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
Believe me, it's nothing that complicated. I think I know the difference between right and wrong, and I don't let politics come between me and that knowledge. This is very much like the smoking issue, where the left has pursued government-sponsored anti-smoking policies. I don't like those policies any more than the next conservative, and I don't support them. But that doesn't alter the fact that smoking stinks and is dangerous to one's health. I'm not going to go about promoting smoking as a positive good simply in order to spite those on the left.
Amendment 9 and 10 of the Bill of Rights said so!
No. 9 - "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
No.10 - "The powers not delegated to the United States (i.e. Federal government) by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people."
The Founders' intent is controlling in any interpretation of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights was understood, from the time of its framing until 1865 to be a prohibition against the powers of the Federal Government. You are interpreting 1860's issues with a 1990's view, but fail to try to understand issues as they were viewed in 1860. The following quotes will help in that shortfall!
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." --Thomas Jefferson
"...[T]he States will retain, under the proposed Constitution, a very extensive portion of active sovereignty..." --James Madison, Federalist No. 45
I put these quotes here because you are too ignorant, or uninterested to research them for yourself.
I used to wonder why blacks were so suspicious of Republicans and persisted in voting Democrat in spite of the disparity between black religiosity and the blatant endorsement by Democrats of immorality. Now I'm not quite so perplexed.
You mistake the conservative position on "states' rights".
My own very conservative position is that everyone must have his rights observed, but that these issues needed to be resolved through the political process. The political process involves everyone and consults everyone. Judges don't; this was particularly true of the liberal Warren Court and Burger Court Justices.
The problem with the civil rights movement is that the entire transaction was an exercise in grand-strategic coercion. The confrontational approach of the NAACP in particular, in contrast to e.g. the Urban League, revolved around a strategy of achieving total victory before a liberal, or at least a Northern, Supreme Court. Stop and think about it: the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964, and 1965 were the sum and total of legislation on the subject during the days when these questions were being deliberated, and all the real movement was supplied either by Supreme Court decisions or by Lyndon Johnson's political coercion and threats of imprisonment.
That isn't dialogue, debate, or anything resembling a democratic process. It isn't anything but a steamrolling job, and as a Jacksonian democrat, i.e. a 20th-century conservative, I can't support the way that the movement's gains were achieved. It was a triumph in decree law -- court decisions and executive orders -- over a prostrate region of the country by the other regions, which were provoked by liberal media and liberal court decrees, all of it justified by polemic against white Southerners as a group, which is ironic given the nature of the original complaint.
The early history of desegregation showed some movement until the liberals typically overreached, assembling narrow consensus among the amenable, and trying to exclude "nonprogressive elements" -- shutting out people they thought wouldn't go along. That was what provoked the negative reactions of many white southerners, that and the segregationist rhetoric about Communists, appeals to racist stereotypes and race politics, etc.; but rather than engage the segregationists in debate, and instead of campaigning at the local and state level of politics, liberals went to court every time they encountered resistance -- every time. The result has been a tissue, a mass, of antidemocratic decree law which was promulgated precisely because of who the white Southerners were, a process of social change that, when it was applied in Northern communities later on, people up there found no more palatable, but which at the time, in the 50's and 60's, was felt to be "good enough" for the likes of Southerners, precisely because the process was intended to devalue them completely.
In short, there was no justice, but only a series of rigid decrees that put Southern whites firmly in the back of the bus. That isn't freedom, it isn't first-class citizenship, it isn't anything that would have been recognizable to the Framers. The Framers, I think, would have regarded the civil rights movement as a procession of horrors, fed by the violence of people like the Klan, but equally by the determination of Northern liberals to discuss nothing with the "crackers", but only to impose their own will selfrighteously on their own devalued "others", for the benefit of Southern blacks who lost many of their own rights in the process of so much curtailment of the ability of the Southern states to govern themselves.
To this day, no Southern state can hold an election. They have to apply to the federal government, which then allows them to hold elections -- but only after the Civil Rights Division checks over the redistricting plans to make sure that they're advantageous to Southern blacks (and of course, by the operation of zero-sum arithmetic, disadvantageous to Southern whites, who are thus officially second-class citizens of second-class states, forever). Thus the argument about "states' rights" is really a complaint that they don't exist any more, immolated in the attainder of the civil rights movement.
This damage is blinked by self-satisfied liberals (who don't care about the American political system anyway -- their taste is for authoritarian government) and their black clients who never enjoyed the freedom that their white neighbors did anyway. The result is a general degradation of the public's idea of what rights are, and especially of their inviolable nature. Liberals have deliberately assisted this conceptual decay with their proliferation of non-right "rights" to entitlements, etc.
The conservative Supreme Court justices have recognized the damage and have moved to try to attempt some restoration of the Tenth Amendment, which was the very amendment on whose adoption the ratification and adoption of the Constitution itself once depended. But they have an awful lot of work to do, and unfortunately most of the damage is popular, conceptual, political, and moral, and not easily amenable to repair by the court system.
'By what authority am I kidnapped in the street, and brought here by these dogs?' asked Monks, looking from one to the other of the men who stood beside him.
'By mine,' replied Mr. Brownlow. 'Those persons are indemnified by me. If you complain of being deprived of your liberty--you had power and opportunity to retrieve it as you came along, but you deemed it advisable to remain quiet--I say again, throw yourself for protection on the law. I will appeal to the law too; but when you have gone too far to recede, do not sue to me for leniency, when the power will have passed into other hands; and do not say I plunged you down the gulf into which you rushed, yourself.'
Look MORON I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I pointed out your failure, you still look at events of 1860 with a 1990's view and there is nothing that I could ever say that would get you to understand that it wasn't about keeping "slaves" on the plantation, rather it was a fight against big government. You are obtuse of intellectual thought and any further discussion is pointless! Your comments lend credence to the fact that you believe government should tell us how to live our lives, and that free thinking independent men are a danger to the rigid order of a socialist society.
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude more than the animating struggle for freedom, go in peace. We seek neither your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
Listen, cretin, I know perfectly well what you're "trying to say," and I'm here to say that you're full of baloney. I know the difference between the excesses of big government and the valid uses of government. That knowledge informs my principles, and there I take my stand.
Not so fast, if there is someone who is full of what bulls excrete in the field it is you. What I have stated and quoted is directly from the Founders' themselves ... your stance is NOT! If our government is based on the principle that the people, not the representatives of the people who wield the power, then your assertion of valid government in the events of 1860 is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay left of center, or as we used to say in the military "high right" meaning off target.
"Cretin"?! You must've learned a new word at WalMart, your Mommy would be proud.
Brutal things, those facts.
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