than just the South's struggle against the North, and some long-rooted Southerners identify with it in a way that transcends race. But, for decades, it was used by the Ku Klux Klan as a banner for segregation and persecution. And white supremacists still embrace it today.
When will I believe that this flag is about heritage and not hate? When I see people from Confederate organizations seriously confront racists who use the flag to espouse bigotry.
Those who wish to take pride in the South should find a less divisive icon. Hasn't our region evolved beyond the infighting and intolerance that the flag symbolizes? Why define the South by a dead Confederacy when we have Kitty Hawk and Bourbon Street and Memphis barbecue and Basin Street jazz and collard greens and Coca-Cola? If you want to show pride in the South, paint a plate of grits on a T-shirt and wear it to school.
Even SEC football and NASCAR, institutions once rooted in segregation, have made significant strides toward diversity. It's the progress of our present, not the failures of our past, that should be championed.
And for all the talk about fighting for liberty and American's second revolution, the Civil War was a failure. A rare and total loss of the humanity we have typically shared as a nation.
Consider the horrific Gettysburg battles that resulted in 50,000 casualties. Fields were strewn with dead soldiers, and the air held the screams of Americans whose limbs had been amputated. Maybe if the battle flag brought to mind those images, someone wouldn't have raised it over Hudson High.
Even if I could look beyond the racist overtones of the flag (and I can't), the rebel cross of stars would still represent American history's most divisive period. A different outcome could have brought dire consequences not only for this country, but for the entire world. Could the Allies have won World War II dependent on two separate nations instead of one United States?
History has proven there is strength in our unity, and now, more than ever in this post-9/11 world, any symbol that threatens that unity should be voluntarily abandoned.
It's been said that those who oppose the war in Iraq lend comfort to our enemies. Yet true comfort for the terrorists must come when they see a new generation of Americans divided over a 141-year-old symbol that should have been buried at Appomattox.
No, the Confederate flag should not be banned in schools. I would never deny a person's right to freedom of speech. But for those who feel compelled to wear it to school, I ask only one thing: Think about what you're doing.
That's all I'm saying.
- Ernest Hooper can be reached at 813 226-3406 or Hooper@sptimes.com
Guess I shouldn't display my Cross either
Should you wish me to peruse a certain point in that url, please oblige me by indicating that passage to which you would refer.
Whether he did or did not see p/u trucks bearing the Confederate Battle flag he has the same old tired axe to grind.
I know not if he writes of black on black problems, but he is beating a dead mule with this.
The sad thing is there are many black achievements and black persons of integrity to write about and be positive.
This kind of article serves simply to divide, which is exactly the intent.
Should you wish me to peruse a certain point in that url, please oblige me by indicating that passage to which you would refer.
The whole thing, baby. The whole thing.
Yankees weren't allowed in mine.
Wearing "formal FUBU" to court dates? [I saw that one -- first time I ever saw FUBU on clothing -- no kidding.]
Driving around in a "boom car" with the stereo turned up, just to annoy white people with rap lyrics about capping white ho's/cops/mutha********s?
Carrying a Lorcin .380 to school and then showing it around/having it accidentally go off/shoving it in a teacher's face/capping an out-ethnic student/teacher?
Playing boom boxes on buses?
Following little old ladies home and mugging them in their own driveways?
Doing hot prowls/burglaries/assaults in homes in melanin-deficient neighborhoods?
Drive-bys on people who annoy you?
Jacking someone for her ride by blowing her brains out at a red light?
Sometimes I feel "divided" when stuff like that happens in my hometown, in my neighborhood, around the corner and down the street. Maybe I'm just not liberal enough. Maybe I ought to read another Theodora Bartimus column about accepting people the way they are.
That's right. Teach them how endogamously evil "those people" are. In a non-divisive way, of course.
Here you go again - talking sh*t as always.
A State's Right of Self-Determination is what was the driving force behind the Secession of the Southern States in 1860 - 61. Whether the issue was freeing slaves, or tariffs, the basic premise was that Washington DC (or other States) could not direct the Southern States as to what they were supposed to do. It was up to each State to determine the fate of its own domestic institutions (i.e. SLAVERY) and how its money was to be spent. Refer to the ORIGINAL INTENT of the Founding Fathers! Once again, go back and read the Federalist Papers and the Constitutional debates. Learn something other than the tripe you're spewing then come back and discuss things intelligently, not like some mindless robot who can only puppet the party line.
free dixie,sw
Do you think that's what the author was thinking about? I don't think so. So if he wasn't concerned with being seen teaching his sons to distrust, fear, and dislike Southern whites, which he obviously did right there in the middle of the restaurant, what exactly is our reciprocal obligation to him? He didn't trim or back and fill or make nice -- do you criticize him for that? No.
Many black people of middle-age and older have distinct memories of a less-enlightened time in our nation's history.
