Exactly. Have you ever noticed that the exact same people who claim a constitutional right to burn the American flag as "symbolic speech" are the same ones who want to ban others from flying confederate flags?
Nobody's aiming to put them on the capital building.
The CBF is the emblem or racism and slavery -- and losers.
"The South was almost helpless in this respect. Nearly all its locomotives, spikes, car wheels, car bodies annd other items of equipment had come from the north...
As the nation's need for an adequate transportation increased, the system would grow weaker and weaker, and there was no earthly help for it....these problems , indeed, were so grave and pointed so surely towards final defeat that one is faced to wonder how the founding fathers of the Confederacy could possibly have overlooked them. The answer perhaps is that the problems were not so much unseen as uncomprehended. At bottom they were Yankee problems; concerns of the broker, the money changer, the trader, the mechanic, the grasping man of business; they were matters that such people would think of, not matters that would command the attention of aristocrats who who were familiar with valor, the classics and heroric atttitudes. Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it....Essentially, this was the reliance of a group that knew little of the modern world but which did not know nearly enough and could never understand that it did not know enough. It ran exactly parallel to Mr. Davis's magnificent statement that the duration of the war could be left up to the enemy--the war would go on until the enemy gave up, and it did not matter how far off that day might be.
The trouble was it did matter. It mattered enormously."
--The Coming Fury, p. 438-439, by Bruce Catton
In other words, as Rhett Butler said: "it's going to make a great deal of difference to a great many gentlemen."
Walt
I've made the same argument here in the past, but unfortunately many on these Confederacy/Civil War/South-in-general threads already have their minds made up. No amount of logic, reason, or fact will change the minds of those who believe that 1) the South is full of doofus, bucktoothed hicks who wouldn't be able to survive without the help of our Northern benefactors, 2) we sit around all day everyday pining for the "good old days" of slavery and Jim Crow, and 3) we're still fighting the Civil War (heck, we have enough to worry about with the one yet to come). To them all pride we Southerners have for our homes, our culture, our cuisine, our beautiful women, our great football and fishing, and all other things Southern, stems from the fact that we had slavery 140 years ago.
I have tried to explain to them that not only is it a symbol of our heritage, but also a nationwide symbol of today's struggle against what many see as the government's increasing infringement against our property rights, our parental rights, our RKBA, and so on. That's why I've seen the flag flying in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, and many other non-Southern states I've lived or worked in. But those who march in the lockstep of conventional wisdom will not listen to anything other than parroting of their belief that the Reconstruction should never have ended.
I'm with you completely, bro, because I'm a proud Southerner, too. But your reason will not get through the armor of many thick skulls on these threads.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!