By that do I take it that you mean that when Side A is winning, that's ontologically good, but when Side B is winning, that's metaphysically bad? Sounds like you've swallowed some Northern liberal "march of history" progressivism.
Blacks lost as much as anyone when liberal and statist principles advanced on the back of the civil rights movement.
Rather than argue for their POV, liberals have always gone for the power play. They tried using inside politics in leadership forums to install their program on desegregation in the South in the 1950's, and when they encountered significant resistance from people who hadn't been consulted and were never conciliated, they immediately turned to the federal government and the courts. Liberals don't debate issues with scum like us: they just articulate a position and then try to enforce it "by any means necessary", while justifying it by rhetoric and by pointing at whatever the other guy is doing wrong. Liberalism owed its largest debt to the Ku Klux Klan bombers and the liberal journalists who knew how to use them, and there was no justice in any of it, only a power struggle won by the undeserving -- liberal statists. Everybody else lost. Blacks thought they "won", but the rights they won were less than the whites had had before the civil rights movement.
Those memories are highly unpleasant, and they see the flag as symbolic of those memories.
The Klan didn't really use the flag. The segregationists did, and they rallied against (in particular) Eisenhower's stand on enforcing the liberal court decisions on integration, and his sending the 82nd Airborne Division to Little Rock to chase white mobs off the street and away from the schools.
Once the liberals won in court, they put the Executive in a box, about whether to enforce the court decrees. After Eisenhower made his decision, the segregationists were fresh out of luck, out of time, and out of friends. That's when they ran up the battle flag, hoping to inspire a united front against the federal government. They failed, because history put Lyndon Johnson in the White House, who attacked them with all the tools of the "imperial presidency" and broke them by threatening them with mass jailings of school boards and other public officials. That was Leon Panetta's first real public-service job, threatening the slowfooted in Louisiana for Lyndon Johnson. The deal was, if Panetta called someone in, he explained to them that they couldn't even resign their offices or do anything but exactly what he told them to do, when he told them to do it, or they would spend time in a federal penitentiary, and the rest of their lives as felons and ex-convicts. That's what liberalism means, where the rubber meets the road. Northerners loved it, of course.
And it was just the same thing for segregation. "Don't try to tell us that we can't force our n*****rs to the back of the bus."
But the guy who wrote the article is. He's engaged in guerrilla theater against the Florida Supreme Court decision that display of the Confederate flag is a free-speech issue and that people's use of it can't be constrained by ordinance or public law. He's moping publicly about the injustice of it all.......which will, naturally, in due course call for a change in the legal status of people who display that flag, in order, as the NAACP keeps telling us, to help the deserving innocent "be free" from the evil presence.
Liberals always want a court to land on the other guy. In this case, the Florida Supremes have pulled the opinionator's fangs, and he is reduced temporarily to trying to gum the opposition to death.
Why are you helping him?
First of all, Agnes Heep is from Delaware. You can learn this by right-clicking on her name where she's posted up; that will take you to her "about" page, or profile page. You haven't done one yet, I see, since this is your second day and all, but it's easy to do.
Second, you'll have read the article and seen that it's another complaint about Confederalia, and part of the NAACP's and the Eastern clerisy's drive to digest the South by homogenizing it, to which end they earnestly desire the complete suppression of symbols and tokens of Southern separateness. Northerners already discriminate, e.g., against Southerners who retain their accents -- notice, for example, how certain Southern hand-lickers who want to get ahead have abandoned their speechways and loudly embraced Northern "values": Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Tom Lehrer, and Julia Roberts (from Smyrna, Georgia) all leap to mind. Tom Wicker of The New York Slimes kept his accent, but he made up for it by being even more vociferously urban-liberal. He stopped short of peppering his speech with New-Yorkisms and Yiddish slang, but I'm sure Punch and Pinchy have been pleased with his various other impostures.
Third, if you read back up the thread, you'll see that Agnes is arguing that Southerners ought to be better-behaved: like not showing a Confederate flag, ever. Like not being, well, so objectionable. This despite the fact that she knows that the other side is a bunch of liberals, so that they'll just move the goalposts and go on beating on you if you accede to what they want. And despite knowing that one of the indicia of real character is not kowtowing to people who are predisposed to dislike you anyway no matter what you do. Which is why the whole world despises earnest liberals like Tad Bartimus, who is always whining about how hard she works to be down with the brothers and sisters and just can't get over the fact that at the end of the day she's still so white......that kind of "considerateness to others" is just toadying, and the whole world despises a toady.
So that's what I was explaining to Agnes, that she won't get many takers by counseling Southerners to reappraise themselves as America's official white trash and start learning to toady and suck up.
If you were capable of reading you would have noticed the quote marks around that sentence you find so objectionable. That isn't my sentiment ... it's the quote I'm ascribing to the Southern segregationists who thought Jim Crow was merely a matter of state's rights.
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